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Racist Che allegations....
Apparently, Che acted like a racist while in the Congo? According to a right wing friend who read some ridiculous article, emailed me about Che being a racist while on his mission in the Congo. He didn't cite any specific stuff except that Che said that he was furious with the Congolese rebels who couldn't fire a weapon or wanted to learn. And that the rebel leader he was supposed to fight with was a womanizer and boozehound. I am guessing that the right wing is interpreting these quotes from Che's diary as being racist, when they seem to, IMO, to be criticizing specific people. He was trying to connect these disparate comments he made toward some people he was frustrated with during the Congo campaign with stuff he said in the Motorcycle Diaries about black people, stuff he said when he was a young guy just now breaking out into the world.
Why has there been this new spin on Che being racist? Why would he fight for the liberation of indigenous people and Africans from colonial white rule if he was racist?
Questions still remain. Why did Cuba only release Che's diary about the Congo in 2002? Has anyone read it or read excerpts where Che might have come off as racist?
I hear a lot of this Che being racist stuff. Most of it (if not all) is complete trash.
In the case of the Congo, I haven't read the diaries in over 4 years, but if memory serves, he had issue with the way the Congolese put more faith into their superstitions, than time and effort into learning the art of combat.
Was he a racist? No, not really.
But the guy was rather harsh on his men. I don't mean about the part where he shot traitors or deserters, I mean just in general he was kind of an asshole to the men serving under him.
AFAIK Che was not too enamored with some of the rebel leaders in the Congo who he accused of being opportunists or not committed to the revolution. I believe he was also frustrated with the state of revolutionaries in Congo- divided, pursuing conflicting objectives, the difficulty of the Cuban mission to connect meaningfully to the local population, and having to form a guerrilla network in a span of months that would have taken years otherwise.
I don't think Cuba's releasing the diaries have any insidious purpose, it's just that it was rather uneventful as far as Che as a direct combatant is concerned compared to his other expeditions. Plus, the Congo was tragedy that was more of a bummer (to put it lightly) than anything - even some of Che's failures like in Bolivia - that could be turned inspiring. On a more grounded level maybe Cuba didn't want to rock the boat with the Kabila government of post-Mobutu Congo, as it appears Che was very critical of him in his accounts (Kabila Sr. was assassinated in 2001).
He desegregated Cuban schools. He denounced the racism of the KKK. Condemned South Africa's aparthied, etc., etc. That's not something a racist tends to do
Yes, we want to make your wife a radical feminist lesbian, we want to forcibly gay marry you to a leatherclad bear, we want to send your kids into white slavery at the court of a black communist dictator, we want to paint your church red with the blood of christian babies, we want to set fire to your ikea and your SUV, we want to rape your labrador with the broken pieces of your white picketed fence.
We want to wage nuclear war on the nuclear family.
why? because we are pinko freedom hating commienazi atheist bastards, its just what we do.
~psycho
I totally forgot about his march with Malcolm X for civil rights!
How the hell can that massive thing be overlooked? He stood at the UN and denounced Apartheid and Jim Crow.
Let's put it this way. If Che wrote the things he wrote in his diary on this forum, he'd be instantly banned and no body would have a problem with it.
The Motorcycle Diaries? He wasn't even a socialist then.
Why would he head over to the Congo and do what he did if he hated blacks?
'despite being a comedy, there's a lot of truth to this, black people always talking shit behind white peoples back. Blacks don't give a shit about white, why do whites give them so much "nice" attention?'
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I would be more concerned about some of the things he said about nuking entire cities.
“If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression”
Please put the full quote:
It is beautifully written, don't you think?
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
He was so racist to black people that he went to help with their revolution.
Why, Che? Why?
According to right-wing nuts, every socialist is a racist. Including Marx, Engels, Trotsky, etc.
☭ “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” - Karl Marx ☭
Because "We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims."
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
Yes. But this website is moderated by a number of "politically correct" petite bourgeois moralists. They take a puritanical view toward social attitudes they disapprove of. Write approvingly of the Moscow Trials and that's no problem. Make a comment that might, by some strange stretch of the imagination be deemed sexist or racist and you get banned. Che may have said something untoward in his lifetime -- he remains a revolutionary martyr. I disagree with his Stalinist politics, but the man was also a hero.
I think he was talking about Cuba or the fSU being bombed by the US
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"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
I think it's complicated. I confess to have a limited understanding of Latin American race politics (let alone their various country-class-etc. specificities!), but I'm relatively sure that Che probably had both a) internalized some racist bullshit and a political commitment to antiracism.
The desire to avoid criticizing the former (because "Che was a hero!") is counterproductive in terms of developing the latter.
So was Che racist? Probably! Good luck finding someone who isn't! Should his racist mistakes be criticized? Of course!
Is this grounds to dismiss Che entirely? Does this call the sincerity of his antiracist work into question? No! Of course not!
Complaining about "petite bourgeois political correctness" is totally bogus in this case. When "political correctness" serves to cover-up or avoid confronting contradictions in the name of politeness it should be confronted. Calling valid criticism "political correctness" is, in fact, that same impulse - trying to "clean up" a narrative, erase serious errors, etc. See Mao in Combat Liberalism.
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
I'm not a racist. Lenin wasn't a racist. No real Marxist is a racist.
Che was a racist. Mao was a racist. But they weren't Marxists (and neither are you for that matter if you think all people are inherently racist) so who cares.
Was he saying that Cuba must be on the offensive and use nukes to bomb millions in the name of liberation?
Or that they must keep going the course of liberation even if it costs Cuba millions of lives because the US will nuke them?
