Marketing a Mass Murderer

In a piece from the June 1 Los Angeles Times, Ben Ehrenreich looks at the enduring popularity of terrorist mass murderer Ernesto "Che" Guevara:

Snapped in March 1960, Alberto Korda's iconic image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara is possibly -- who's counting? -- the most-reproduced photograph in the world. Some version of it has been painted, printed, digitized, embroidered, tattooed, silk-screened, sculpted or sketched on nearly every surface imaginable. Brick and mortar city walls. Poster board waved high above a crowd. Gisele Bündchen's bikini.

And though he never went away -- except in the strictly mortal sense -- Che is suddenly everywhere again. In October, an Iranian student militia organized a "Che Like Chamran" conference, attempting to enlist the martyred Marxist in the Islamic revolution. (They made the mistake of inviting his daughter, who pointed out that her dad did not believe in God.) Hollywood is at it as well: Steven Soderbergh's long-anticipated, two-part Che biopic ("The Argentine" and "Guerrilla") premiered May 21 at Cannes, with Benicio Del Toro playing the legendary Argentine-doctor-cum-internationalist-revolutionary. And "Chevolution," Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez's documentary on the mass dissemination of the Korda image, is now making the film festival rounds.

(link via Hot Air)


You may be wondering if Soderbergh's "long-anticipated" films will include the part in 1959 where Guevara oversaw the execution of hundreds of prisoners who were convicted before kangaroo courts without the benefit of habeas corpus and due process? Sadly, no. According to Variety, Soderbergh appears to have left out that part of the Che Guevara story. (link via Libertas)


However, cinematic hagiographies are merely one part of the cult of Che. As Ehrenreich points out, the Guevara brand name is used to sell all manner of products:

"You think it's funny," the Clash once sang, "turning rebellion into money." Maybe not funny but quite a trick: There's Che beer, Che cola, Che cigarettes, the inevitable Cherry Guevara ice cream. Online at thechestore.com, you'll find Che's face on hoodies, beanies, berets, backpacks, bandannas, belt buckles, wallets, wall clocks, Zippo lighters, pocket flasks and of course, T-shirts. La La Ling in Los Feliz sells Che onesies for the wee 'uns. I bought my 3-year-old niece a plush Che doll one Christmas. She abandoned him for Dora the Explorer.

Online I found a T-shirt for sale depicting Homer Simpson sporting an arm tattoo of Che, and then there is the famous New Yorker cartoon featuring Che wearing a T-shirt depicting Bart Simpson (and now a T-shirt itself). What could it possibly mean? Only that the Che tee has itself become a symbol, shorthand for posture drained of ideology, rebelliousness as fashion statement. Other notable wearers of Che tees: Kyle from "South Park," Prince Harry, Jay-Z, who rapped on "The Black Album," "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on," which is about as likely as Che the jihadi, but never mind.


Actually, I'm not sure that "Che the jihadi" would be all that unlikely. He certainly had the murderous fanaticism down pat. Besides, according to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, "after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling—a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life."

Anyway, I'm curious if any of the empty headed individuals who sport Guevara t-shirts have ever given a thought to his victims? Probably not. After all, none of the hundreds murdered by Che ever posed for cool, iconic photographs.


But despite that, and despite the selling and sampling and all the multilayered appropriations, Ziff maintains that Che's image still means something, even if it's something as generic as protest, nonconformity, a wish for change. "It's diluted," Ziff says, but "I don't think it's ever lost its edge."

Allow me to submit my own thoughts on what the popularity of Guevara and his image mean: that our society has grown so morally and intellectually bankrupt that many will cheerfully sport the image of a totalitarian butcher while being oblivious to his actual record. Obviously this does not bode well for the future. I can hardly wait for when in 20 or 30 years the first Abu Musab Al Zarqawi merchandise starts hitting stores. I'm sure the plastic beheading knives will be especially popular with the kids.


If you want to read about the real Che Guevara, see the articles written by Paul Berman and Alvaro Vargas Llosa.

Idolizing a Murderer

Tuesday's Guardian reports on a disturbing trend in Latin America: a growing tendency to idolize the murderous totalitarian fanatic known as Che Guevara:

Bolivia's peasants spurned Che's rebellion, leaving the Bolivian army and the CIA to capture him on October 8 1967, kill him the following day, and rid South America of Cuba's revolutionary spirit. The soldiers reportedly drew straws to determine who would have the honour of shooting Che.

"And so he is dead," wrote the Guardian's Richard Gott, one of the few journalists at the scene that day. "As they pumped preservative into his half-naked, dirty body and as the crowd shouted to be allowed to see, it was difficult to recall that this man had once been one of the great figures of Latin America."

It was difficult to feel his ideas would die with him, Gott added. He was right. Forty years later the anniversary of the death is looming and the scene is transformed: the Cubans are back, socialism is back, and Che is officially a hero.

An elaborate ceremony in Vallegrande, the town where his corpse was displayed, will be just one of many government-backed rallies across the Andes and the Caribbean.

"Che is greater and more present than ever," said Oswaldo "Chato" Peredo, a Bolivian former guerrilla whose brother, Roberto, was executed alongside the communist icon.


The Richard Gott who wrote so poetically about the martyred Che is a strident leftist who was the Guardian's longtime literary editor. He resigned in 1994 after it was reported that he accepted funds from the KGB.

As for the object of Gott's affections, Nat Hentoff relates an anecdote about Che's "commitment" to democracy:

That reminded me of what Che Guevara told me at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations when I asked him if he could foresee a time — however distant — when there would be free elections in Cuba.

Guevara, who, in charge of a Havana prison, shot and killed many prisoners of conscience, didn't wait for the interpreter to finish before he burst into laughter and said to me, "Free elections — in Cuba?"

(Emphasis added-DD)


In a September 2004 piece for Slate, Paul Berman ably summarized the Guevara record:

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.

(Emphasis added-DD)


Che Guevara was not a heroic freedom fighter; he was a Latin Zarqawi. That he has become an object of hero worship is a dangerous manifestation of historical ignorance and moral blindness.

Of Che Guevara and "Constitutional Rights"

During the holidays, I broke down and actually read Naomi Wolf's new book , The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Its only redeeming quality was that it was a fairly quick read. Still, that's five hours of my life I won't be getting back.

I'll be posting an excruciatingly long winded review of the book very soon. In the meantime, there is one particular aspect I wanted to address. In her essay, Wolf spends a lot of time talking about the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She compares the prison to a Nazi concentration camp, which exists for the sole purpose of producing "false confessions by brown people with Muslim names".(p.71)

Wolf's discussion of Guantanamo is little more than a regurgitation of the talking points of a lawyer named Michael Ratner. She cites him by name and quotes him extensively in the text. Ratner is president of an innocuous sounding organization named the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). According to their web site, the CCR is "dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Ratner and the CCR have spearheaded the legal campaign in support of the Guantanamo detainees. In order to assess the credibility of Wolf's claims about Guantanamo, a look at Ratner and the CCR is warranted.


Unfortunately, Ratner's legal career reveals that he is anything but a disinterested advocate for human rights. In particular, there have been two constants to Ratner's work: one, he is reliably opposed to whatever policy the US government is pursuing; two, he is almost always on the same side as the regime of Fidel Castro.

In 1996 Ratner represented a pro-Castro crank who vandalized New York street signs dedicated to anti-Castro pilots shot down and killed by the Cuban Air Force. During the Elian Gonzalez saga in 2000, Ratner forcefully demanded the boy's return to Cuba, going so far as to travel to Havana and meet with high-ranking Castro regime officials. The best indicator of Ratner's real attitude towards "constitutional rights", however, lies in his choice of hero: one Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

"Bearded, bald, and fond of quoting Che Guevara". This is how author Brandt Goldstein describes Ratner in his 2005 book Storming the Court. In 1997, Ratner co-edited a book containing declassified U.S. government documents about Guevara. He and his colleague, Michael Steven Smith, announced the book's official release at a press conference in Havana.

Back in June 2005, Rocco DiPippo documented Ratner's long record of using the law as a tool in support of his radical leftist ideology. According to DiPippo, Ratner's introduction to the Che volume includes the following passage:

…for many of us seeking to change our society, Cuba was a desirable model. And it was Ché Guevara, more than any other figure, who embodied both that revolution and solidarity with peoples fighting to be free from U.S. hegemony…Ché has remained my hero ever since.

