Che!

The cult of Che Guevara (all those posters and tee-shirts, not to speak of the recent movie hagiography) is a persistent—and rather annoying—reminder of the way that the crimes of communism still rank oddly low in the popular imagination.

But if the Che cult is bad in the United States, in Argentina—the land of the murderer’s birth—it is worse. Please see below a few pictures I took recently in Buenos Aires. Some of this tat must have been aimed at the tourist peso, but I suspect that it also reflected a certain pride in a local boy made, uh, good, a pride about as perverse as, oh, I don’t know, maybe irony-free US tee-shirts commemorating “Charles Manson, American”, a design that may somewhere exist but, if it does, remains mercifully rare.

Well, you get the picture.

Then again, back in the USA there is this…..

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6 Responses to Che!

  1. I personally prefer the t-shirt of Che Guevara wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. He is no longer a revolutionary or a cold blooded killer, he’s another pop celebrity, like Paris and Kim . . .

    http://store.theonion.com/product/che-wearing-che-tshirt-tshirt,115/

  2. Pangloss says:

    The “Chas!” t shirt needs a cross etched in the forehead.

    And then there is this…

    http://www.thoseshirts.com/reagan.html

  3. Wade Nichols says:

    On one of my walks through NYC, on Wooster St. just past the Adidas store and below Canal Street, there’s some “street art”/graffiti on the wall in a parking lot. It’s an image of Mussolini and it says “Mussolini The Original Che”.

    Actually, I just googled it and here’s the image:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/20158323@N04/3471601012/

    and I see that Jonah Goldberg also spotted it:

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/186322/original-che/jonah-goldberg

    and “NW Republican” also discusses it:

    http://nwrepublican.blogspot.com/2009/09/mussolini-original-che.html

    It’s interesting in the sense that I can’t figure out whether the “artist” is trying to say that Che was indeed a bad guy, and he’s comparing him to Mussolini, or whether Mussolini is also a “good guy” just like Che!

  4. Susan says:

    Well, they were both notorious womanizers.

  5. brent says:

    I have never understood how somebody does not see the logo-ifcation of Che and the subsequent rampant commercialization of it as anything other than an ironic example of the failure of communism.

    Really, it’s the market equivalent of sticking the vanquished enemy general’s head on a pike right in front of the city wall.

  6. Vincent P says:

    I can’t help but wonder if the popularization of Che simply stemmed from ignorance of what he did, or if the people who revered him really did understand his significance to History is certainly less than positive.

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