All Go and No Show

His rugged countenance grips you like the militant equivalent of a UNICEF poster child. But what precisely does his gaze compel you to do? To rebel against your government? To have a stiff drink? To undress a supermodel? Such is the dilemma posed by the photographic legacy of the 20th century’s most glamorous revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Since his death, his iconic visage has accompanied Parisian student riots, advertised Smirnoff vodka, and even adorned Gisele Bundchen’s brassiere.

The commercial use of images based on Alberto Diaz’s classic 1960 photograph have reduced Che to a cog in the very capitalist machine he fought to destroy. This irony has not been lost on Che’s family and supporters. In 2000, Diaz successfully sued Smirnoff’s parent company to force it to stop using Che’s image as a promotional gimmick. Now, Che’s widow Aleida plans to initiate a campaign of lawsuits against companies she believes continue to exploit the image. "We can't attack everyone with lances like Don Quixote, but we can try to maintain the ethics [of Che’s legacy],” she explained. She intends to helm this effort from the Che Guevara Studies Center, set to have opened in Havana in late 2005.

I have absolutely no enthusiasm for Che Guevara, but I staunchly support Aleida’s efforts. Though I find Che’s doctrines and methods deplorable, I must acknowledge that he believed passionately in a cause and pursued it relentlessly. I cannot say the same for the companies which manipulate his iconography, unless reckless profiteering counts as a cause. They have brazenly turned Che into a generic symbol of vague and fashionable antiauthoritarianism, a motif for restless youths to express their disaffection with such amorphous entities as “the man” and “the system.” Che’s life and work demand to be taken seriously, more so than they have been by corporations, and more so than they have been, it would even seem, by his wife. I agree with her as to the paramount importance of preserving his legacy, but I radically disagree with her as to the true nature of that legacy.

Che rose to international prominence as Fidel Castro’s second-in-command during the Cuban revolution. An admirer of the Soviet Union and China, Che once declared, “I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain;” he named his first son Vladimir in honor of Vladimir Lenin. However, he behaved more like Stalin after Castro appointed him as state prosecutor. In that capacity he liquidated the antagonists of the revolution, establishing Cuba’s first forced labor camp and even executing numerous former comrades who refused to embrace Castro’s dictatorship. By Che’s own account he played a key role in bringing Soviet ballistic missiles to Cuba, precipitating 1962’s missile crisis; in a later interview with an English newspaper, he stated that, had he had the choice, he would have launched a nuclear attack on the United States. In his will, he wrote of the “extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines.”

If history demands the preservation of Che’s legacy, then truth demands the accurate recounting of it. While this selective biographical sketch does not fully illuminate Che’s complex character, which doubtless had some positive aspects, it serves to demonstrate that his ultimate legacy consists of pure amorality. His personal code dictated that the end justifies the most atrocious means, that the cause trumps all other conceivable considerations. Like his icon Mao Zedong, a self-described “man without law or limit,” Che embraced the venerable maxim that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Che never even approached the death tolls of Mao and Stalin, who between them killed over 100 million people, but not for lack of trying. Have the “omelettes” of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba justified their sanguinary seasoning? Perhaps Che’s legion of t-shirt toting devotees have all along been raging against the wrong machine.

Be Afraid... Be Very Afraid

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter - or so the saying goes. This statement holds true, at least, as a cynical expression of popular perceptions. A divisive figures like Yasser Arafat may remain a hero to his supporters and an utter scoundrel to his opponents. And the line does sometimes blur. Even the generally respected Nelson Mandela had occasion to resort to unprincipled violence in his younger days. But the issue persists: do subjective considerations alone distinguish terrorists and freedom fighters?

The United Nations experienced intense difficulty last year when it attempted to draft a definition of terrorism acceptable to its member states. In order to avert further international controversy, I humbly offer a solitary criterion which substantially contributes towards distinguishing freedom fighters from terrorists: freedom fighters content themselves with attacking the people actually responsible for oppressing them. Terrorists, conversely, delight in assaulting symbolic targets, in slaughtering the innocent in order to “make a statement” or draw attention to their cause.

Do you know what strikes terror into my heart? The fact that certain individuals and organizations in the world today regard me as a legitimate target for assassination simply because I am white, or American, or Christian, or “Western.” That I have never committed a hate crime, that I have only the most indirect say in my country’s foreign policy, that I am centuries too young to have participated in the historical atrocities of my religion, and that the “West” has been systematically dismantling its cultural heritage for decades fail to detract from the overarching symbolic value that my head upon a pike would have. “The cause” takes precedence over my life - and yours. Do you want to know how to tell the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Ask yourself whether or not he wants you dead.

This strain of thought which justifies murder does not merely appeal to fringe groups of foreign nationals and religious extremists. Ward Churchill, until last year an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, offered this startling terrorist apology in a February 2005 interview with the syndicated program Democracy Now!:

“As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved, and they did so both willingly and knowingly. . . . [They were] too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind, and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.”

Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann oversaw the logistics of implementing Hitler’s “final solution” during the Holocaust. The Jews who worked at the World Trade Center, having perished in the conflagration of September 11th, will never have a chance to respond to the accusation of being “little Eichmanns.” The immigrants working as cooks and custodians and the single mothers laboring as secretaries will not have the opportunity to address whether or not their days consisted of “power lunches and stock transactions.” But none of this matters to Mr. Churchill, who joins with Mao Tse-Tung in declaring that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Nor does it matter to my own school, Shoreline Community College, which invited Churchill to speak on campus late last year for a no doubt hefty honorarium. Churchill received a fast track to tenure at UC Boulder by masquerading as a Native American, prompting genuine Natives to dub him “Walking Eagle,” as in, “He’s so full of shit that he can’t fly.” If only the country, and the world, would so join in repudiating him, his ilk, and the homicidal ideology they advocate.