Friday, March 29, AD 2024 4:03am

Honoring A Murderer in Galway

 “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”

 G. K. Chesterton

 Ah poor Ireland.  As the Faith has become weaker in the Emerald Isle, strange new gods are arising, and one of the strangest is Che Guevara, deceased Argentinian revolutionary and hero of politically correct fools everywhere.  In Galway of all places the local government passed a measure approving of a memorial to Castro’s Himmler.

 

The minutes of Galway City Council’s meeting of  Monday, 16 May 2011, include the following proposal: ‘That Galway City Council  commit itself to honoring one of its own, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, descendant of  two of our Tribes, the Lynch family of Lydican House, and the Blakes. The  project to be furthered by liaising with the Argentinean and Cuban  Embassies.’

 

Billy Cameron, an Irish Labor Party councillor in  Galway, has scoffed at the claims made by fellow city councillors that they  didn’t know they had voted to approve a monument in honor of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

 

To underline his point Councillor Cameron dryly  asked if his fellow Galway City Councillors thought they had been voting for ‘an  egg and spoon race?’ when they unanimously approved the measure.

 

Councilor Cameron also had some advice for  conservative Cuban-Americans who have taken an interest in the case in recent  weeks: they should ‘butt out’ of Irish affairs, he told GalwayIndependent.com.

That last comment is rich.  What business is it of Ireland to honor a man who helped install a brutal tyranny in Cuba?  Of course this is being done because nature abhors a vacuum, and without a belief in Christ, people will search for substitute religions and for many in the West Leftism of various stripes is the favored choice.  It is gratifying that this attempt to honor “Saint” Che is drawing such fire.  Castro’s hangman deserves it:

Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who gave comfort to those sentenced to die and personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke to me recently from his home in Puerto Rico. A former Catholic priest, now seventy-five, who describes himself as “closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former Cardinal Ratzinger,” he recalls that

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.”

How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of “over 500.” According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara’s biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about “the two thousand or so” executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. “He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure,” Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.

Samuel Gregg at the Acton Institute has a brilliant look at this controversy and how it reflects a traditional Leftist antipathy to History when it reveals their heroes and heroines in a harsh light:

The Irish left’s initial reaction was to deny these facts and launch ad hominem attacks. When that failed, they produced extraordinary rationalizations which bordered on the absurd. One columnist, for example, wrote: “Yes, Che was ruthless and fanatical and sometimes murderous. But was he a murderer? No, not in the sense of a serial killer or gangland assassin. He was one of those rare people who are prepared to push past ethical constraints, even their own conscience, and bring about a greater good by doing terrible things.”

Apparently murder isn’t really murder if it’s justified by “a greater good.”

We shouldn’t, however, be surprised by such responses. They reflect a pattern. Getting contemporary French left-wing intellectuals, for example, to acknowledge the ideological genocide unleashed in the Vendée by the French Revolution in the 1790s is almost impossible. In present-day America, any mention of Planned Parenthood’s early association with the eugenics movement invariably results in stone-walling and, eventually, lame explanations that its founder Margaret Sanger was a “child of her time.” The same approach shows up in most American liberals’ studied refusal to discuss slurs employed by the likes of Bill Maher to describe conservative women.

But it’s when the left is confronted with the history of Communism that the denials, ad hominem vitriol, sullen silences, and feeble excuses really get going. Back in 1997, several French intellectuals, many with left-wing backgrounds, published The Black Book of Communism. This text exhaustively detailed how Communist movements and regimes had imprisoned, tortured, starved, experimented upon, enslaved, and exterminated millions across the globe throughout the 20th century.

Though a few brave lefty souls conceded the book’s damning evidence, the left’s general response followed the usual playbook: attacks on the authors’ credibility; arcane disputation of precise numbers killed (as if a million-less here-or-there made any meaningful difference to the overall thesis); claims that Stalin represented a “distortion” of Marxism; and even bizarre suggestions that such crimes shouldn’t distract us from Communism’s “genuine achievements.”

Go here to read the brilliant rest.  One of the many reasons why I love History is that ultimately the truth comes out in it, warts and all.  It sometimes takes a great deal of time, but ultimately people like Che have to face the bar of History, just as they face the judgment of God.