(Emphasis in provided quote-DD)


A look at the man Ratner calls his "hero" reveals a great deal about the sincerity of his commitment to human rights and civil liberties. Of particular interest is Guevara's performance as head of La Cabana prison in Havana in the early months of the Castro regime. While there, he was responsible for the execution of hundreds of prisoners, who were condemned without the benefit of habeas corpus or due process. Alvaro Vargas Llosa's aptly titled July 2005 essay "The Killing Machine" quotes a chaplain at La Cabana discussing his experiences with Guevara:

there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants. The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen. Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the galera de la muerte. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions. After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him “the butcher” because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot. I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment. The day I left, Che told me we had both tried to bring one another to each other’s side and had failed. His last words were: “When we take our masks off, we will be enemies.”

(Emphasis added-DD)


A lawyer named Jose Vilasuso who was involved in the La Cabana tribunals has also testified to the blatantly rigged nature of the process and the key role played by Guevara:

At the beginning, the Tribunals were composed of civilian and military lawyers, under the direction of Captain Mike Duque de Estrada and Lieutenants Sotolongo and Rivero (who later went crazy), and the prosecutors Tony Suarez de la Fuente (Pelayito) also known as “Pool o’blood” (Charco de Sangre) among others. Then, most of us quit given the excesses. Later, others without any legal training occupied our positions.

There were relatives of victims of the previous regime who were put in charge of judging the accused.

The first case on which I worked was that of Ariel Lima, a former revolutionary who had gone to the government side. His fate was sealed. He was dressed in prison uniform. I saw him handcuffed with his teeth chattering. According to the Law of the Guerrillas the facts were judged without any consideration to general juridical principles. The right of Habeas Corpus had been suspended.

The statements of the investigating officer constituted irrefutable proof of wrongdoing. The defense lawyer simply admitted the accusations and requested the generosity of the government in order to reduce the sentence. In those days, Guevara was visible in his black beret, cigar in mouth. Cantinflas-like face and bandaged arm in sling. He was extremely thin and his slow and cold tone demonstrated his “posse” of “gray eminence” of the Revolution and total adherence to Marxist theory. Many people congregated in his office and engaged in lively discussions about the revolutionary process. However, his conversation used to be full of irony, he never showed any alteration in temperament or paid any attention to different opinions He reprimanded in private more than one colleague; in public, he chastised us all: “Don’t delay these trials. This is a revolution, the proofs are secondary. We have to proceed by conviction. They are a gang of criminals and murderers. Besides, remember that there is an Appeals Tribunals”

This Appeals Tribunal never decided in favor of the appeal. It simply confirmed the sentences. It was presided by Commander Ernesto Guevara Serna.

(Emphasis added-DD)


Michael Ratner demands that the suspected jihadists held at Guantanamo be granted habeas corpus, yet he supports a regime that in 1992 eliminated the same right from the Cuban constitution after many years of ignoring it altogether. Ratner denounces the military commissions at Guantanamo as unfair, yet he embraces as a hero a man who oversaw the execution of hundreds after convicting them in kangaroo courts. Ratner heads an organization that claims to support "advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet he collaborates with a regime that burns this document and imprisons those who distribute it.

For Michael Ratner, upholding human rights means filing lawsuit after lawsuit against the U.S. government and allies such as Israel, while not lifting a finger on behalf of the victims of radical and Marxist regimes like Cuba's. He is many things, but a champion of "constitutional rights" is not one of them.

Che Chic on Screen

In a terrific piece for the Wall Street Journal, Bridget Johnson notes the disturbing new wave of hagiographical Che Guevara biopics. She also offers Hollywood her own ideas for films about communism:

Villains would include--you guessed it--Che Guevara, whose legacy includes both ordering and conducting executions and founding forced labor camps. "Guevara . . . quickly gain[ed] a reputation for ruthlessness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately shot without trial," writes Pascal Fontaine in "The Black Book." Guevara also wrote in his diary about executing peasant Eutimio Guerra, a suspected informant, with a single .32-caliber shot to the head. Guevara, in his will, praised the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines." He tried to spread the havoc caused by the Cuban revolution in other countries from Africa to South America, rallying for "two, three, many Vietnams!"

Guevara oversaw executions at La Cabana prison; some of those executed were his former comrades who wouldn't relinquish their democratic beliefs. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," he said. He didn't assuage his barbarity by being a brilliant statesman, either, helping drive the economy to ruin as head of Cuba's central bank and minister of industries. "Though claiming to despise money," writes Fontaine, "he lived in one of the rich, private areas of Havana." Guevara told a British reporter after the Cuban Missile Crisis that the nukes would have been fired if they were under Cuban control--which would have wasted all of those future American suburban revolutionary wannabes.


