Che Guevara: An emblem of freedom?

Che Guevara: An emblem of freedom?
By Humberto Fontova 10:51 AM 06/23/2011

Let's excuse our intrepid "watchdog" MSM. They're too busy rummaging
through Sarah Palin's garbage to report on the actual sayings and doings
by our actual government officials. So here's a report from Britain's
Guardian on a speech by Alec Ross, the U.S. State Department's senior
advisor on innovation: "Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they
have ever been before," he proclaimed at the Innovate Conference in
London this week. "One thesis statement I want to emphasize is how
networks [the Internet] disrupt the exercise of power … because of the
devolution of power from the nation state to the individual…the Internet
has become the Che Guevara of 21st century."

Imagine the MSM snarkiness and uproar if somewhere in Sarah Palin's
e-mail garbage bins they scrounged up an item where she equates Internet
freedom with the co-founder of the regime that Freedom House rates as
among the three most repressive on Earth against the Internet, where
bloggers were being jailed and tortured for the crime of blogging while
she wrote the message. Because, in fact, Cubans were being jailed and
tortured for blogging while the U.S. State Department's senior advisor
on "Internet freedom" hailed the Cuban regime's co-founder as the emblem
of Internet freedom.

Imagine the media snarkiness and uproar if Sarah Palin claimed that
"dictatorships are now more vulnerable" then equated the co-founder of
the most enduring Stalinist dictatorship in modern history with the
enemy of dictatorships.

Imagine the MSM uproar and snarkiness if Sarah Palin linked "the
devolution of power from the nation state to the individual" with a man
who worshipped Joseph Stalin, who signed his correspondence "Stalin II,"
who as chief KGB liaison for a Stalinist regime proclaimed that
"Individualism must disappear! It is criminal to think in terms of
individuals! Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of
governmental mandates! Youth should learn to think and act as a mass."
In a famous speech, Che Guevara even vowed "to make individualism
disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!"

I provide the following as a public service for any U.S. State
Department officials reading The Daily Caller: Ernesto "Che" Guevara
(the gentleman a senior U.S. State Department official hails as an
emblem of freedom) was second in command, chief executioner, and chief
KGB liaison for a regime that outlawed elections and private property.
This regime's KGB-supervised police — employing the midnight knock and
the dawn raid among other devices — rounded up and jailed more political
prisoners per capita than Stalin's and executed more people (out of a
population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than
Hitler's executed (out of a population of 70 million) in its first six.

The regime Che Guevara co-founded stole the savings and property of 6.4
million citizens, made refugees of 20 percent of the population from a
nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved
a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe. Che
Guevara's regime also shattered — through executions, incarceration,
mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba.
Many opponents of the Cuban regime qualify as the longest-suffering
political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps,
forced labor and torture chambers for a period THREE TIMES as long in
Che Guevara's Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin's Gulag.

Tens of thousands of Cuban youths learned that Che Guevara's admonitions
were more than idle bombast. In Che Guevara, the hundreds of Soviet KGB
and East German Stasi "consultants" who flooded Cuba in the early 1960s
found an extremely eager acolyte. By the mid-'60s the crime of a
"rocker" lifestyle or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked
off Cuba's streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps
with "Work Will Make Men out of You" in bold letters above the gate and
with machine-gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these
camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today the world's largest Che Guevara image adorns Cuba's headquarters
and torture chambers for its KGB-trained secret police. Nothing could be
more fitting.

Imagine the MSM snarkiness and uproar if Sarah Palin, as an official of
the U.S. Department of State, lauded a man who insulted the U.S. as "the
Great Enemy of Mankind!" and her countrymen as "hyenas fit only for
extermination!" and who openly craved to incinerate millions of them
with a surprise nuclear attack. "If the missiles had remained," confided
Che Guevara to The London Daily Worker in November 1962, "we would have
fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City."

Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane
University and is the author of four books, including Fidel: Hollywood's
Favorite Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots
Who Idolize Him. For more information and for video clips of his
television and college speaking appearances, please visit www.hfontova.com.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/23/che-guevara-an-emblem-of-freedom/