 

 

 

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WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 7:45am

I would cite this, as well as all infatuation with such degenerates, as proof that evolution of the human species remains a myth. To evolve is to become greater and better. Such progress is difficult to find nowadays.

c matt
c matt
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 8:21am

I don’t know if I would equate evolution with greater and better. To evolve is simply to adapt to changed conditions. Evolution is neutral as to whether those changes are good or bad, from a moral sense, particularly if we are speaking about “cultural” evolutions.

c matt
c matt
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 8:33am

Fascinating video. It is rather ironic that the anti-capitalist Che’s image is exploited by capitalists on t-shirts and coffee mugs. I am sure Che is enjoying this from his 6th circle.

WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 8:44am

“To evolve is simply to adapt to changed conditions.”

Granted, in the value-neutral sense. But homo sapiens is supposed to be able to change his environment as well as adapt to it.

If we have that ability, and yet we still wind up on a regular basis with both murdering tyrants and those who worship them, I’d submit that something in the theory is awry.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 10:31am

My ancestors departed in suffering and tears.

The sassenach succeeded after all.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 3:52pm

For some reason known only to God, there are two surviving….things….that successfully resist extermination. One of them is the cockroach. The other is Marxism.

Nothing on the face of the earth has failed in such a spectacular way as Marxism. Marxism is the worst ideology, the worst philosophy, the worst economic model, the worst system to devise a society ever thought up by man. Karl Marx was a degenerate. Karl Marx lived off of others for almost all of his adult life. Karl Marx abandoned his children. Karl Marx was a racist, an elitist and in favor of eugenics.

Marxism survives primarily in the minds of so called academics who infest the so called “institutions of higher learning” which are turning out deeply indebted and highly stupid people. To a lesser degree, Marxism infests the worlds of art and entertainment. Marxism fails when it comes to sports. The blatant cheating of the USSR at the Olympic Games when I was young is proof of that.

Ronald Reagan was born before the rise of the USSR and lived to see it fall. Karol Wojytla was born a few years after Red October 1917 but he too lived to see the USSR fall. RR and JPII were living proof that smarts, guile and determination were what it took to bring down an Evil Empire. These men should be seen as the heroes of our age and the ages to follow, but the expensive and failed indoctrination systems known as public education have failed the youth of the world and their parents.

The Black Book of Communism should be required reading of anyone who enters high school. A good book to accompany that would be Bloodlands. Nazism was never more than second worst compared to Communism.

Yet, the brain dead of the worldwide Political Left continue to genuflect at the High Altar of Evil. Guevara was a punk, a terrorist and a thug – a small man with a vicious mind and accountable to no one. He deserved his fate in Bolivia. the CIA should have cremated his remains and dumped the ashes into the Pacific – like what Israel did to Adolf Eichmann. JFK was too much of a coward to commit the necessary force to eliminate Castro in 1961, and as a result, Castro has sought to spread his cancer thorough Latin America. Castro has failed in creating other Communist states such as his own, but Castro succeeded in indirectly causing the deaths of countless people in Latin America through wars, political repression and economic instability.

Our failed indoctrination systems have caused the USA to be led by insufferable twits – useful idiots – like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Obumbler. Notice that these people come from states that are currently abject failures.

The Irish Labor Party is populated by idiots – useful idiots as Lenin would call them. So is the Democrat Party of the USA, the Socialist Party of France, Spain and Portugal, the Liberal Party of Canada, the Sandinistas, the Chavistas, the followers of Evo Morales in Bolivia, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Not so long ago, Mairo Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian intellectual, wrote a book, The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot. Latin American “higher education” is permeated with worshipers of Castro, followers of the insufferably stupid Eduard Galeano, and abject haters of the USA, who they blame for all of Latin America’s failures. It is a funny and hard hitting book. Llosa excoriates Latin American politicians, university professors, liberation theology-damaged Catholic religious and other assorted fools.

People who wear a Che t shirt should be given a week’s vacation in Little Havana and Hialeah. It would be like wearing a Joe Stalin T-shirt in Warsaw. I would pay my own way to see the fireworks from that.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, April 13, AD 2012 4:14pm

Penguin’s Fan: Excellent!!!

Bill G.
Bill G.
Saturday, April 14, AD 2012 2:05am

Don’t blame the Sassanach for what is going on in Ireland. For generations, the Irish stood up for the Church and their Faith against great oppression. Given two decades of economic prosperity, they dumped it all for modernism and materialism. Maybe not all, but a great many.

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Sunday, April 15, AD 2012 10:30pm

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