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June 26, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:57
2732 The Truth About Che Guevara

The real truth behind one of the most controversial, charismatic and popular rebels of the twentieth century.

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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
This is the truth about one of the most revered, iconic, and controversial rebels of the 20th century.
The truth about Che Guevara.
So who is the man?
Well, his real name was Ernesto Guevara.
He was nicknamed Che.
After he picked that up as a verbal tick in his South and Central American travels, it's sort of the equivalent of maybe y'all in the South or A in Canada.
And he fought in the Cuban Revolution and occupied several high-ranking positions in Fidel Castro's government.
His picture and image, one of the most widely recognized symbols of rebellion in the world today, And the photograph of him, which is often silkscreened on t-shirts, has been called the most famous photograph in the world.
Let's hear what some famous leaders themselves had to say about the man.
Nelson Mandela said, The life of Shea is an inspiration to all human beings who cherish freedom.
We will always honor his memory.
Time Magazine wrote, Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che Guevara guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and a perceptive sense of humor.
Rage Against the Machine.
We've considered Shea a fifth band member for a long time now for the simple reason that he exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire.
He was an amazing example of courage, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them.
Christopher Hitchens...
1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Shea.
His death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time.
He was a role model.
Benicio del Toro, the actor, said Shea was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked to talk.
There's just something cool about people like that.
The more I get to know Shea, the more I respect him.
And you can find these and similar accolades all over the place.
What is the truth about Shea Guevara?
Well, let's start with his deep, deep background.
Che Guevara's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, had roots in Spanish and Irish nobility and was the great-grandson of one of the richest men in South America, most of whose fortune was lost by his descendants.
Also, actually quite the case with my own family tree as well.
Ernesto's parents were born in America as their families fled an Argentine dictatorship to join the California Gold Rush in the 19th century.
After returning from exile, his parents got married and settled down in Buenos Aires.
Ernesto had a secular upbringing and was an atheist, which in the 19th century generally meant incredibly fertile ground for Marxism.
As one authority figure was displaced by secular rationalism, another one tended to rush in to fill the vacuum, which was the belief in the virtue of the totalitarian state.
His noble origins and the adventurous spirit of his ancestors influenced him greatly, but his father sought to prepare him for a working life.
The only aristocracy I believe in is the aristocracy of talent, which is, I guess, a uniquely aristocratic way of viewing talent versus, say, work.
Ernesto went to college to study architecture, but later dropped out to pursue entrepreneurial ventures.
And of course, since Shea ended up basically being the son of an entrepreneur, and himself an entrepreneur, it's a little confusing about some of the Marxism, but we'll get to that.
A friend of Ernesto's convinced him he could become rich by growing and selling yerba mate, a plant used for the mate beverage consumed by millions of South Americans.
After visiting Missionus, a yerba-growing province with plenty of cheap land, he became enthralled by the prospect of earning a fortune.
From the green gold.
However, he couldn't invest in a plantation because his money was tied to a yacht building company he had started with a wealthy relative.
So here you have landowner and fruit exploiter and worker exploiter combined with yacht building company.
Not the greatest credentials for the father of a Marxist unless the Marxism is purely reactionary.
So, Shea's mother, Celia de la Srina y Lusa, was born into an incredibly wealthy family with roots in Spanish nobility.
Tragically, Celia's father committed suicide shortly following her birth after learning he had syphilis.
He drowned himself, and there is some speculation that he got syphilis as a result of an affair.
Celia's mother killed herself shortly thereafter, leaving baby Celia in the care of her older sister Carmen de la Serna.
So a very tragic upbringing for Shea's mother, which as you can see as the story unfolds will have devastating consequences.
Carmen was a feminist and a member of the Argentine Communist Party who later married a famous communist poet And journalist.
So we have a Marxist feminist, which is usually two sides of the same coin, or at least socialist feminist.
What kind of son is she going to raise?
Through her sister's influence, Celia became a communist and a feminist herself, rejecting religion but retaining an affinity for the spiritual.
In other words, all the benefits of religion without having to get up early on Sundays.
During the 1920s and 30s, Celia held frequent meetings to discuss the development of the Argentine feminist movement.
Ernesto, Shea's father, was 27 years old at the time, and he met Celia soon after she graduated from the All Girls Catholic School of the Sacred Heart in Buenos Aires.
