Samizdata

Samizdata commenter Marc Sheffner (thanks Marc!), spotted this story in a thread comment about this.

Makes you so glad that all our precious details are going to be looked after by those clever political folk and their friends, does it not?

Talking of IT, the debut UK edition of Wired has a look at some of the folk that run Britain’s IT and other vital infrastructure systems.

Dr. Douglas Young, Professor from the Political Science & History at Gainesville State College has a question for you to ask the next person you see wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt

Hollywood has dutifully churned out yet another cinematic agitprop paean to a leftist ‘martyr’, this time Ernesto Guevara. So let us recall the real ‘Che’ and try to discern why many supposedly democratic, civil libertarian liberals still swoon over this Stalinist mass-murderer.

The meticulous myth of Senor Guevara is of a handsome Argentine heroically helping Fidel Castro’s guerrillas liberate Cuba from Fulgencio Batista’s military dictatorship in 1959. Then he became a global revolutionary icon inspiring the downtrodden to rise up everywhere, even personally leading rebel warriors in the Congo before being executed doing the same in Bolivia in 1967. The (communist) party line says Che personifies the selfless humanitarian courageously fighting for ‘social justice’. He is the Marxists’ martyred Christ figure replete with pictures of his half-naked corpse riddled with bullet holes. And the classic poster of an angry young Guevara has scarred countless college dorm rooms for over 40 years, putting a face on the eternally young rebel for angry adolescents everywhere.

The real Guevara was a reckless bourgeois adrenaline-junkie seeking a place in history as a liberator of the oppressed. But this fanatic’s vehicle of ‘liberation’ was Stalinism, named for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, murderer of well over 20 million of his own people. As one of Castro’s top lieutenants, Che helped steer Cuba’s revolutionary regime in a radically repressive direction. Soon after overthrowing Batista, Guevara choreographed the executions of hundreds of Batista officials without any fair trials. He thought nothing of summarily executing even fellow guerrillas suspected of disloyalty and shot one himself with no due process.

Che was a purist political fanatic who saw everything in stark black and white. Therefore he vociferously opposed freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, protest, or any other rights not completely consistent with his North Korean-style communism. How many rock music-loving teens sporting Guevara t-shirts today know their hero supported Cuba’s 1960s’ repression of the genre? How many homosexual fans know he had gays jailed?

Did the Obama volunteers in that Texas campaign headquarters with Che’s poster on the wall know that Guevara fervently opposed any free elections? How ‘progressive’ is that?

How socially just was it that Che was enraged when the Russians blinked during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and withdrew their nuclear missiles from the island, thus averting a nuclear war? Guevara was such a zealous ideologue that he relished the specter of millions of Cuban lives sacrificed on the altar of communism, declaring Cuba “a people ready to sacrifice itself to nuclear arms, that its ashes might serve as a basis for new societies”. Some humanitarian!

Che was a narcissist who boasted that “I have no house, wife, children, parents, or brothers; my friends are friends as long as they think like me, politically”. This is a role model for today’s ‘post-political’ voters claiming we should get beyond partisanship?

Adding to the ridiculousness of the Che cult is that he was virtually a complete failure. As a medical doctor, he never even had a practice. When put in charge of the Cuban economy at the start of Castro’s government, his uncompromising communist diktats ran it completely into the ground, from which it never recovered. Humiliated, and also angry that Castro was not fomenting enough revolution abroad, he then tried to lead such quixotic adventures in Argentina, the Congo, and Bolivia, failing miserably everywhere while sacrificing the lives of scores of naïve, idealistic young followers as deluded pawns in the service of his personality cult.

Another reason he fled Cuba in the mid-1960s was the complete mess he made of his private life. Though he preached sexual purity to his colleagues, he was a shameless adulterer who abandoned two wives and many children, some legitimate, others not. As a grandson put it, “he was never home”. The public Che who supposedly had such great love for humanity privately could not stand most folks.

Guevara’s promiscuous communist adventurism was the pattern of a terminal adolescent running away from his problems to get caught up in some heroic crusade against his eternal bete noir, ‘Yankee imperialism’.

So why do so many well-heeled American libs still admire this thug? Are the young simply ignorant of his execrable record and drawn to the image of the dashing young rebel? Do older progressives feel guilt for their free market prosperity, and showing solidarity with Che absolves them? Do hippies-turned-yuppies get nostalgic for their youthful protests and rationalize that the symbolism of Che as a ‘social reformer’ eclipses his actual horrific human rights record? And are some American Guevaraistas truly dangerous leftists who seek to emulate their icon and destroy our free, democratic, capitalist society?

Ask that guy wearing the Che tee-shirt.

At 8 pm on Friday 14th, the day after tomorrow, I am giving a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society, as mentioned here. I killed two birds with one stone by listening this evening to a talk given on October 24th to the Society by Professor David Friedman, concerning which they have a report (and a link to the recording) on their blog, here. I wanted to hear what Professor Friedman had to say because I always want to hear what he says, he having been one of my favourite libertarians ever since I first read The Machinery of Freedom in about 1975. And, by listening to what Friedman said to the Oxford Libertarians and to the questions they asked of him after he had spoken, I now have a better idea of what kind of audience they will be and what they’ve recently been attending to and thinking about. More recently, their blog flagged up their video of the same event. I’ll be watching some of that too.

Today, they put up a blog posting advertising my talk. Its heading is a little out of date, but it describes what I used to do far more energetically than I do now, and what I will be talking about: Propagandising for Liberty. My use of the word propaganda is deliberate in this connection. For me, propaganda is a neutral term, meaning simply: that which should be propagated. But there is, I agree, a whiff of intimidation about the word, of weight of argument in the gross tonnage sense as well as merely in the sense of intellectual power. But how to contrive such effects without incurring crippling costs? I don’t have all the answers, but will offer some and I will be paying particular attention to universities.

By the way, David Friedman’s talk to the LA/LI conference on the afternoon following his Oxford talk, on the impact of various revolutionary near-future technologies, can now be viewed as well as heard, here.

Barataria – A new edict was promulgated last night forbidding the people from making public comments on clothing other than their own. The Master of Protocol is also looking at more severe punishments for seamstresses and button-makers who give fashion tips.

The Guild of Tailors has announced itself very pleased. “This is a major contribution to preserving the fine traditions of aristocratic couture, so recently under attack from vulgar speculation,” a spokesman said. “The country only just survived the panic and chaos recently caused to his Imperial Highness’ wardrobe by a malicious peasant-boy, so everyone can now understand where that sort of thing leads to. More sumptuary laws will mean an orderly clothes trade where people are able to buy what experts know is good for them at an approved price. “