[NYTr] Peter Bell: Why I stopped reading the Nation

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[White liberals are like white bread -- lots of empty calories, and with
a mouse to drop and plop shit online.  Shame on The Nation. and it's
not the first time of late. Victor Navasky, we miss you. This time the
liberals are (yet again) slandering Cuba and Che. As one antidote,
besides our news, see the late Jon Hillson's "The Sexual Politics
of Reinaldo Arenas: Fact, Fiction and the Real Record of the Cuban
Revolution." It covers a lot more than the stupid dishonest movie
"Before Night Falls." It's long. It'll make you think. Duh. It's at NY
Transfer here: http://www.blythe.org/arenas.html 

Amerikkkan liberals! Ignorant and dizguzzting, part of the problem not
the solution, as they have been all along.They don't have a clue, these
dumb Konsumer Kids. Che is someone who shows up on their t-shirts,
since they're too politically correct to have ash trays. Child, you
missed the Sixties, they ain't comin' back, and if they did you don't
have the brains or the balls for them. Go to college. Eat your trust
fund. Get out of the way. -NY Transfer]


Why I stopped reading the Nation

by Peter Bell
November 19, 2007

Well, now and again someone will see something or point me in the
direction of the Nation online to read something, and it's pretty
good.  I used to be a subscriber, even, in the 80s and 90s.  They run a
lot of good stuff from Naomi Klein, and Cockburn's a great writer (even
when he's completely wrong on the facts - perhaps even moreseo then, as
with his current stance on global warming) So, why did I stop reading
them again?

They've taken the opportunity to remind me on their website.

They found a Che Guevara:  Threat or Menace?  piece by the execrable Kay
Steiger, and simply plunked it onto their website.

The Nation is at its best when it's reporting on what's happening for
academic-class white people in the US, and even then, they frequently
get rather weak in the knees.  They live in the same all-white Amerika
that Woody Allen shoots films in, the one where even basic fact
checking is only done if there's a spare intern around.  apparently the
academics are beginning to get a little long in the tooth, as no one
involved in posting the Steiger piece remembered that Reinaldo Arenas,
the hobbyhorse liberals still ride in defense of queers against Cuban
policy of 30 years ago, died in... um..  New York.

Steiger has him dead in Cuba, almost personally murdered by Che.

Steiger also cites an astonishingly sloppy Vargas Llosa (not that one,
another one, this one's named Alvaro and is tied to an Oakland,
California CATO subsidiary called the Independent Institute) essay
about Che published in the New Republic;  this Vargas Llosa, not unlike
the other one, appears to've decided the side with the butter is the
side that needs to stay on top around the world.  Hint to the Nation
web team:  when you're picking up a blather from someone, even when
their organization has "progressive" in its name, and they cite The New
Republic, it's worth really looking pretty carefully at how much
bullshit they're spewing.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071112&s=che

Kay Steiger

October 12, 2007

This week is the 40th anniversary of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's infamous
death in Bolivia, and his legacy is still hotly contested. There's a
website called TheCheStore.com. On it, you can buy t-shirts, caps,
"collectables," and camouflage gear--all pasted with the iconic image of
South America's most famous revolutionary. It's one of many commercial
endeavors devoted to selling gear--including watches, key chains, and
even bikinis--decorated with Guevara's image. The New York Times
pointed out that Guevara's face is now "as much a marketing tool as an
international revolutionary icon." Richard L. Harris is re-releasing
his book Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevara's Last Mission, and
Stephen Soderbergh is working on a movie called Guerrilla, starring
Benicio Del Toro as Guevara, to be released next year. We live in an
age where Guevara "sells."

This man, born as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, was born in Argentina to
a family of wealth. He studied medicine in his youth, but while
traveling, met leftist revolutionaries Fidel and Raúl Castro. It was
then that they formed a plan to overthrow Cuba's capitalist government
and replace it with a socialist one. They fought a long guerrilla war,
and Castro finally seized power on January 1, 1959. He recruited
Guevara to lead Cuba from a primarily agrarian economy to an
industrialized one.