They decided to get married, but Celia's family opposed her involvement with Ernesto, seeing Through the young entrepreneur's desire to fund his Yerba Mate fever by tapping into the clan's great fortune, he needed money, he needed capital, he needed to expand his land holdings and basically he was a himbo gold digger.
At least that is what her family thought.
Celia was yet to turn 21 and under Argentine law she needed her family's permission to get married or to receive her inheritance.
Ultimately, the lovers forced the consent of Celia's family by staging an elopement.
The marriage was approved, but Celia had to sue her family to win her inheritance, only to receive a portion of it.
Celia and Ernesto finally got married in a private ceremony on November the 10th, 1927, and immediately fled to Missionis.
Ernesto wrote,"'Together we decided what to do with our lives.'" Behind lay the penitences, the prudery and the tight circle of relatives and friends who wanted to impede our marriage.
And just briefly to touch on South and Central America, there was great promise.
Argentina in the 1920s had the same per capita income as the United States.
There was great promise of economic growth and stability in South and Central America.
Tragically, they got heavily infected with the viruses of socialism and particularly Marxism, which has resulted in many of the disasters that have occurred since, along with a fairly brutal US foreign policy.
After keeping it a secret for three decades, Celia finally revealed that she'd been three months pregnant when she married Ernesto.
And they had to stage an elopement because a woman, of course, went to a Catholic school and so on.
If you conceived a child out of wedlock, it would have brought great shame to her and her family had it become public knowledge.
So this accident may explain why or help explain why a committed communist and a feminist married an entrepreneur.
Kind of the bourgeoisie enemy.
Fleeing Buenos Aires right after the wedding was also necessary to hide the onset of Celia's pregnancy.
When Che Guevara was born, they had a doctor friend falsify the date on the birth certificate so they could avoid a scandal.
After arriving in Missiones, Ernesto used Celia's money to buy 500 acres of jungle land, and the couple built a roomy wooden house.
This is basically a humid hell jungle space, as we'll see.
They spent the next few months of Celia's pregnancy engaged in various activities such as fishing, boating, and horseback riding.
As you can see, not a huge amount of work actually going on, which is somewhat necessary if you're an entrepreneur, if I remember correctly.
Ernesto, Che's father, couldn't relax.
To him, Missionis was a place full of "ferocious beasts, dangerous work, robbery and murderous jungle cyclones, interminable rains and tropical diseases." I guess that means he would have fit nicely in Congress.
In the spirit of his grandfather, he viewed the jungle as a goldmine that would restore his family's wealth, and he couldn't wait to start working on it.
But as Celia's pregnancy advanced, they decided to return to civilization so she could give birth in a more comfortable and secure place.
They ended up in the large city of Rosario, where Ernesto Che Guevara was born on May 14th, 1928.
The date on his birth certificate was falsified to June 14th.
The family immediately left for Buenos Aires to show off their son to family and friends, lying to everyone that he was born prematurely.
According to one of Ernesto's sisters, the infant almost died from pneumonia 40 days after he was born.
This, I would imagine, has something to do with the rigors of travel.
Of course, in the 20s, in that place of the world, travel was pretty harsh.
Ernesto Sr.
now desired to get the Euromate plantation off the ground, so the family returned to their Missione's homestead.
Now, we mentioned it's sort of 500 acres of humid jungle hell.
It's full of insects every single night.
Che Guevara's father would creep into his infant's room holding a flashlight while one of his workers used the burning tip of a cigarette to remove the mites burrowed.
Into the baby's flesh.
Now, this is also similar to, as we see from his later political writings, these early infant and toddler experiences have a very deep impression on people's ideology, particularly if they've not rigorously pursued self-knowledge.
Hitler used to call Jews the lice burrowing into the flesh of the German population.
This, of course, was, babies used to be so tightly swaddled, these, like, Sort of self-hugging baby burritos that they used to wrap the kids in and the bandages and so on.
The sheets would be full of lice which would burrow into the children's flesh.
And so, many years later, Che Guevara would claim, after having these mites burrowing into his flesh as a baby, that the oppressed masses, quote, would turn the wheel of history by awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected.
In March 1929, Celia became pregnant with their second child.
She hired a young nanny to take care of her son.
Who was less than a year old.
This may indicate, you know, hiring a nanny when you're kind of a stay-at-home mom and have servants, may indicate that she was feeling overwhelmed and may have been suffering from postpartum depression.
Pure theorizing, of course, but it certainly would fit what happened later.
