This is something which I found online and sharing with you guys. Enjoy :
The cigar smoking bearded young man with deep eyes stares at you from beyond the grave… through the tee-shirts and from the Facebook walls and in the posters of countless youth hostels across India. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara lives on relentlessly marketed in every conceivable consumer item of youth life today.
Che the failed revolutionary is a grand success as a youth icon.
Perceived by a vast majority of youths as a rebel who fought for a just cause, he comes in handy to declare one’s own inner rebel. A youth who wears Che on his extended epidermis that we call as Tee-shirt, it’s a proclamation that he is a co-rebel in the cause. Forget that the youth in question may actually be toiling in the call center for consumers in the US of A Forget that the youth in question may drink Coca Cola and burp fried chickens with Kentucky labels. Still with Che’s stern eyes peering out of his chest, he can consider himself the quintessential rebel – the eternal angry youth. In other words it is the easy way out to be a rebel and at the same time lead a life confirming to all consumerist and peer pressures.
But the problem is not just merely about making a superficial statement of being a pseudo-rebel. Che is also a Trojan for certain memes. In adoring Che, unknowingly these memes get internalized and enter the youth psyche. It is not unlike the worm malware tunneling into your system. The youths begin to venerate the ideology that created Che and the violence that is inherent in it. In fact violence has been cardinal to Che’s life philosophy. It’s not mindless brutal violence but cold blooded calculated violence.
In the famous – or is that notorious- ‘Message’ he sent his comrades from Bolivia, he wanted them to develop “hatred as an element of struggleâ€. He elaborated the point further:  “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.†The supreme irony is that the youth who wears Che on his clothing may even be wearing him as an icon of universal humanism! And slowly the poison enters his system: the poison of hatred for the ideological enemy – the demonizing and dehumanizing of ‘the other’.
Che made diary entries when he was leading his ‘revolutionary’ life. They reveal a pathological killer in love with murder. For example, in January 1957, Guevara had a problem. Che developed doubts about one of his comrades Eutimio Guerra – that Guerra might be a spy. In his own words let us hear how he solved the problem: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.† The pattern is repeated in diary entries – Che’s solution seems to be simple: when in doubt, kill.
Even Che’s martyrdom was an after-constructed myth. The reality of Che’s martyrdom is far from being a socialist martyr fell by the despicable capitalist and imperialist forces. In reality information about Che’s movements in Bolivia which were passed on to the army, seemed to have originated from Cuba and reached CIA through Soviet hands. The treacherous source seems to be ‘Tania’, girl friend of Che, outside his wedlock, who was actually a honey trap from East Germany working for Soviet KGB. Socialist regimes were as much to blame, perhaps more so to blame as that ‘imperialist Satan’ US, which we all love to hate. And even in the end when he actually had an opportunity to become a martyr fighting the army, Che voluntarily surrendered himself to the authorities. He came out of his hiding with hands raised, pleading to spare his life as he was ‘more valuable to you (Bolivian army) alive than dead’.
The peak of paradox is that the very capitalist forces which Che despised so completely were the ones who had converted his face into a youth icon. Marketing Che as the face of the rebel youth started in 1997 – coinciding with the spread of globalization. As Che merchandise –from basketball caps to coffee cups- generates profits in the market, the photo has also generated copyright battles. In the globalized economy, Che is the coke and cola of revolution international. And like coke and cola, he has replaced in developing countries the local –more related and more rooted revolutionary icons.
“I became a Communist. Communism made me a man” – Che Guevara. By ‘becoming a man’, many systems of organized thuggery mean the first taking of life.
Quote – “War to a young man is what childbirth is to a woman” – Hitler
Fact – Criminal gangs in Chennai as well as Sicilian criminals use the same slang term for murder and sexual encounter.
It is a mark of criminally diseased minds that they are incapable of distinguishing between the creation and destruction of life.
Nevertheless youths do need an icon. They need an icon, who can enthuse the consumed youths of this consumerist age, with ideals to live and grow by. The world needs an icon who can charge the youth to become harbingers of true reform not in little bits and pieces but “root-and-branch reformâ€. We need an icon to galvanize the international youth into action by appealing to their innermost being and their most profound love. We need a personality who can assure the youth of today with conviction that Love and not brutal violence that shall bring the final victory. We need as our icon someone who will ask us at our face, “Do you love your fellow men? Where should you go to seek for God — are not all the poor, the miserable, the weak, need help ? Why not help them first? Why go to dig a well on the shores of the Ganga? Believe in the omnipotent power of love. Who cares for these tinsel puffs of name?â€
