{"id":10801,"date":"2019-01-09T02:56:27","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T02:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=10801"},"modified":"2019-01-09T03:05:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T03:05:40","slug":"chesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/chesus\/","title":{"rendered":"Chesus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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It does not take much detective work to understand that Marxism is, in many respects, another branch of the Judeo-Christian tree, most notably in its millenarian fantasies, but also in, one way or another, its sanctification of poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many religions, of course, have saints and in this<\/a> intriguing piece for Quillette,<\/em> partly based on his father\u2019s own acquaintance with Guevara, George Schifini looks at the cult of Che. There\u2019s so much in this article about the transformation of an almost certainly psychotic killer into a saint that it\u2019s hard to know where to begin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One aspect of the piece that is perhaps worth highlighting is how quickly Che\u2019s transformation into something with a touch of the divine about him began:<\/p>\n\n\n\n


“The cult of Che began within hours of Guevara\u2019s execution by a Bolivian army sergeant. After his body was placed in the Vallegrande, Bolivia, hospital laundry room, hospital nuns, the nurse who washed his body, as well as several women of the town, had the impression that the dead Argentine resembled Jesus Christ and clipped snippets of his hair to keep for good luck. “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And that cult has endured. Helped, doubtless, by that iconic photograph of Guevara taken by Alberto Korda, it has been shown, to use a wonderful phrase of Schifini\u2019s, to have “the wattage to light up the religious circuits of the human mind for the long haul.” Put another way, the circumstances of Guevara’s life and death and the iconography (including some of the photographs of his corpse) that came with it have offered enough for the \u2018God gene\u2019 to work with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n


“In the village of Vallegrande… some of the locals pray and attribute miracles to San Ernesto. A nurse who washed Guevara\u2019s body said, \u201cNone dies as long as he is remembered. He is very miraculous\u201d\u2026. In Cuba, the Afro-Cuban faith Santeria has incorporated Guevara (as a black man) as a divine entity that can, for the supplicant, intercede with God\u2026. But it\u2019s the secular world that keeps the Che cult from withering.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That’s not so surprising. The secular world has the technology and the money to keep a cult going, and it has, for many of its inhabitants, a spiritual gap to fill. The God gene does not switch off in what are nominally secular societies. It merely finds a different outlet. It didn’t hurt, of course, that what Guevara was preaching was merely a variant of a long-established template.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this also helped:<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Ernesto Guevara was born, raised, and died in the Latin American milieu of Christianity. The Bolivian women who tended to the corpse of Guevara reported that he resembled Jesus Christ, and not, unsurprisingly, Osiris, Zoroaster, Krishna, or Buddha. As we have seen, many analyses by secular intellectuals of Che instinctively draw on analogues with Christianity and its eponymous divinity. In Latin America, and arguably Western society, the \u201cmythic lore\u201d of Jesus Christ is one the \u201cfilaments of myth that are everywhere in the air\u201d acting as magnets to \u201cthe great and little heroes of the world\u201d (Campbell, 1964). Guevara\u2019s narrative, in particular his death\u2014the whereabouts of Che\u2019s body was unknown for decades\u2014contains a strong field of mythic magnetism to attach itself to the Christ myth\u2026 <\/p>

\u2026When Campbell wrote of the filaments of myths that floated in the \u201cair,\u201d he argued that myth did its heavy lifting in the human mind. He defined a \u201cfunctioning mythology\u201d as a \u201ccorpus of culturally maintained sign stimuli\u201d that catalyze a release of energy. Myth functions as a sign, stimuli triggering an innate releasing mechanism, terms borrowed from ethology, the science of animal behavior. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Schifini\u2019s father had asked what could keep the cult of Che from becoming a religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ernesto \u201cChe\u201d Guevara narrative, now more mythology than primary source history, and the Korda photo contain an abundance of \u201csign stimuli.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

To Schifini\u2019s father, the way that religions began was that “a messianic man kills and is killed and decades, perhaps centuries later, is worshiped as a deity”: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schifini’s father was astonished that his path had crossed, however briefly, with such a man:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“My father didn\u2019t believe in religion…He probably didn\u2019t believe in a god or gods, although I can\u2019t be sure because we never explicitly discussed the topic. I wish he were still around to talk of all these things. “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We should be grateful that the son\nstill is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It does not take much detective work to understand that Marxism is, in many respects, another branch of the Judeo-Christian tree, most notably in its millenarian fantasies, but also in, one way or another, its sanctification of poverty. Many religions, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[607,358,1097],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10801"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10805,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions\/10805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}