Thread: The Cult of Che

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/webl...heMonument.jpg

Try this ..
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/webl...Destroyed&only

I get sick every time I see some aging hippie, yuppie and baby, open-borders zealot, or college punk sporting a Che shirt–or some clueless corporate retailer making a buck off of Che chic. ( Manson "memorabila" has the same effect ... for similar reasons )

The Young America’s Foundation is tired of it, too. They’ve put out a poster for Freedom Week this week illustrating the victims of Che Guevara, using the moonbat iconic image of the mass murderer.

http://michellemalkin.com/wp/wp-cont...07/11/2che.jpg



Poster relates Che's dark side

One of the most famous faces of communism is getting a makeover this week, with a new poster designed to teach students the whole story about Cuban revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

"The Victims of Che Guevera" poster, produced by the Young America's Foundation, centers on a collage that uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba's communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist guerrilla, who has become a popular T-shirt icon.

"Che is one of the heroes that the left idolizes," said Patrick X. Coyle, vice president of YAF. "But a lot of kids don't know anything about him. We thought this would be a great way to highlight his atrocities."

The occasion for the poster is Freedom Week, YAF's annual commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, which has since become the most famous event symbolizing the collapse of Soviet communism.

Conservative students on more than 100 college and university campuses will participate in Freedom Week events, and YAF has printed 10,000 copies of the Guevara poster to dramatize the fact that communism "affected real individuals," Mr. Coyle said.

"In fact, collectivist regimes, according to 'The Black Book of Communism,' murdered more than 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century," he said.

The Che poster was the brainchild of YAF President Ron Robinson and created by designer Jonathan Briggs. "We worked with Umberto Fontova, author of 'Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him' and he helped us acquire the images" of victims of Cuban communism, Mr. Coyle said.

A native of Argentina, Guevara met exiled Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1956. Three years later, after Mr. Castro had overthrown the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista, Guevara was responsible for the trials and executions of the communist regime's enemies. He later traveled to Africa and Latin America, helping promote Marxist guerrilla uprisings, before being killed by the Bolivian army in 1967.

A famous photo of Guevara by Alberto Korda was made into a poster that adorned the walls of many student radicals in the U.S. during the era in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Guevara was "an international terrorist and mass murderer," the YAF poster declares.

It's no accident, Mr. Coyle suggests, that Guevara T-shirts are worn by students on so many campuses today. "Colleges and universities are the last holdouts of Marxist ideas," he said.

By Robert Stacy McCain


http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/...111050092/1015

Soderbergh challenges Cannes with epic Che tale
By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer
Thu May 22, 2:30 PM ET

CANNES, France - Unless it is one of his "Ocean's Eleven" casino romps, Steven Soderbergh never makes things easy for an audience.

With his epic film biography of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Soderbergh defiantly has made the story he wanted to see, one that will prove a very tough sell to some audiences.

The two-part saga runs four hours, 30 minutes. It is almost entirely in Spanish, a particular challenge for U.S. viewers who dislike subtitles. It dispenses with many cliches of the biopic, offering virtually no insight into the origin of Che's brand of humanism, instead presenting impressionistic glimpses of Che's idealism in action during the Cuban revolution and his attempt to foment a similar transformation in Bolivia.

Soderbergh was prepared for reporters' skepticism on all fronts at a Cannes news conference Thursday.

On shooting in Spanish:

"You can't make a film with any level of credibility in this case unless it's in Spanish," Soderbergh said. "I hope we're reaching a time where you go make a movie in another culture, that you shoot in the language of that culture. I'm hoping the days of that sort of specific brand of cultural imperialism have ended."

On the length:

"Just the further you get into it, it felt like if you're going to have context, then it's just going to have to be a certain size," Soderbergh said.

On the unconventional structure:

"I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people ... upset that something's not conventional," Soderbergh said. "The bottom line is we're just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That's really it. And the scenes were chosen strictly on the basis of, 'Yeah, what does that tell us about his character?'"

