Che

I still don’t completely understand why it is that thousands of people can wander around wearing clothing emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara and it is considered completely acceptable; whereas if one person were to walk around displaying an image of a Nazi in a positive light he would, quite rightly, be excoriated.

Here are some of the wise sayings of Ernesto “Che” Guevara:

If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.

- Quoted in The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis by Servando Gonzales (Spooks Books, 2002, p. 111)

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

- Quoted in The Cuban Revolution: Years of Promise by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay (University Press of Florida, 2005, p. 57)

The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: “Yank it off, boy, what does it matter.” I did so and his possessions were now mine.

- Diary entry quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (Bantam Books, 1997)

In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity.