Ché Guevara and Other Ironic Farytales
The social memory is like a great game of broken telephone. Qualities are sublimated, detailed eroded, names forgotten, crimes transmogrified. The way the more visceral shades of our folk beliefs fade into the rose-tinted romance of hindsight is visible in so many historical transformations. A marriage can begin as a sanctified kidnapping. A duke seems like a dignified office of high prestige, but was originally a warlord with whose army a king had to bargain to stabilise the realm. A king is no different; a bandit with a following great enough to assert that his preferences are inviolable rules identical with God-given law. The difference between a king and a bandit however, lies in what is received in return for their taxes.
Those who haven't read Don Quixote, or the earliest ballads of Robin Hood, probably see them as earnest, goodhearted heroes, fighting for a noble dream or righting wrongs and sticking it to the man. But Robin Hood originally never gave to the poor, and would kill for no nobler reason than material gain or escaping justice. In much the same way, Don Quixote was catastrophically insane, and come close to ruining a fair number of lives before being ushered on his way by more intelligent and sane people who know how to manipulate him. On several occasions, Ché Guevara has been compared to both. And in many ways, the comparisons are only too apt.
A violent and merciless man, a racist and a hater of homosexuals and women, a known rapist, medical fraud and despot, a dogmatic terrorist with no regard for popular sentiment or the counter-evidence of reality, Guevara has become known worldwide as a heroic, compassionate champion of the poor. The same can be said of many revolutionary movements, at least until the stink of the bodies becomes too strong to ignore. The romance of the revolutionary archetype, part bandit, part knight-of-the-realm, runs so deep that even Pol Pot was praised, by the entire academic establishment, right up until it was publicly unsustainable. Even Noam Chomsky partook in defending the Khmer Rouge's reputation. This cycle continues today, most recently with Venezuela. No matter how many times they get sold a Lada, they are always willing to believe it's a Mercedes.
Robin Hood, Schemer of Schemes
Most people who know of the tale today wouldn't think of Robin Hood as the murderer of small children. But that is indeed how his legend starts. The earliest story, Robin Hood and the Monk, tells the tale of how his arrogance and criminality got him jailed, and how fraud and murder set him free. Written in an archaic dialect and irregular spelling, it is not relaxing reading, though is somewhat easier if you are acquainted with Chaucer, or speak a little Dutch. Below is a synopsis of the story. I have updated the spelling to be more legible where quotes appear.
One afternoon, as he and his servant Little John lie under the sun, in the week after Pentecost, Robin complains of the fact that he is excommunicated from the Church and forbidden from taking mass, due to his criminal acts and lack of repentance. But resolves to set off into the neighbouring parish of Nottingham to find a church to pray in. Though Much the Miller's son recommends he take a dozen men to guard himself, Robin insists on only going with Little John.
As they set off, he and Little John decide to have a shooting contest to pass the time. John reckons he can hit a penny, and Robin boasts he can hit three for every one of John's, and wagers five shillings on the outcome. John wins soundly, but Robin refused to pay, and strikes John across the face for demanding his due. John draws his sword and tells Robin,
Were thou not my master, Thou shouldst be hit full sore, Get thee a man where thou wilt, For thou getst me no more.
So they split, and Robin is forced to travel to Nottingham, and Saint Mary's church, alone.
As he kneels and genuflects, a monk, whom Robin had once robbed of a hundred pounds, recognises him, and runs out to bring the sheriff. The sheriff gathered many deputies, and ambushed Robin in the church. But armed as he was with a two-handed sword, he killed twelve of the bailiffs before his blade broke on the sheriff's head, and he prayed God bring the smith who made it suffering. He had no remorse for any of the dead, and thought only of how he wished Little John were there to help fight for his escape.
Robin being locked in prison, his men, over whom he is master, are honour-bound to avenge him. Waiting on the highway, they spy the monk with a little page. Leading them on, they pretend to be Robin's victims, and learn that the monk has got Robin imprisoned. They also learn that he is bearing a letter for King John, which awaits a reward. John reveals himself as one of Robin's men, and cuts down the monk, while Much murders the little pageboy, to prevent him bearing witness. They bring the letters to the king, and tell him the monk simply died on the road, collecting money and titles in reward for delivering the letter.
Riding back to Nottingham, Robin's men show the king's seal to the Sheriff, and explain the absence of the monk by telling him the monk was made abbott at Westminster. In celebration, the sheriff shares his good wine with them. After drinking the sheriff under the table, they set about murdering the jail porter and freeing Robin. After the sheriff wakes to see what has been done, he rings the town bell, but Robin Hood and his men have fled back to Sherwood forest.
Then bespake good Little John,
To Robyn Hood can he say,
"I have done thee a good turn for an evil.
Acquit thee when thou may.
I have done thee a good turn,"
said Little John, For sooth as I you say;
"I have brought thee under green-wood lynne;
Farewell, and have a good day."
"Nay, by my trowth," said Robin Hood,
"So shall it never be;
I'll make thee master," said Robin Hood,
"Of all my men and me."