Starring Benicio Del Toro, the Oscar-winning co-star of Soderbergh's "Traffic," as Guevara, the two films were shot as "The Argentine" and "Guerrilla." The cast includes Franka Potente, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Demian Bichir as Fidel Castro. Soderbergh buddy Matt Damon, part of the star-studded "Ocean's Eleven" ensemble, makes a brief appearance.

"The Argentine" juxtaposes Guevara and Castro's late 1950s triumph in Cuba with flashbacks to their early planning days in Mexico and Che's visit to New York City in the mid-1960s, when he was greeted with condemnation and death threats over the Castro regime's iron-fisted rule.

"Guerrilla" follows the downfall of Guevara as his grass-roots campaign in Bolivia degenerates into a handful of scraggly, starving rebels on the run from vastly superior government forces in the jungle.

Che was executed in Bolivia in 1967. Much of the world now has only a superficial grasp of Che as a symbol of revolution from T-shirts and posters depicting his boldly smiling face.

While it may be hard to persuade audiences to see it a first time, the story requires repeated viewings to really appreciate it, said Del Toro, also a producer on the project.

"It reminds me of the painter who did a portrait of this lady, and when he gave it to the lady, the lady said, `That portrait doesn't look anything like me.' And the painter said, 'Oh, it will,'" Del Toro said. "I really think that eventually, those people, when they see the movie for the third time, they'll start seeing things, they'll start seeing dimensions and angles, maybe a look or a smile or the use of this or a character here and there. ... I know them very well, but I'm still finding stuff."

The films were presented as one entry at Cannes under the name "Che." They played without credits, the way Soderbergh would prefer to see it initially released to general audiences.

"Here's what I would like to do is, every time it opens in a town, let's say, that for a week, you can see it as one movie for the first week, and then you split it off into two films," Soderbergh said. "That's what I would like to do is have a sort of roadshow engagement, no credits ... a printed program that comes with the movie. To me, that would be an event."

How the films actually will play in the U.S. and other countries will depend on deals Soderbergh strikes as he shops it around to distributors at Cannes.

"Che" is competing for the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or, which Soderbergh won with his feature debut, "sex, lies and videotape," in 1989.

While Soderbergh talked seriously and passionately about his desire to make the films, he also had a ready wisecrack for his motivation:

"It's all a very elaborate way for us to sell our own T-shirts," Soderbergh said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080522/..._LZ6wOAeOs0NUE

On the Net: http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en.html

STYLE ICON : Capitalizing on Che Guevara's image
Cashing in on the iconic photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara has become all the rage these days.
By Ben Ehrenreich
Special to The Times
June 1, 2008

IF THIS were a photo session, you couldn't have asked for more. The model, long-haired with steely gaze and wispy guerrillero beard. Jacket zipped to the chin. Collar up and hair uncombed. Jaw set in anger. Beret at a perfect, rakish tilt. There's tension even in his pose: his shoulders turning one way, his face another. And those eyes, mournful but defiant, staring up and to the right as if at some distant vision of the future, or a giant, slow-approaching foe.

Snapped in March 1960, Alberto Korda's iconic image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara is possibly -- who's counting? -- the most-reproduced photograph in the world. Some version of it has been painted, printed, digitized, embroidered, tattooed, silk-screened, sculpted or sketched on nearly every surface imaginable. Brick and mortar city walls. Poster board waved high above a crowd. Gisele Bündchen's bikini.

And though he never went away -- except in the strictly mortal sense -- Che is suddenly everywhere again. In October, an Iranian student militia organized a "Che Like Chamran" conference, attempting to enlist the martyred Marxist in the Islamic revolution. (They made the mistake of inviting his daughter, who pointed out that her dad did not believe in God.)

