Hey! It's Dead Che Day! Hooray!

It was forty years ago today
When they finally executed Che
His shirts have been the latest style
But the man was really very vile
So may I introduce to you
The beast you've known for all these years...
Che Guevara's bloated, stinking corpse!

Yes, forty years ago the planet became a better place as brutal, mass-murdering Stalinist t-shirt icon Ernesto "Spanky" Guevara was finally sent to hell. Despite being a failure as a revolutionary, Ernest had the good fortune of having a few pictures of him taken which made him seem to be a dashing figure, thereby guaranteeing that clueless teenagers and clueless Hollywood leftists would forever immortalize him (Now only $19.99 for this lovely Che shirt!).

The Cult of Che

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

The fact that this man, responsible for so much suffering and death could become an icon says a lot about the sickness of our society.