Putting down Hitler whilst wearing Che Guevara T-shirts.

in illiberal •  2 years ago 

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I don't know if this is going to surprise anyone that any clash that I have with leftists about Che Guevara's legacy isn't my first rodeo.

What I've found to be persistently fascinating about the illiberal Left for the last many years of my life is their commitment to delusions of imminent threats and the propensity to ignore truly perverse celebrations of pure evil.

Despite the hype and hyperbole that was used to paint Trump voters as Nazis, the reality is that probably less than one percent of citizens of these united States would take umbrage in regard to abusive language directed at Hitler's legacy. The overwhelming majority of citizens of these united States take particular umbrage in regard to political leaders that they like being compared to Hitler because we all hate Hitler. I don't know how short y'all's memories are; but, I remember Bush being depicted with Hitler mustaches followed by the same treatment being inflicted upon Obama. It's the same infantile, slanderous bullshit that too many people engage in every time politics go in a direction they don't like.

That's why it's funny when illiberal Leftists make anti-Hitler statements and think that there's something profound or provocative about it. It's almost farcical that anybody thinks that labelling oneself as "anti-fascist" is somehow bold or inherently virtuous. Stalin and Mao were anti-Fascist, too. Stalin and Mao murdered about seven to eight times more people than Hitler. Some of the estimates of the death toll of the Holodomor put the number of murdered Ukrainians higher than the number of murdered Jews in the Holocaust and I'm still regularly meeting people who don't know that the Holodomor even happened, or that it was the inspiration for Orwell's Animal Farm.

I don't single out Che Guevara because I think he's worse than Hitler. I don't know anybody who singles out Che for that reason. I single out Che because people who think that it's profound to put down Hitler will wear Che's image on their chests while doing it. It's a profound indictment of our education system that so few people see the irony of a person who sees himself as a bold anti-fascist and anti-racist who constantly reminds us of how evil and violent and racist Hitler was, while celebrating a racist, homophobic, book burning murderer in Che.

We're not attacking Che because he was worse than Hitler. We're attacking Che because the swastika is so heavily stigmatized that even Jains and Buddhists have to be careful about displaying it while people call unironically wear the hammer and sickle. We talk about this because Che was an evil man who is still celebrated in movies like The Motorcycle Diaries and Steven Soderbergh's bullshit movies. We talk about this because our culture is so warped that one of my ex-girlfriends could literally (once again, unironically) wear a t-shirt celebrating communist leaders (aka mass murderers) including Che and even I could love her despite the political disagreements and illiberal Leftists won't even breath the same air as a person who voted for Trump.

Basically, we talk about Che because he is the perfect illustration of the hypocrisy of the illiberal Left. If your impression of yourself is that you're a good human being because you're intolerant of MAGA hat wearers call for the tearing down of any founder who owned slaves while you'll spend two seconds defending a man who openly hated black people, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, and so-on and murdered countless numbers of them while legitimately burning books and killing political dissents, you're living a life of self-deception.

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