TranceAddict Forums (www.tranceaddict.com/forums)
- Political Discussion / Debate
-- The Culture of Che
Pages (2): [1] 2 »
The Culture of Che
I often wonder if people who wear those Che shirts, beaming with pride, have ANY clue who Che really was...
| quote: |
The Cult of Che Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. By Paul Berman Posted Friday, Sept. 24, 2004, at 7:33 AM ET The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system�the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become �"� and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy�a tragedy on the hugest scale. The present-day cult of Che�the T-shirts, the bars, the posters�has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries. The film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52�which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie. The colony is tyrannized by nuns, who maintain a cruel social hierarchy between the staff and the patients. The nuns refuse to feed people who fail to attend mass. Young Che, in his insistent honesty, rebels against these strictures, and his rebellion is bracing to witness. You think you are observing a noble protest against the oppressive customs and authoritarian habits of an obscurantist Catholic Church at its most reactionary. Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death�precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water�all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes. The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. Che had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip. He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, Jos� Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by Che. And yet, for all the ostensible indigenism in this movie, the pathos here has very little to do with the Indian past, or even with the New World. The pathos is Spanish, in the most archaic fashion�a pathos that combines the Catholic martyrdom of the Christlike scenes with the on-the-road spirit not of Jack Kerouac (as some people may imagine) but of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a tried-and-true formula in Spanish culture. (See Benito P�rez Gald�s' classic 19th-century novel Nazar�n.) If you were to compare Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, with its pious tone, to the irrevent, humorous, ironic, libertarian films of Pedro Almod�var, you could easily imagine that Salles' film comes from the long-ago past, perhaps from the dark reactionary times of Franco�and Almod�var's movies come from the modern age that has rebelled against Franco. The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Ra�l Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too. These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. V�clav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility�those days appear to be over. I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba�will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Ra�l Rivero? As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almod�var-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison. Search Order by Ra�l Rivero What are these gentlemen looking for in my house? What is this officer doing reading the sheet of paper on which I've written the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"? What hint of conspiracy speaks to him from the photo without a dedication of my father in a guayabera (black tie) in the fields of the National Capitol? How does he interpret my certificates of divorce? Where will his techniques of harassment lead him when he reads the ten-line poems and discovers the war wounds of my great-grandfather? Eight policemen are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters, and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks and want to know where little Andrea sleeps and what does her asthma have to do with my carpets. They want the code of a message from Zucu in the upper part of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile of the comrade): "Castles with music box. I won't let the boy hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie." A specialist in aporia came, a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal who examined at the point of a gun the hills of poetry books. Eight policemen in my house with a search order, a clean operation, a full victory for the vanguard of the proletariat who confiscated my Consul typewriter, one hundred forty-two blank pages and a sad and personal heap of papers �the most perishable of the perishable from this summer. Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism and The Passion of Joschka Fischer. |
I didn't know much about che untill a little while ago. what really made me interested was that movie the motorcycle diaries that was adapted from his log he wrote on his journey through latin america. i read alot of stuff by him and then one day in class we just happened to be discussing him, and there was a kid with a che shirt. omfg, i've never met a dumber person in my life just about sums up the whole class.
there is a dance club here in Dallas called "Che". not kidding. it's not a fly by night warehouse joint either it's fairly hi-brow in a nice part of the metroplex. replete with the requisite portrait of his stupid mug (the one on all the t-shirts in red) right above the door where all the proletariate stand around to get picked to go in. oh the irony. every time i see the place i giggle, but the neocon inside of me wants to set fire to the place.
