Why the Ignorant Still Celebrate Che Guevara

The Vacuousness of Contextless Symbology

by
Micah J. Fleck

When Last Week Tonight host John Oliver did his recent piece on Hitler imagery in Thailand, I was initially aghast – after all, how could an entire country be so apparently woefully ignorant of something as catastrophic as the holocaust and/or a figure as evil as the head Führer himself? But then I got to thinking, and after the initial shock had worn off I then mused, “well, why not?”

Overviewing all of the out-of-context imagery that has been subsumed by various country’s pop cultures over the years (and there is a lot of it), it becomes clear that, after a while, new meanings and even entirely new ideological associations can be applied to people, gestures, insignias, etc. that nobody who existed at the initial image’s inception could have ever predicted. Yes, Hitler being glorified as a superhero for mass marketing schemes and artwork in Thailand might be among the most extreme examples of this, but it is by no means an isolated incident in thought and application.

Take, for instance, the curious case of how Japanese schoolgirls are forced to wear the outfits of Western male sailors, or how young women of Japan in general throw out peace signs for photographs without actually knowing what the peace sign is (thank Yoko Ono for helping popularize this gesture in her home country). Neither example can fully explain the process that led to these reassignment, but we can objectively see the origin point and the final, transformed application in a contextless modern culture, far removed from the original circumstances that birthed such images.

Usually, the temperamental art of usurping of another culture’s facets is harmless (as is the case with the aforementioned Japanese examples), but now and again, an icon can be so wrongfully misused, so ignorantly applied, and so vacuously celebrated as to completely undermine the objectively negative connotations of its origin. Such is the case with Thailand’s Hilter imagery, and nowhere is it more prominent (and irritating) in the political world than with American youth’s current obsession with Che Guevara.

RELATED: 10 Psychotic Quotes From Socialist Hero Che Guevara

Che has become a “hipster icon,” claims Michael Totten, writing for the World Affairs Journal, but in reality was a “mass murderer” who acted as Fidel Castro‘s “chief executioner” and who also “enslaved” the citizens of Cuba after fighting a revolution supposedly on their behalf – rather than topple the Batista regime he was fighting against like many thought he would, Guevara simply helped to replace it with a new one that was, according to Totten, “worse than the last.” Not only that, but Guevara was also a documented racist who was in favor of the death penalty by firing squad and other twisted, violent tactics (the fact that leftists can be anti-death penalty but still embrace figures like Che who endorsed and induced the same kind of government-led murder in their own day never ceases to astonish me).

In short, he was not a good guy.

And while it could be argued that communism (the political ideology Guevera and other Cuban revolutionaries were fighting for) is a noble idea in theory, we have yet to see an instance in history where its practical application has ever reaped the kind of utopian benefits originators like Karl Marx envisioned. More often than not in fact, communism’s effect in the applied world amounts to mass bloodshed and enslavement. Che’s revolution was no exception. How many times must we attempt the same thing, and reap the same negative results, before we finally realize perhaps the flaw is in the ideology itself, not just in how it is applied?

So what does this have to do once again with adopted symbology? In the case of Guevara and the ignorant American hipsters who don his likeness on scads of t-shirts, hats, posters, and other swag, I believe it is important that we do all that we can to keep reminding them of the reality behind the trendy imagery. Much like the Thai children in John Oliver’s skit, our American youth are in crisis – they are uneducated in the area of global communist history, and as such celebrate the work of a man who, by all objective accounts, has never been worth celebrating for anyone who actually cares about his fellow man.

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