On the 40th anniversary of Che’s death, daniel hannan finds his continued popularity unjustifiable |
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Forty years ago, Che Guevara died before a Bolivian firing squad – commanded, as it happens, by the uncle of a school friend. It should have been a small event: the execution of a terrorist whose violent proclivities had led even Fidel Castro to send him abroad.
Yet Guevara has become one of the few figures to whom that ghastly word “iconic” applies literally: his face, as photographed by Alberto Korda, has become one of the most recognised of our age, stencilled in the slums of Caracas and La Paz, worn by derr-brained students, turned into a cringe-making poster of Jesus by the Church of England.
Four decades on, Guevara is making a grisly doctrinal come-back. Three South American states – Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela – have dissolved their parliaments and rewritten their constitutions along the socialist lines he proposed. In Cuba, he has
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Guevara has become one of the few figures to whom that ghastly word ‘iconic’ applies literally |
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achieved a cult status that he never enjoyed while alive. History, to borrow Castro’s most famous bit of swanking, has absolved him.
It is not surprising that Latin American Communists idolise him: theirs has always been a hot-tempered, millenarian creed that depends on martyrdom. Far harder to justify is his popularity among Euro-lefties.
It was the monstrous Jean-Paul Sartre who started it, calling Guevara “the most complete human being of our age”. He was the supreme embodiment of the can’t-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs school of socialism. By citing his name, students who had never held a gun allowed themselves a frisson of danger: a sense that they might do the same themselves in the right circumstances.
Yet we now know where that reasoning leads: to gulags. Wearing the Guevara icon on a T-shirt is as offensive as carrying the image of Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler. The next time you see some oaf doing it, bollock him. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 9, 2007
Daniel Hannan is the Conservative MEP for Southeast England |
The life of Che Guevara
The hidden face of Che Guevara.
Picture Past: 1967