here is some more irony
| quote: |
| The Revolution Will Not Be Silk-Screened Capitalism and copyright law usurp socialism�s most famous image. by Katherine Glover - October 2004 Ernesto �Che� Guevara has come a long way. Once best known as a fierce companion of Fidel Castro, he now graces the T-shirts of revolutionaries, as well as assorted hipsters, celebrities, and stoners who couldn�t find Che�s native country (Argentina) on a map. Since the release of The Motorcycle Diaries, a film based on Che�s memoirs that emphasizes his wandering, Kerouac-like persona more than his communist heroics and martyrdom, sales of posters, buttons, and other Che merchandise have soared. Che is more popular than ever, even if his socialist ideals have run aground. If becoming a martyr, a cult of personality, and a sex symbol weren�t indignity enough for a Marxist, his image has now been copyrighted. A Georgia man named David McWilliams is claiming he has an exclusive license to reproduce the famous Che photo anywhere in North America�and he�s threatening to sue anyone who violates this right. That includes Northern Sun, the charming boutique for radicals in South Minneapolis. �Please send a list of total inventory on your shelves, and forward same to us for destruction,� McWilliams commanded in an email to Northern Sun owner Scott Cramer on August 17. �Failure to comply with these requests will result in our pursuit of all legal remedies available to us.� Cramer says he initially agreed to start buying all of his Che merchandise from McWilliams� company, but then he found out the T-shirts were made in Honduras, a country with terrible labor conditions. Who exactly was this man who claimed to own Che? When McWilliams refused to supply Cramer with T-shirts made in the U.S.A., Cramer was forced to keep all Che products out of his catalog and website until he and his lawyers could figure out what to do. McWilliams did not respond to my friendly inquiries. But according to Cramer, McWilliams says he purchased the license from some Frenchmen after they threatened to sue him for violating their copyright. How the Frenchmen got rights to the photo is unclear. The iconic image of Che comes from a photo taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda. The print collected dust in Korda�s studio until 1967, the year of Guevara�s death, when a visiting Italian publisher got a copy of the print from Korda, brought it back to Europe, and sold more than two million posters. Korda could do nothing, because Cuba had, until 1997, refused to join the international Berne Copyright Convention. Even then, Korda only bothered with one lawsuit, against Smirnoff Vodka in 2000. They wanted to use it in an ad campaign. Korda said he didn�t mind if people reproduced Che�s image �to propagate his memory and the cause of social justice throughout the world,� but he was against using it to sell alcohol, or �for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che.� He won the case, and he donated all the money to Cuban hospitals. When Korda died in 2001, the rights he had exercised passed on to his daughter. She has been twice as aggressive in suing people who use the image for political causes, particularly those she feels her father would abhor (one anti-Cuba and another anti-abortion). But it is unclear whether she has ever profited from any licensing schemes. Some sources say it is not Korda�s daughter, but Che�s estate, that now controls the copyright. �That was my first mistake,� says Cramer. �When McWilliams offered to send me proof, I said, �No, that�s okay, I believe you.�� Cramer consulted a copyright lawyer, but he could offer little advice without actually seeing documentation of McWilliams� rights. But Johnny Havana, a merchandiser based in Toronto who runs TheCheStore.com, says Cramer did the right thing. After dealing with similar threats a year ago, Havana did some research and concluded that it wasn�t worth it for a small company to take on McWilliams. �I would have had to go to France to fight.� Havana says McWilliams sells him a good product and he�s never had any complaints. And the T-shirts Havana gets are all made in the United States, he says. So why did McWilliams tell Cramer he could only buy Che T-shirts made in Honduras? �It�s a big company,� says Havana. �He can do whatever he wants.� In other words, capitalism wins. �Katherine Glover |
>>communists...let the rhythm move you!<<
| quote: |
| The 50,000 watts of hard pounding energy and excitement of a South Beach Club awaits you at Club Ch�. Right off the bat you�ll notice that it is a complete multimedia experience with a state-of-the-art professional nightclub sound and computerized laser light systems, and 45 plasmas, projectors and monitors. |
Is this a Cyrus baiting thread?
I did my spanish presentation on Che a few semester ago. Che was a badass!
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Q5echo here is some more irony |
Che was a flaming h0m0.
Any retard that wears a Che shirt deserves to get punched in the face. I hope they do.
And any retard who has Che in his avatar deserves to get hit in the face by an 18 wheeler going 80 MPH 
most people who wear the shirts know nothing about him, maybe they know that he "wanted to bring freedom to people but was backstabbed by castro"...yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by emc^2 Che was a flaming h0m0. Any retard that wears a Che shirt deserves to get punched in the face. I hope they do. And any retard who has Che in his avatar deserves to get hit in the face by an 18 wheeler going 80 MPH |
oh, wow yeah he left his job as doc...that he barely had, to set up a totalatarian government. what a standup guy. at one point joseph stalin left his training as a priest to kill 20 million people, he's the model of a honest, modest, humble, helping, selfless human being.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by habsfan Here's a guy who leaves his potentially comfy life as a doctor to help those less fortunate,leads a revolution, and you're calling him a homo? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Q5echo [.IMG]http://thoseshirts.com/images/rect-checap-sand.jpg[/IMG] |
In response to the article where it says that Che was killed in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant
- God bless Bolivia!!!
I have a che t-shirt. Didnt even know he was a c*nt. This is great.