Hollywood is at it as well: Steven Soderbergh's long-anticipated, two-part Che biopic ("The Argentine" and "Guerrilla") premiered May 21 at Cannes, with Benicio Del Toro playing the legendary Argentine-doctor-cum-internationalist-revolutionary. And "Chevolution," Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez's documentary on the mass dissemination of the Korda image, is now making the film festival rounds.

Images have a way of shedding context, shaking off history. But just so you know: Korda snapped the shot in the idealistic first blush of the Cuban Revolution, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, before Fidel Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union. One day earlier, an explosion in Havana harbor ripped through a Belgian cargo ship bearing munitions for the nascent regime. Castro blamed the CIA. At the memorial service for the many dozens killed, Korda clicked the shutter and caught Guevara on the podium, angry but determined, staring fearlessly off into the yonder.

The image spread mysteriously, apparently with a will of its own. Revolución, the Cuban newspaper, used it to announce a conference on industrialization at which Dr. Ernesto Guevara, then minister of industry, planned to lecture. Korda gave a print to the Italian leftist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who distributed it as a poster when he got home. Around the same time, Paris Match somehow got a copy and published it beside a July 1967 article asking "Che Guevara -- Where Is He?" And on the facing page, there is a photo of a crowd gathered in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. Waldo-like, Korda's portrait is there already, printed on a placard carried by the crowd.

The portrait would outlive its subject. Immediately after Che's death in October 1967 (in the highlands of Bolivia, where he is now worshiped as a saint), the image multiplied. Marchers carried it through the streets of Milan, Italy, to protest his execution. May '68 swung fast around the corner. There he was in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and in Prague, in Mexico City, Paris, Washington, Vietnam.

Transformation

THE IMAGE quickly mutated. It was not just the age of protest after all, but of Pop Art and the sly Warholian conflation of culture, celebrity and commerce. Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick flattened out the shading into a bold, T-shirt-friendly graphic in black, white and red. He wanted the image "to breed like rabbits," and it did.

But the shadows and complexities of Che's life and legacy disappeared as well. The man became a logo. As Ivan de la Nuez, a Barcelona, Spain, museum director quoted in Ziff and Lopez's film puts it, "Capitalism devours everything . . . even its worst enemies." Che has proved an abundant meal. His image has sold Converse sneakers and Smirnoff vodka. "Viva Gorditas," barks the Taco Bell Chihuahua, donning a Che beret.

"You think it's funny," the Clash once sang, "turning rebellion into money." Maybe not funny but quite a trick: There's Che beer, Che cola, Che cigarettes, the inevitable Cherry Guevara ice cream. Online at http://www.thechestore.com, you'll find Che's face on hoodies, beanies, berets, backpacks, bandannas, belt buckles, wallets, wall clocks, Zippo lighters, pocket flasks and of course, T-shirts. La La Ling in Los Feliz sells Che onesies for the wee 'uns. I bought my 3-year-old niece a plush Che doll one Christmas. She abandoned him for Dora the Explorer.

Online I found a T-shirt for sale depicting Homer Simpson sporting an arm tattoo of Che, and then there is the famous New Yorker cartoon featuring Che wearing a T-shirt depicting Bart Simpson (and now a T-shirt itself).

What could it possibly mean? Only that the Che tee has itself become a symbol, shorthand for posture drained of ideology, rebelliousness as fashion statement. Other notable wearers of Che tees: Kyle from "South Park," Prince Harry, Jay-Z, who rapped on "The Black Album," "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on," which is about as likely as Che the jihadi, but never mind.

The "Chevolution" soundtrack features a song by the Australian punk band the Clap called "Che Guevara T-Shirt Wearer." (That rhymes in Australia.) "You're a Che Guevara T-shirt wearer," the chorus goes, "and you have no idea who he is."

Ziff and Lopez interviewed a young Republican on the UCLA campus, who thought Che was a musician, and a bicyclist in Venice Beach, who identified the face on his T-shirt as "the guy who invented those mojitos."

