Che Guevara and the "Pedagogy of the Wall"

Because it's now a topic of discussion on the Liberty Blog, and and important one, I thought it'd move it up top. As we talk here about liberty and individual rights, especially rights in property, the subject of Comrade "Che" allows us an opportunity to visit the concepts of romantic idolization and how they contrast with reality.

It's also important to talk for a while about ideological consistency. Ideas have meaning, obviously, and if one isn't to be considered a hypocrite, one's beliefs ought to at the very least agree with one another. This is known as "ideological consistency" - the belief, for instance, that if government ought to be severely re-evaluating how it perpetuates the individual welfare state (more commonly called "welfare reform"), that they ought to also be working on reducing the number of subsidies they put out to various industries (ie, perpetuating the "buggy whip" industry, though that industry ought to have died around the same time as the internal combustion engine).

Anyhow, ideological consistency has also come up on this blog - and discussing Che, socialism, and property rights seems to help illustrate the problem when internal ideals become inconsistent.

People must remember that no matter how romanticized historical figures might be, the realities of their lives and their effects might be much, much different from that portrayed in books or on the big screen. I'm fairly sure I don't have to remind the bulk of the readers of the Liberty Blog of that. But sometimes it is important to restate the obvious.

In terms of the great "heroes" of communism and socialism, this reminder is even more important. There are many flavors of socialism, from mild socialistic government programs to full-blown totalitarian maoist-stalinism (and beyond). On that most extreme end, the movements are characterized by commanding authority, cold-blooded violence, brutal repression of dissent, and the complete subsumption of individual liberties to the state. Such as it is with with the flavor of stalinism as practiced by Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Guevara didn't just practice stalinism as a system, he truly admired Stalin and his iron-fisted viciousness. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of The Wall!"" Guevara reportedly said these words as he perpetuated Castro's revolution in Cuba.

Like is totalitarian compadres, Guevara was a man who understood the seductive power of hate, and the use of hate as a tool. He said in his 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental, "Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy...

"We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline."

Truly romantic stuff, isn't it?

But as we turn to the issue of individual rights, especially private property rights, Guevara's words are particularly telling, "one has to constantly think on behalf of masses and not on behalf of individuals...It's criminal to think of individuals because the needs of the individual become completely weakened in the face of the needs of the human conglomeration."

In the context of what we've been talking about regarding eminent domain, it's clear where Guevara's loyalties would lie. If communism as expressed by Marx can be summed up at "the abolition of private property", the stalinism expressed by Guevara saw that abolition carried out with a maximum of hatred towards the owners of that property, with the most extreme force used in the taking of the property from their hands.

Those who admire Guevara cannot, with the same breath, speak romantically about their passionate committment to protecting private property from the predation of the state, or any other rights for that matter. Guevara had no respect for either, and people with consistent internal ideologies recognize this.

Socialism remains an evil force on this planet. And I don't mean to speak of it in the bogeyman-ish terms of McCarthyism. I mean that as far as devastating and murderous political philosophies go, there are damned few worse than socialism. Millions have been killed at the hands of socialist devotees. Millions more have been enslaved at the whim of gangs of fanatical madmen. Che Guevara was one of these, and the "Motorcycle Diaries" does as much damage to the cause of freedom and individual rights as any tome celebrating the life of Hitler or Stalin - perhaps more because few have ever seen beyond the romantic imaging of Che.

He is not to be emulated and admired. He is to be shunned and reviled.