Governing is hard work, and it requires tolerance and patience. It's
debatable whether those are skills that Castro possessed, but Guevara
most certainly did not. When Guevara's impatience with governing had
reached its limit, he traveled to other communist countries in Eastern
Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa. While in Africa, he felt the Congo
was ripe for a socialist revolution in the same way Cuba had been, so
he returned to lead the guerilla mission there. But Guevara
miscalculated the political situation, and language barriers prevented
him from truly becoming one of the Congolese fighters. By his own
admission, the endeavor was a failure. Instead, he turned his attention
to Bolivia, hoping to incite a socialist "Latin Revolution." He failed
there too, and was executed after being captured by the Bolivian army.

Guevara was intelligent and hugely prolific, compulsively keeping
volumes of diaries throughout his life; his seminal work, Guerilla
Warfare, was published posthumously in 1969. The books in his personal
library were jammed in the margins with his own notes and thoughts.
During a journey highlighted by the Oscar-winning "Diarios de
Motocicleta" (The Motorcycle Diaries), he provided medical treatment to
Peruvian Indians, who were living examples of social injustice,
suffering from poverty and disease. Early in life he resolved to aid
those who like himself, battled asthma. (Guevara suffered from the
disease for his entire life.)

He was a man of principles, to a fault. Despite his promotion to a
high-level position in the Cuban government Guevara kept his wife,
Aleida, and four children (in addition to his ex-wife and her daughter)
on a strict salary that was equal to what he earned as a soldier in
Fidel Castro's rebel army, according to New Yorker writer Jon Lee
Anderson in his definitive biography of Guevara. Aleida routinely
borrowed money from the bodyguards to make ends meet. His frugality was
motivated by ideology; he was deeply devoted to the works of Karl Marx
and V.I. Lenin. The Socialist Worker Online paints its own rosy version
of Guevara's life, emphasizing his concern for the common worker and
his courage as a fighter.

Because of his close relationship to Castro, it's hard to separate
feelings about Guevara from feelings about Castro, and from political
baggage of the Cold War. Of the first time Guevara met Castro in Mexico,
Anderson writes,

Ernesto and Fidel shared some traits. Both were favored boys from large
families and extremely spoiled; careless about their appearance;
sexually voracious, but men to whom relationships came in second to
their personal goals. Both were imbued with Latin machismo: believers
in the innate weakness of women, contemptuous of homosexuals, and
admirers of brave men of action.

At best, Guevara's politics advocated for a mindless devotion of the
working man (with an emphasis on "man") to socialism, but left out other
causes many progressives have worked long and hard for: equality for
gender and sexual orientation. In fact, gays were persecuted following
the Cuban revolution. (Poet and novelist Reynaldo Arenas, who included
descriptions of his openly gay lifestyle in his writings, was killed as
the result of the government's prosecution of gays.)

Guevara was raised with a Catholic outlook on life, in which the "good"
girls saved themselves for marriage. Wealthy Argentine boys tended to
sexually exploit the family mucama, or servant girl, and Guevara was no
exception. Anderson tells of a cousin who once "watched in astonishment
from his place at the dining table through the open doors leading to the
kitchen as Ernesto had quick sex with the muchama on the kitchen table,
directly behind their aunt's unsuspecting back." His treatment of his
first wife, Hilda Gadea, highlights his mistreatment of women, which was
well-known to those around him. Guevara used her connections to
revolutionaries like Castro, married her reluctantly once she was
pregnant, and then, following the Cuban Revolution, traded in Hilda in
for his new, younger wife, Aleida.

Guevara treated his fellow freedom fighters brutally. He would deny his
men the personal comfort of writing a diary even though he kept his own.
He often held tribunals where he would execute his own guerrilleros if
he questioned their loyalty to the revolution, labeling them
"counterrevolutionaries." These served as models for Guevara's tribunals
at a prison called La Cabaña. The New Republic has described the events
at the prison as "one of the darkest periods of the revolution," where
an estimated 200 men were killed without any kind of due process for
fighting against the revolution. Anderson wrote in his biography that
Guevara "acquired a reputation for a cold-blooded willingness to take
direct action against transgressors from the revolutionary norms."

Guevara is perceived as a revolutionary icon, and serves as powerful
symbol for many young progressives. But he was cruel and militantly
dogmatic in ways that should make the left squirm. The fascination with
him is understandable; he was a charismatic figure that believed in
something so much that he was willing to devote his entire life to it.
Although we live in a post-Cold War world, where socialism has been
widely discredited, the desire to make life better for the working man
is still an admirable goal. The discussion of Guevara is still divisive
and complicated, years after his death, and it should be.

Kay Steiger is an associate editor of CampusProgress.org.