But despite that, and despite the selling and sampling and all the multilayered appropriations, Ziff maintains that Che's image still means something, even if it's something as generic as protest, nonconformity, a wish for change. "It's diluted," Ziff says, but "I don't think it's ever lost its edge."

To a degree, she's right. Rebels and activists the world over still take inspiration from Guevara. But the image has lost something; Che's face on a poster in 1968 isn't quite the same thing as it is on a mousepad 40 years later. Perhaps it is precisely that loss -- the shedding of Che's radicalism and ideological rigor -- that renders him so supremely marketable today. Things are not going well these days. Kids don't want revolution so much as, um, something different.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that L.A. artist Shepard Fairey, in his design for a Sen. Barack Obama poster, looked to Korda's Che. Fairey's Obama is not wearing a beret, and he's looking left instead of right, but his face tilts at the same angle as Che's. His jaw is set with the same willfulness and strength, and he too is gazing recognizably upward into the future (hasta la victoria siempre . . . ). Obama's eyes, though, are filled not with righteous anger but with vague and lofty hope.

Che means change, if nothing else -- and not necessarily Marxist or anti-imperialist or radical at all. Today, his face can mean almost anything. He can even symbolize dissatisfaction with the regime he helped establish. In Cuba last spring, I met a young rapper from the slums of central Havana who was thoroughly disenchanted with Castro's revolution. I asked him whom he would prefer as president, Fidel or Raúl Castro. He laughed and shook his head. "I'd prefer Che," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...ellemalkin.com

Look, you just can’t hide from Che’s history. It’s like putting a David Duke for President bumper sticker on your car and then explaining that for you, personally, it’s just about traditional values and not about white nationalism.

It’s like flying a Hezbollah flag and just claiming that you’re not for terrorism or wiping out Israel, you’re just opposed to Zionism.

This swastika tattoo? Why, it’s just a Hindu/ American Indian good luck symbol, friend–not a Nazi thing at all. Shame on you for thinking so.

I think this cuts both ways–you might, say, want to wear a Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride. There’s actually a much better argument to be made than in the hypotheticals above that the Confederate flag has been rehabilitated–transformed into a symbol of pride in Southern heritage and divorced from its racist connotations. But you shouldn’t be surprised if it raises a few eyebrows from people who understand it as A: a flag of armed rebellion against the United States and B: the flag of a pro-slavery cause.

Even if you’re telling the truth and those things subjectively mean something totally innocuous to you, you’re an idiot for ignoring the commonly accepted symbolism as well as the historical context. You might want that Che T-shirt just to stand for “change”, or for “hey, hippie chicks, I would like to make dirty hippie love to you”, but there’s just not much getting around the fact that Che was a murdering sociopathic Commie ideologue.

Which I think is also what Michelle and Charles are saying about the keffiyeh. http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...omplaints.html Maybe it’s just a cool exotic scarf to you. But there’s a very important background to it that you don’t know or are ignoring, and if you really understood what it meant to Islamic terrorists in the current, ongoing conflict, why would you possibly want to wear it?

P.S. If you just have to wear a keffiyeh, one of the dozens of links at Michelle’s post (sorry, forgot which) had the interesting idea of subverting it. Get one with American flags on it. Or Stars of David. Or the little Mohammed bomb-turban Danish cartoon.

14/378

Che Guevara, 4 decades later, gets a hometown statue
By Jack Chang, McClatchy Newspapers
Sat Jun 14, 7:03 PM ET

ROSARIO , Argentina - While Ernesto "Che" Guevara remains the most famous export of this sleepy city, his legacy here has long been a low-key one. Except for a handful of businesses named in his honor, few markers alert visitors that the revolutionary leader was born here exactly 80 years ago before becoming one of the most mythic figures of the 20th century.

That changed Saturday when civic leaders inaugurated the first official monument honoring the revolutionary leader in Argentina , ending decades of government silence about the controversial figure.

A 13-foot-high bronze statue unveiled before hundreds of cheering admirers depicts the beret-wearing Guevara standing defiantly while facing toward Santa Clara , Cuba , where another statue of Guevara faces toward Argentina .