Red Dusk


Alas, I don't see Hollywood bringing Ms. Johnson's much more historically accurate vision of Che to the big screen anytime soon.

Revolution @t Your Library

The New York Public Library gift shop, among its other offerings, is selling Che Guevara watches:

Revolution is a permanent state with this clever watch, featuring the classic romantic image of Ché Guevara, around which the word "revolution" -- revolves.

As the New York Sun reports, the Cuban-American community is less than enthusiastic about this item:

Maria Werlau, president of the Free Society Project - a nonprofit human rights organization documenting the victims of Cuba's communist revolution - denounced sales of the watch as "outrageous." After not having calls to the library returned, she wrote a letter of protest to the institution's president, Paul LeClerc.

(Link via NRO's Corner)


Unfortunately, this is just one example of the cult of Che that has infected our popular culture. Few seem to know or care that the "classic romantic image" they celebrate is that of a fanatical thug who helped create a brutal totalitarian despotism. In a September 24 piece for Slate, Paul Berman demolished the moral and political obtuseness that sustains the Che obsession:

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.

As Berman also points out, Che helped found, and remains a symbol of, a regime that burns books and crushes intellectual freedom. That NYPL would choose to market the image of someone who was an avowed enemy of everything our profession is supposed to stand for is a disgrace, but sadly not surprising.

Subverting the Che Cult

I have been a frequent critic of the efforts to market the image of terrorist mass murderer Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It would appear, however, that Che merchandise has finally served a useful purpose.

This Washington Post article on Wednesday's magnificent hostage rescue in Colombia, includes the following:

Yesterday, two white helicopters arrived in a jungle clearing where the hostages were being held. The men in the helicopters looked like guerrillas, Betancourt later said, describing details of the rescue at the military airport.

“Absolutely surreal,” she said, noting that some of the men who got off the helicopter wore T-shirts emblazoned with the iconic image of the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “I thought this was the FARC,” she said.

Their hands bound, the hostages were forced aboard the helicopters, wondering where they would be taken next in their long ordeal. But once aboard, Betancourt said, Cesar and another guerrilla were overpowered and the crewmen announced that the passengers were now free. “The chief of the operation said: ‘We’re the national army. You’re free,’ ” she said. “The helicopter almost fell from the sky because we were jumping up and down, yelling, crying, hugging one another. We couldn’t believe it.”

(Emphasis added-DD; link via Hot Air)


Such glorious irony is truly to be savored.

Cuban Libraries Update

Here are two recent news items courtesy of the Friends of Cuban Libraries Web site:

Sensitive to growing international concern over reports of human rights violations, in late April the government of President Fidel Castro conducted a secret trial of two Cuban librarians, Elio Enrique Chávez and Luis Elio de la Paz, and sentenced them to prison on a charge of "dangerousness."

The two librarians from eastern Cuba are registered delegates to the Assembly to Promote a Civil Society, a conference of more than 300 non-governmental organizations scheduled to convene in Havana on May 20. If the Civil Assembly takes place, it will be the first nationwide public meeting of non-governmental organizations held in Cuba since the establishment of the Castro regime in 1959. Alarmed by the prospect of this unprecedented challenge to its authority, the government is using threats and arrests to prevent the Civil Assembly from taking place and is pressuring member organizations to revoke their support for the gathering.

Sending librarians to prison for the charge of "dangerousness". Only in a totalitarian police state. Surely the American Library Association will speak out? Don't hold your breath.


While ALA maintains its disgraceful silence on the suppression of intellectual freedom in Castro's Cuba, one unlikely source is speaking up: Che Guevara's grandson, Canek Sánchez Guevara. One of the arguments made by the pro-Castro hard left in ALA is that only right-wing neocon warmongers like myself support the independent library movement, out of our desire to brainwash the Cuban people into rejecting the wonderful existence they enjoy in Fidel's workers' paradise. Sanchez Guevara, an anarchist, puts the lie to this nonsense by showing that support for Cuban libraries spans the political spectrum:

Ultimately, a leftist alternative for Cuba should emphasize with strength and determination the problem of the most basic freedoms.... Because, tell us: How would a socialist project of construction be affected by the fact that 12 million Cubans - among other prerogatives which can be imagined - had the possibility of expressing, arranging and organizing themselves in the forms that seem best to them? We reproduce one of your comments: "All of the young people who are now asking political questions, the ones worth listening to, are always on the left, anarchists or Trotskyists, etc. But ALL of them are revolutionaries [i.e., supporters of the Communist Party]...." Do you know, or do you not know, that these revolutionaries [in present-day Cuba] don't have a right to open a library to the public, to broadcast a radio program, to hold meetings without permission, to have their own newspaper or to freely defend their viewpoints within trade unions or within groups focused on young people, neighborhood activism, gender, environmentalism, etc.? These things require a degree of freedom which today is nonexistent and which calls for, not the intervention of the State, but rather autonomous authority; they require nothing more or less than the socially guaranteed possibility of every collective group, however they may define themselves - as long as they don't violate the liberty of others - to set their own rules. You enjoy a privileged position, Celia, and you must have noticed the obsession [in Castro's Cuba] with surveillance, control, repression, etc. And freedom is something entirely different.

(emphasis added-DD)

Standing with the independent librarians of Cuba should be a no-brainer for an organization committed to the defense of intellectual freedom. Unfortunately, the leftist politicization of ALA makes such a stance all but impossible.

Agitprop @Your Library

The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library is currently hosting an exhibition titled "Multiple Interpretations: Contemporary Prints in Portfolio at The New York Public Library". According to an NYPL press release, this exhibition contains "(p)rints by some of the most intriguing and compelling artists active today".

The NYPL web site describes one of the exhibit portfolios as follows:

Nora Ligorano (American, born 1956) and
Marshall Reese (American, born 1955)
Line Up
Portfolio of eight digital prints with colophon and DVD
Brooklyn: Madness of Art Editions, 2006
Harper #4

For more than twenty years, Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have used art to address political and social issues. In Line Up, present and former high-ranking government officials, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and Karl Rove (Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz are not on view here), appear in a series of fake mug shots. They hold slates inscribed with numbers that refer to specific dates when the “suspects” made “incriminatory” statements about Iraq. President Bush in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, reported, “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…. He clearly has much to hide.” On January 25, 2002, Alberto Gonzales reported to President Bush, “[t]his new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” In an accompanying DVD, these and other officials are heard making their assertions; the pop of a flashbulb is then followed by the mug shot of the speaker, growing progressively larger until it more than fills the screen. The screen goes dark, and a metallic clunk, presumably the sound of a prison door slamming shut, ends each sequence.

(Emphasis added-DD)


Wow, if this kind of infantile, dishonest agitprop is what "the most intriguing and compelling artists active today" are doing, then I'd really hate to see what the crappy and unimaginative artists are up to. Even in a heavily Democratic city like New York, this particular portfolio has been a source of some controversy. However, Fox News reports that the NYPL denies any political intent:

"This exhibition has no political agenda," the library said in a statement issued Thursday. "The work described in the media has been presented out of context and is not a complete or fair representation of the entire exhibition — which showcases 23 different contemporary printmakers from around the world, featuring a range of subject matters."

The library also said that nothing in the exhibit is reflective of the views of the institution.

"Portions of this exhibition ... should not be viewed as a political statement by the library," it said.


Maybe not. However, readers who believe that the portfolio in question does not reflect the views of most NYPL librarians and staff are invited to submit bids on my sizable holdings of prime beachfront property. Just supply your account information to my associates in Nigeria.


Seriously, this is a prime example of the groupthink I described two years ago in the Chronicle. Did no one at NYPL realize that some people might be offended by a publicly funded display of blatant agitprop? In all probability, no, because the portfolio in question undoubtedly reflects a viewpoint that almost everyone at NYPL takes for granted as true. Frankly, I suspect that they couldn't conceive of the prints as being controversial, because "everyone" knows that "Bush lied" about Saddam and WMD.

It's also worth remembering that three years ago NYPL thought that selling Che Guevara watches in its gift shop was a good idea.


According to the New York Daily News, a pair of angry exhibit goers plan to return and set up a similar display of Democrats. We'll see if they're allowed to do it, or if NYPL denies them on the grounds that they are not "some of the most intriguing and compelling artists active today".



Personally, I believe that if NYPL really wants to do an edgy, controversial exhibit, they should do one debunking the widely held canard that concern over Iraq's WMD programs was deliberately fabricated by the Bush Administration. The exhibit could include some images of Halabja; information on Operation Desert Fox; video of some of President Clinton's remarks on Saddam and WMD; a copy of the Butler Report; and finally, it could include a copy of former Clinton official Kenneth Pollack's influential 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. This last item should be quite easy to obtain, considering that the NYPL system owns six copies of it.