So free of having to take care of young Shea, young Ernesto, Celia started swimming daily in the nearby Paraná River.
When she was six months pregnant, she got caught by the river's current and nearly drowned.
Two of her husband's workers And of course, it's well known now, though it really wasn't at the time, That stress hormones while a baby is in the mother's womb can cause significant problems in fetal development.
So whether this had an effect on both the children or the resulting four children is probably quite considerable.
By now, there was friction in the relationship between Shea's parents.
Celia was reckless and aloof, preparing to spend her time in isolation.
Ernesto was paranoid and emotionally needy who needed to have people around him.
So you get the usual codependent.
She's fleeing.
That causes her to pursue him more, which causes her to emotionally flee more, and this creates a pretty toxic cycle.
The family moved back to Buenos Aires later the same year and settled down in the city's outskirts since Celia was about to give birth.
And Ernesto Sr.
needed to take care of a business-related problem.
One of the investors had withdrawn from his yacht-building company while he was away.
The company was also on the verge of bankruptcy due to the incompetence of Ernesto's second cousin and business partner.
So in December 1929, Celia gave birth to the second child, a daughter named after her.
Ernesto lost his inheritance soon after the family returned to Buenos Aires.
A fire destroyed the shipyard and they couldn't get any insurance money because his cousin forgot to pay the premium.
He wasn't terribly worried because they could rely on family and friends to survive financially, not to mention Celia's vast inheritance.
But in this, and we've seen this when I've done a video on the truth about Karl Marx, there is a tendency of people who end up in Marxist circles to have families who rely upon manipulation, parasitism, and particularly sexual predation upon the working classes, servants and maids, and so on.
On May 2nd, 1930, during the onset of the Argentine winter, Celia took two-year-old Ernesto swimming.
The boy got sick the same night, and doctors diagnosed him with asthmatic bronchitis, which later developed into chronic asthma.
This affliction followed Che Guevara for the rest of his life.
Again, I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for over five years, taking a two-year-old swimming during the onset of winter, not particularly smart, particularly in a time when there were very few effective antibiotics.
So this began to really dominate family geographic decisions.
The damp climate of Missionis made the family's return to the Yerba Mate plantation impossible.
Ernesto Sr.
blamed Celia for bringing about their son's misfortune, and the fallout of the incident strained the marriage almost to the breaking point.
So Shea's father saw his son's illness as a curse.
He wrote in his memoir, Ernesto's asthma had begun to affect our decisions.
Each day imposed new restrictions on our freedom of movement, and each day we found ourselves more at the mercy of that damned sickness.
Not exactly floating on clouds, Florence Nightingale borg of empathy levels of concern for his son.
In 1931, the Guevara's moved yet again, this time to Buenos Aires itself.
Vasilia would give birth to their third child, Roberto, a year later.
This kind of chaos, this economic, financial, and career instability.
Nobody really has a job.
You just got to keep moving.
You're always worried about money.
This is quite common in the lives of people who end up with larger-than-life personalities, I suppose.
Following medical recommendations, the family kept traveling back and forth between the dry climate Of Cordoba province and Buenos Aires in the hopes of alleviating young Ernesto's condition, but there was no apparent pattern in the manifestation of his affliction, which may mean that it had some psychosomatic elements.
Unable to attend to his business and with no hope of improving his son's health, Ernesto Sr.
started feeling unstable and unable to do anything.
So a friend of the family recommended the dry climate of a spa town called Alta Gracia, so the Guevara's decided to move there indefinitely.
And again, you're not going to have friendships forming and social networks forming and groups forming, which is a kind of an impediment to the healthy development of a child's empathy.
Despair crept in on Ernesto Sr.
He was unable to work while the family funds kept shrinking.
He suffered from insomnia and felt isolated, further distancing himself.
From his children, and an emotionally absent father has been statistically quite closely tied to a lack of empathy in the child, in particular in the sons.
Meanwhile, Celia became the fun-loving mother that engaged the three children in activities like hiking, swimming, and mule riding.
She gave birth to their fourth child, Ana Maria, in January 1934.
The financial situation of the Gueveras was becoming strained due to the fact that neither Ernesto nor Celia knew how to handle money in a practical manner.
This is also true of a lot of people who end up on the left.
They have parents who don't really seem to understand or manage the value of money very well.
In other words, we were always broke, therefore money is bad.
I fight with my girlfriend about money, therefore we should eliminate money.