"Nay, by my trowth," said Little John,
"So shall it never be;
But let me be a fellow," said Little John,
"No nader keep I by."
As they all celebrate their freedom, the king flies into a rage upon hearing the news, and calls for the sheriff to be hanged. He reflects on the trickery of John, and his loyalty to Robin, and declares that the matter shall not be spoken of again. And at no point did a commoner receive a penny's profit.
Don Quixote, Dreamer of Dreams
Terry Gilliam has a fascination for half-mad dreamers. Perhaps the most romantic portrayal of the archetype is in the charming and surreal Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, wherein the titular hero (a satire of the contemporaneous raconteur adventurer hocking wild and fabricated tales for attention, much in the line of Gulliver's Travels) is recast as an inspiring hero railing against the suffocating, pointless and absurd bureaucracy of the "Age of Reason". By dreaming big, and selling his tales of outrageous fantasy, he motivates the characters to stand up to the powers that be, and by sheer force of will, twists reality into the shape of his fantasies. In doing so he reveals that the war they are fighting and the enemies beyond the gates are as phantoms, which melt into the rising sunlight, as the Baron rides away on a sunbeam. Thus, a nightmare is vanquished by a dream, and the real world is rescued by a fantasy.
Much like the Baron, the Don has been transformed under Gilliam's lens, from a mendacious and egotistical madman into a noble if eccentric dreamer, who rescues the characters from the corruption of their world and delivers them into a new spirit of inspiration. Terry Gilliam has, quite famously and self-admittedly, been a victim of the romance himself; this film, his passion project, took almost 30 years to make, and failed dramatically and tragically several times, thwarted by studios, floods, lawsuits and the ageing and death of lead actors. His sentimentality is an almost perfect Foucauldian romance of the anarchic and the insane, battling against the behemoth of cynical, hyper-rational bourgeois bureaucracy, a theme which recurs in every film of Gilliam's, from the magnificent Brazil to the bleak and nihilistic Zero Theorem.
But the original story told by Cervantes is a cautionary tale, totally different in tone. It is a sprawling epic comedy starring an old man whose brain is fried by dehydration and an obsession with chivalric romances. Fantasies of damsels in distress, evil Moors and Jews, giants and wizards, consume the mind of the protagonist, who convinces the simple and innocent yeoman Sancho Panza to follow him on a whirlwind clusterfuck through the Castilian countryside. He makes himself an interminable, violent nuisance, threatening the peaceful drudgery of everyday life, and even the progress of high romance, with his many episodes of unhinged zealotry. While utterly implacable and immune to reason, he is extremely gullible, and will follow the logic of any convenient fiction fed to him that conforms to his surrealistic vision. This vulnerability is exploited to hurry him off out of the way, winding him up and setting him off in the direction of new phantoms, or even convincing him he is paralysed by a magic spell.
The message conveyed by Gilliam, though beautiful in execution, is in fact the very opposite of Cervantes's intention. Cervantes wished to warn against taking fictional or idealised romances seriously, and to forget the idealised conquistadors of the past who, if history is any judge, were not the sweetest, noblest of gentlemen. The disconnect from reality is not seen as a source of inspiration or revelation, a means of curing the grey cynicism and corruption of the modern world, but a sickness which must be dealt with through redirection and creative manipulation. And much like his fictional counterparts, the life of our next character has taught the world the very same faults from which he suffered, and which led to his undoing.
Ché Guevara, Memer of Memes
A lot of ink has been spilled over Che Guevara. Perhaps almost as much on paper as on t-shirts. He, along with his analogues in Russia, China, Vietnam and his colleagues in Cuba, have inspired countless bitter and willow-wristed academics and arrogant dope-smoking teenagers to sleight the hand that feeds. But unlike the other murderers, his image has survived, thanks to his photogenic physiognomy and his good fortune of a death in action. His wikipedia article is a glowing and unblemished hagiography, due in no small part to the partisan gatekeeping of its most avid communist contributor, Redthoreau.
To pretend that Guevara was not a great man would be foolish. But here, the distinction between great and good becomes rather acute. Much like Stalin, he was a bright, pugnacious, widely-read young man with a yen for adventure and an incomplete education. His eventual medical degree was a fraud he acquired over six months through contacts in the communist government, and most of his pre-existing medical knowledge was self-taught. He had no belief whatsoever in democracy or freedom of thought, and believed in the military path to communism exclusively, dogmatically, and unrepentantly.
His comrades in Cuba did not originally call themselves Communists. This is because they were opposing the Socialist coalition of Fulgencio Batista, who was backed by the communist party and the workers unions. His envy for the economic program of Franklin Roosevelt has ironically earned him the posthumous reputation of a fetishist of freemarket capitalism, while his opposition to the anti-liberal ultranationalist Partida Auténtico is conveniently forgotten. Batista's CIA support isn't the first example of a US-backed socialist government; Ethiopia and Somalia, for example, stand as prime examples of such realpolitik. Batista held onto power against the Soviet-backed insurgency with militant cruelty. The revolutionaries promised the cheering crowds that they would not embrace communism or the Soviet Union.
