BBC’s love affair with Che Guevara – and Cuba – continues

Mike at The Monkey Tennis Centre has the story on the latest BBC puff piece on Cuba – this time, specifically on the murderous Che Guevara. The occasion? The 40th anniversary of when he was shot and killed.

The Calgary Sun’s Ian Robinson writes the piece the BBC should have, but didn’t (h/t: Betsy Newmark):

A couple of years ago, I came across one of our website geeks in a hallway wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

I’m a right-wing guy, but you wouldn’t catch me wearing an Augusto Pinochet T-shirt. It’s considered bad form among my people to promote mass murderers, but that’s never stopped those on the left end of the spectrum.

I’ve seen young folks wearing gear with the image of Mao emblazoned on it, and he killed so many people he made Hitler look like a Quaker.

I said to the guy: “You know, some people would consider your shirt offensive, given Che was a mass murderer. It’s like wearing a Ted Bundy T-shirt.”

He turned to me — wearing the kind of patchy, testosterone-challenged beard that was Che’s trademark — and said: “Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”

Wow. Nice to know who the moral imbeciles are.

Writing in Time magazine in 1999, another moral imbecile, the writer Ariel Dorfman penned the words: “By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world.”

The anniversary of the death of the Argentine doctor turned Cuban Communist revolutionary is Oct. 9.

He continues to be a symbol of freedom and revolutionary fervour and purity for people who can’t read or think.

Che was Fidel Castro’s right-hand man. Despite the fact leftie morons from Pierre Trudeau to Michael Moore venerate the Cuban totalitarian state, it is just a prison masquerading as a nation.

After the revolution toppling the Batista regime, Castro put his buddy the doctor in charge of a prison to deal with the new enemies of the state. Cheerfully violating his Hippocratic oath — he was a licensed physician — Che said: “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!”

The best scholarship available shows he approved or participated in the illegal executions of at least 200 people — including a 14-year-old boy.

One author has recently claimed the number of executions might have been over a thousand, with thousands more taking place later (emphasis added):

Humberto Fontova: He was put in charge of the execution squads in early 1959. He stayed in charge of the prison where most of the executions took place in Havana. And in the months he was in charge there, about four months until July 1959, the estimates run from 500 to 1,182 men and boys sent to the firing squad without due process. But the system he set in place for the executions … in that system of justice, according to “The Black Book of Communism” – the definitive source – by the mid-sixties, 14,000 men and boys had been executed in Cuba. That was the year, December 1964, when Che Guevara … addressed the General Assembly, and he said: “Executions? Certainly we execute. And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary!” So, in other words, he still claimed the system. It was still his system at work.

It’s disappointing – although not surprising – to see the BBC engaged in Che hero worship. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time they’ve written a puff piece on a hateful, disgusting degenerate (here’s another example), and surely it won’t be the last.

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