Much of Guevara's family, including three of his children, attended the ceremony along with other veterans of the Cuban Revolution who fought beside Guevara.

Sculptor Andres Zerneri , who created the statue, said the time had come in Guevara's native country for such a monument, especially as the revolutionary's influence spreads around a Latin America increasingly dominated by leftist governments.

As a show of Guevara's international fame, Zerneri solicited donations of keys from around the world to be melted for the bronze used in the statue. That request unleashed a flood of some 75,000 keys.

"There's a more Latin American consciousness now in the region, and it's the direct influence of Che," Zerneri said. "We understand now that he didn't do all this just for the sake of revolution but to change the political face of Latin America ."

Yet the fact that Argentina's first monument to Guevara comes 41 years after his death reveals the ambivalence many in this country feel about one of their most famous native sons, said political analyst Julio Burdman .

Statues of Guevara have already been erected in Cuba , Bolivia and other countries, and he's been the subject of several films, including a much-awaited biopic starring Benicio del Toro .

In particular, Guevara's philosophy of armed, socialist revolution has long made Argentine governments uncomfortable with his legacy and has been out of place in politics here, Burdman said.

Elsewhere in Latin America , however, leaders such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales regularly cite Guevara as an inspiration.

"Guevara never left any solid political movement in Argentina ," Burdman said. "He's more of an image that's been used by political movements around the world than a relevant figure here."

While flag-waving, drum-banging leftist groups marched through Rosario Saturday, some residents said honoring Guevara was a waste of public money.

"I'm in total disagreement with this homage," said Luis Oskis, 50, who owns a store in the city's downtown. "I'm against all extreme movements and all wars, whether they're from the left or the right. After all, Che ordered a lot of deaths."

(STORY CAN END HERE)

Guevara was born to a family of Irish and Basque descent before leaving to study medicine in the capital of Buenos Aires . He became radicalized while traveling around Latin America and eventually joined Fidel Castro in overthrowing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1958.

As part of Castro's Communist government, Guevara oversaw the trials and executions of several hundred people considered traitors and war criminals. He left Cuba to lead failed insurgencies in the Congo and Bolivia , where he was caught with U.S. support and executed in 1967.

Since then, Guevara's handsome, stern face has become one of the most reproduced images in the world, and leftists hail him as a romantic symbol of doomed political idealism.

Last week, Guevara's image was even used by a Socialist group in Rawalpindi, Pakistan , during protests demanding judicial reforms.

Juan Menendez , a self-described Marxist-Leninist activist, said he came to Rosario Saturday to help "rescue" Guevara's legacy from over-commercialism and to remind people of what Guevara fought for. Menendez spoke while holding a giant red banner adorned with the famous image of Guevara created by photographer Alberto Korda.

"We need to remember Guevara as a figure in the fight against injustice," the 18-year-old said. "People have emptied the content of Che and just used his image, and we're trying to revive his message."

Teacher Mirtha del Valle , who was at the front of the crowd, said many Argentines have forgotten about Guevara, even as the rest of the world debates his legacy. She blamed a succession of military and center-right governments who she said had suppressed the history.

"The governments have made sure that people don't know about Che," del Valle said. "In fact, we know less about him than anyone else in Latin America ."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20...latchy/2966747

See also http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...al-ipecac.html


I can't believe that people will wear a shirt with the likeness of Che on it but know absolutely nothing about the man. They do it just because people in Hollywood do it, wealthy people like the ones Che put before a firing squad. I wonder if the Hollywood libtards would still endorse him if they were standing in line to die because they had money? People call Che a hero of the working class but fail to realize that Cuba banned labor unions once the communists took power!!! SMH!


...

John Stossel https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v...266621&fref=nf

ICYMI: The Daily Beast columnist Michael Moynihan explains why clueless celebrities find communists like Che Guevara "cool."

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