But while many sympathetic Anglo journalists believed them at the time, their mendacity should have been anticipated from their widely published political writings. Guevara and Castro were firebreathing Marxists, partisan warriors to the core, willing to sacrifice everything for the revolution, especially if it came at the cost of others. The Cuban state spared no expense in promoting his image, disseminating the polished and edited official versions of his diaries. Even independent, ostensibly neutral journalists like the prolific Jon Lee Anderson, insist that the man did nothing wrong, and out of a wrist-cracking 800 page volume, spend just four on his time as commissioner of the revolutionary tribunals. While some defenders generalise from one or two individual cases, and accept that the charged must be guilty as such, the context provided by Cuba Archive reveals this for the farce it was. It is a must-read.
His uglier side runs to a long list of rather extreme obscenities. This includes his role in founding the forced labour camps, into which the religious, homosexual and black were poured. He supported any and every measure in service of remaking mankind, up to and including nuclear holocaust, which he famously advocated as a preferable option to backing down in the 1961 missile crisis. His depravity is so extreme that even cartoon villain clichées pale in comparison. Several personal acquaintances from his family to his military colleagues attested to his delight in cruelty to animals, including mutilating small kittens. The details of the manner in which he arranged the revolutionary tribunals merit a read on their own.
But opposition to capitalism was not merely a national event, it was global. Much like the Pan-Africans, Guevara wished to unite the whole of Latin America into a great Hispanic Soviet Empire. And in complimentary form, he assisted the global partisan wars in Africa, from Luanda to Mogadishu. Cuban forces appeared across the African continent, and for Guevara, the number one enemy was that great Western strategic counterweight, the segregationist regime of South Africa. During this time, the industrialisation and land reform projects Guevara had been put in charge of were turning out to be a colossal failure, and in an ingenious move, the party leadership kicked him sideways and offered him foreign policy postings instead. After blowing most of Cuba's diplomatic credit in fiery displays of emotion, he was in 1964 handed the option of military glory in exchange for leaving their poor economy alone.
General Alcazar and the Congolese
In 1965, Guevara took 100 black Cubans into the heart of darkest Africa to wage war on the running dogs of global capital. While he was away, Castro had already founded a headquarters in Cuba for the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Ásia, Africa y América Latina, or the Tricontinental for short. It was intended to be a grand coalition of third-world communism, ruled over (of course) by the Cubans. This then, was an exercise closely resembling colonialism, promising the same upliftment Kipling did, only with fewer tangible benefits. Ché was notoriously racist, despite his opposition to capitalist white South Africa, and never held any particular esteem in the blacks, who are still an underclass in Cuba despite the external trappings of Soviet egalitarianism.
One can only imagine what old Ché was imagining, perhaps something out of Tintin in the Congo; a wild tide of public affection sweeping him up as the white saviour. The reality was far less edifying. A follower of the Maoist strategy of People's War, he took the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet Split, and prefered constant, unending terror as a means of ushering in the age of the "new man", a concept previously popular with French Revolutionaries and Italian fascists. While South Africans like to romanticise him for his opposition to apartheid, the parts of Africa acquainted with him sees him as little more than a stupid, meddling foreigner.
The Congolese rebels Guevara raised showed themselves to be far less committed to revolution, and preferred to terrorise the peasants at gunpoint for sex, booze and food. They had little capacity for strategy or courage, and as "Mad" Mike Hoare noted, the appearance of the Cubans was noticeable enough, bringing with them the first semblance of serious, coordinated fighting. Mike Hoare was everything Guevara wasn't - he was also a mercenary, a man who fought without a doctrine, except a sort of primeval code of honour. He was an honest, direct man, who fought only on invitation, and dedicated himself to protecting civilian life and maintaining a clean, disciplined and honest fighting force. He is to the right what Guevara is to the left - a globetrotting swashbuckler. But his successes were more consistent than Ché's.
Finding none of the Congolese militia wanted to fight as much as he did, and that they were mostly cowardly and parasitic gangsters who did little more than live off the fat of the land, Ché Guevara lost interest in the Congo. He had entered secretly in April, and had given up and gone home by November. Not having learned his lesson, Guevara hied off to Bolivia where, for no serious reason aside from the symbolic possibility of nominative predetermination, he became convinced his hare-brained strategy would succeed. Instead, he was captured, interrogated and executed, buried in an unmarked grave in the scrubland next to a Vallegrande airstrip.
The world has remembered Ché as a hybrid of Quixote and Robin Hood. Many have explicitly made the comparison. These people have been right for the wrong reasons. Much like the violent, unrepentant criminality of Robin Hood, and the wild, malleable psychosis of Don Quixote, Ché's sadism and hubris has been elevated into a high romance of revolutionary virtue. It cannot be doubted that he was a man of extraordinary bravery. But bravery and courage are not the same, just as a bandit is not a noble rogue, a madman on a horse is not a knight, a warlord is not a king, and a kidnapping does not make a marriage. And reality knows things that stories don't, which is why Ché Guevara did not ride off into a golden sunset or find rest in a green-wood lynne.