Now that would be intriguing and compelling.

The Price of Dissent in Venezuela

Thor Halvorssen has a must read piece at Pajamas Media about a recent attempt to murder a former Venezuelan judge and outspoken critic of Hugo Chavez. The attack on Judge Monica Fernandez occurred on January 4 in Caracas and is described in detail by Halvorssen. The Venezuelan police have labeled the incident a botched robbery. Halvorssen is justifiably skeptical:

Really? The night before she was shot, Judge Fernandez was the target of a television program called “La Hojilla” (The Razor) used by the government as its public pillory. It is on La Hojilla that the party faithful and the media learns who is in and who is out of Chavez’s favor. In a studio adorned with portraits of Lenin, Mao, Marx, Stalin, and Che Guevara, the program’s host, Mario Silva, attacks all of those who disagree or oppose the government’s actions. From Tony Blair to human rights groups like HRF and Freedom House, the government-funded program is ruthless. On January 4, Judge Fernandez was the mark and her image appeared as viewers were reminded that she is an enemy of the state, a coup-plotter, and a fascist.

Judge Fernandez’s troubles with the Venezuelan government began in April of 2002. A criminal court judge, she had avoided most of the politicization affecting the Venezuelan judiciary. She found herself in a political tempest after President Chavez was removed from office by his own defense minister in April of 2002. A group of civilians from the opposition carried out a coup and appointed themselves the new government. In the confusion that gripped Venezuela, Judge Fernandez received a request for a search warrant from a local prosecutor and police department. The neighbors of what was thought to be an abandoned house had reported seeing unusual activities inside the house: they told police they saw a man moving boxes, assault rifles, and bullet proof vests. Judge Fernandez issued the warrant. Inside the house, the police located Ramon Rodriguez, the Chavez government’s Minister of Justice, who had been hiding out during the coup.

Judge Fernandez did not order his arrest but rather sent him to his home with a police escort. The country was in disarray and nobody knew what would happen next. Chavez returned to power several hours later and Rodriguez subsequently resigned. Fernandez, however, was now considered an enemy of the state.


The High Price of Crossing Hugo

Fidel Worship Watch

The Freadom blog notes that former CPUSA archivist Mark Rosenzweig has reassured his fellow "progressive" librarians that their favorite aging Communist despot is doing much better now:

"On his 80th birthday, President Fidel Castro has sent out an encouraging message on his state of health, which has
considerably improved. He confirms that the country is
running perfectly well. "I promise everyone who
has wished me good health that I will fight for it."


In today's Times of London, Stephen Pollard addressed this phenomenon of Fidel worship among western leftists, of whom so-called "progressive" librarians are merely a small subset:

Such hero worship of so brutal a tyrant would seem beyond rational explanation. As Amnesty International puts it in its 2006 report on Cuba: "There was increasing international concern about Cuba's failure to improve civil and political rights . . . Restrictions on freedom of expression, association and movement continued to cause great concern. Nearly 70 prisoners of conscience remained in prison."”

Cuban prisoners are detained under the catch-all peligrosidad predelictiva, defined as "“a person'’s special proclivity to commit offences as demonstrated by conduct that is manifestly contrary to the norms of socialist morality"”. Castro also operates a pretty basic form of censorship: he imprisons journalists to whom he objects. Twenty-four journalists were in prison at the end of 2005. And no Cuban is allowed to travel abroad without permission.

Rationally, those who describe themselves as "progressive"” ought to be campaigning for Castro'’s departure. Instead, when he does die, his image is likely to outsell even that of Che Guevara on the ubiquitous T-shirts. But rational explanation is the wrong place to start. Ever since Robespierre, the original left-wing tyrant, large sections of the Left have allied themselves with oppressors. Even when the evidence of Stalin's butchery was known, for example, George Bernard Shaw continued to praise him, condoning Stalin'’s purges by arguing that he was merely getting rid of those who weren't up to their jobs, and that "they often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks".


(Link courtesy of Norm Geras)


At first glance it seems odd that anyone who belongs to a profession that is supposed to defend intellectual freedom would champion the cause of a book burning dictator. However, the goal of the radical left fringe in this profession is to make librarianship into a tool for their own ideology. Intellectual freedom, in their view, is merely a weapon to be used against "The System", not a principle to be defended regardless of circumstances.