My che t-shirt is now up there with my adolf hitler t-shirt as my faovurite t-shirt.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Michael19 Didnt even know he was a c*nt. My che t-shirt is now up there with my adolf hitler t-shirt as my faovurite t-shirt. |
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ofcourse you do, you're a neo-con.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by shaolin_Z Of course you do, you're a neo-con. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Nou So if a Democratic president wiretapped the phones illegally and conservatives called for him to be censured would you agree with the conservatives? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Nou Well everything is pointing at these wiretaps being illegal... |
| quote: |
| �If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for the president to go to the court of review, the president can under executive order act unilaterally, which he is doing now,� said Judge Allan Kornblum, magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida and an author of the 1978 FISA Act. �I think that the president would be remiss exercising his constitutional authority by giving all of that power over to a statute.� |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Q5echo no. five FISA judges testified on Capital Hill on March 29 stating that the president was within his rights, constitutionally. including Judge Nathan Kornblum, who actually wrote the FISA laws in 1978, stating... end of dicussion. everything else is reactionary knee jerking fed by the Democratic party to the mouths of the far left. |
| quote: |
| "The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it" |
| quote: |
| "but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president's constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order" |
| quote: |
| "The panel of judges unanimously agreed that the law should have been changed before now to deal with new threats from terrorists" |
| quote: |
| �If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for the president to go to the court of review, the president can under executive order act unilaterally, which he is doing now,� |
| quote: |
| this is why this has not been news out of the MSM recently. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by emc^2 And any retard who has Che in his avatar deserves to get hit in the face by an 18 wheeler going 80 MPH |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Not commenting on this because they had no idea of Bush's true actions. |
| quote: |
| Emphasis mine on the word "international". This has never been in dispute. The question is, did Bush spy on American citizens, not international agents? That question remains unanswered and not commented on by the FISA judges. |
| quote: |
| Judge Kornblum: "As I mentioned, U.S. persons may be in the network or chain of communications of known terrorists, but there will undoubtedly be many other people in the communications network who are known to the intelligence agencies. Some of them may include U.S. persons, thus it is perfectly logical and reasonable to expect that although the program is targeted against terrorist networks abroad, that communications may come to the United States and are of great intelligence interest." |
| quote: |
| "This situation is not unlike things I've seen as a magistrate judge in drug trafficking, where the DEA or state officers are able to secure a cell phone used by a drug dealer. They look at the records of the cell phone, they see he's talked to other cell phones, and the people of those cell phones have talked to other people on cell phones. And so the DEA begins to track all of the people to identify the people in the network of drug trafficking. But till you get the records from the communications companies that keep these phone records, until you determine what the pattern of operation is, until you determine the identities of these people, it can take more than a year. And that was a case I recently saw in Gainesville. However, we don't have that time in dealing with international terrorism." |
| quote: |
| Now this does bring up an interesting question: if, in fact, Bush's domestic spying actions were legal, then what's with the necessity to grant him new powers to spy EVEN MORE legally? |
[/QUOTE]
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Q5echo speculation. first off, you don't know what they had any idea of at the hearing. the judges would not comment on it because they were not briefed on the program as well they couldn't comment. thats just good juriprudence in my book (anybody's book). that subject, being secondary to the primary subject of legality, is not in dispute anyway. |
| quote: |
| what has been made public about the program is whats at issue, and as far as they're concerned, he's [Bush] right. as the article states. |
| quote: |
| Bush authorized the NSA to monitor known Al Queera #'s dialing in and out and through the U.S. |
| quote: |
| In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for the eavesdropping program, which did not seek court warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but ultimately deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said. ...More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive. "We'd chase a number, find it's a school teacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/p...agewanted=print |
| quote: |
| what the hell do you mean it wasn't commented on by the FISA judges? further |
| quote: |
| But again it doesn't address the question as to why Bush felt he didn't have sufficient time for what particular case he deemed necessary to circumvent the courts because the FISA judges didn't see the fucking case he undermined right under their noses in the first place. It also doesn't address another simple question I've brought up here time and again: can someone explain to me how Bush could not have had enough time to obtain a wiretap warrant from a FISA court when he had up to 72 hours to get one AFTER starting that given wiretap? Can someone else also explain to me how Bush is somehow more effective in catching al Qaeda bad guys by not trying to get a warrant from the secret FISA courts up to 72 hours after starting that wiretap? |
| quote: |
| However, we don't have that time in dealing with international terrorism." |
| quote: |
| that was just Kornblum. you want the other's opinions? it seems to me that you want to make something out of nothing here. as usual. |
| quote: |
| One simple but important change that Congress made was to lengthen the time period for us to bring to court applications in support of Attorney General-authorized emergency FISAs. This modification has allowed us to make full and effective use of FISA's pre-existing emergency provisions to ensure that the government acts swiftly to respond to terrorist threats. ...The Department of Justice has been studying Sen. DeWine's proposed legislation. Because the proposed change raises both significant legal and practical issues, the Administration at this time is not prepared to support it. ...The practical concern involves an assessment of whether the current "probable cause" standard has hamstrung our ability to use FISA surveillance to protect our nation. We have been aggressive in seeking FISA warrants and, thanks to Congress's passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, we have been able to use our expanded FISA tools more effectively to combat terrorist activities. It may not be the case that the probable cause standard has caused any difficulties in our ability to seek the FISA warrants we require, and we will need to engage in a significant review to determine the effect a change in the standard would have on our ongoing operations. If the current standard has not posed an obstacle, then there may be little to gain from the lower standard and, as I previously stated, perhaps much to lose. http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/200...73102baker.html |
[/QUOTE] [/QUOTE]
| quote: |
| Originally posted by habsfan Wow! Here's a guy who leaves his potentially comfy life as a doctor to help those less fortunate,leads a revolution, and you're calling him a homo? Yeah, keep acting tough on TA, lol. EDIT: I can't tell if you're being sarcastic? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Erotic Buddha he led a fucking TOTALITARIAN COMMUNIST regime...he's a scumbag and all the other brainless mongrels who worship him are as well |
Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright © 2000-2021, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.