In response to Che’s entirely undeserved popularity among anti-establishment youth in the UK and around the world, many organisations have begun to put up posters with select quotes from the guerrilla fighter, titled, “Can You Tell Who Said What?: Che Guevara or Adolf Hitler.” All the quotes, selected for their brutality, are from Guevara.
Ernesto Lynch, more commonly known by his chosen name, Che Guevara, was born in Rosario, Argentina to Irish and Argentine parents in 1928. Che, who was an instrumental figure in the Cuban Revolution, and fought to incite communist revolutions in several countries in South America, has long been the idol of left-wing teenagers and university students in the West due to the popularity of a few memorable anti-consumerist quotes from his written works. Ironically, his famous portrait photograph, depicting his upturned face adorned with the beret of a communist guerrilla, has become one of the most famous and widely marketed photographs in history, appearing on everything from T-shirts and coffee mugs to flags and posters in Obama campaign offices.
Yet Che was no innocent freedom fighter. Known as ‘the Butcher of La Cabaña’, Che Guevara is known to have ordered the execution of several hundred people he suspected of betraying his communist ideology. Often, he would have his soldiers and commanders shot without trial, in numerous cases performing the executions himself. After successfully taking over Cuba, Guevara proceeded to order the imprisonment of gay men, sought the execution of all political dissidents, severely restricted the press, tried to ban rock and roll music, and drove the Cuban economy into the ground. In his youth, he was even known by many of his friends to be an incurable racist, and rarely bathed.
[…]
Complete text and list of quotes linked here.