Because that's really the problem, right?
They became famous for their extravagant lifestyle, giving dinner parties, going on frequent vacations, owning a car, and employing three servants.
This is a kind of economic entitlement.
No matter what the income, this is how we must live.
And this kind of great Gatsby hollowing out of a debt-ridden lifestyle is pretty stressful and chaotic and catastrophic, I would say, for children's development.
The family enjoyed all these luxuries despite constant financial difficulties.
Ernesto Sr.
wrote, They were really bad times for us.
So full of economic difficulties.
The children were getting bigger.
Ernesto still had his asthma.
We spent a lot on doctors and remedies.
We had to pay for domestic help because Celia couldn't manage alone with the kids.
There was school, rent, clothes, food, trips.
It was all outgoing costs with little coming in.
Now, again, the idea of moving somewhere and getting a job and just working on being stable for your kids doesn't seem to have really particularly come up a lot.
Now, it's not just financial difficulties that were problematic in the Gueveras or among the Gueveras.
The hot-tempered Celia and Ernesto, defying absolutely zero stereotypes of South American or Spanish-based people, started having regular shouting matches, the stories of which became well known in Alta Gracia.
According to one of Shea's childhood friends, to escape his parents' arguments, the boy would flee the house and hide in the brushy countryside, only returning after things had calmed down.
According to Celia's closest friends, the cause of the fights was Ernesto's infidelity.
In an interview, one of Shea's cousins would later remark, everybody knew he was a ladies' man.
Celia knew.
At the time, though, divorce was illegal in Argentina, so Ernesto and Celia decided to stay together despite their marital problems.
Now, Shea's health did improve during his stay in Alta Gracia, but he still suffered from occasional asthma attacks.
The young boy joined the local gangs of children, the barras, and started riding bicycles and playing games like trench warfare with them.
I guess that came in helpful later in Cuba.
His violent side was already showing when he started organizing rock fights between warring barras.
Ernesto Sr.
recalled that his son would get into frequent fistfights with his barra rivals and would become uncontrollable with rage if he felt he had been unjustly reprimanded or punished.
In an article published by one of Che Guevara's cousins, it was revealed that Che also delighted in torturing animals from a very young age.
So, you know, I don't know.
I don't know if he wet his bed.
Arson and torture of animals, one of the three signs of sociopathy, according to my understanding.
And you will see how this looks when somebody grows up in just a few minutes.
So when he got his asthmatic attacks, Shea would have to spend his days confined in bed, not even able to walk.
He filled up the long hours with reading and playing chess.
However, when the conditions subsided, he would be eager to go out and retest his physical boundaries.
Unlike Robert Louis Stevenson and other people who had a lot of illness confinement as children, his language skills improved considerably as a result of reading and writing and making up your own stories and games and so on.
Unlike Ernesto Sr., Celia, his mother, encouraged her son's outdoor activities despite the dangerous consequences.
On numerous occasions, the boy was carried home by his friends, hardly able to breathe.
Because of her son's health condition, Celia tutored the boy at home, teaching him to read and write, as well as exposing him to poetry and philosophy.
During this period, young Ernesto formed an incredibly strong bond with his mother, a bond that would last until the day he died.
She was now his favorite parent.
Or perhaps he could be called the substitute husband.
So moms who are not emotionally connected to the fathers, right, to their husbands, will often gravitate towards a boy as a substitute husband, kind of cling to him and use him for as a way of getting back against the husband by showing intimacy and happiness and so on.
And it's really, really toxic.
And as we see, the eatable complex described by Freud became quite fascinating for him later on in life.
And If a man grows up to be the kind of man which we'll see Che Guevara grew up to be, then looking at how he was parented is really, really important, as I talked about in a recent video about Elliot Rodger.
While Ernesto Sr.
didn't participate much in his son's development, Celia had an almost symbiotic relationship with the boy that set him apart from the rest of her children.
The home tutoring, however, wasn't meant to last.
And this fusion between a needy and dysfunctional mother and a son, to the exclusion of the other children, often produces grandiosity on the part of the child.
I can do everything.
I'm smarter at everyone than anything.
Everyone should do what I say because she has such control and such a lack of boundaries with the mother.
Alta Gracia's educational authorities eventually ordered the family to send their boy to school.
In March 1937, nine-year-old Ernesto entered elementary school, starting at the second grade level.
So, he's been homeschooled, really, for the first nine years of his life.
All right, Elba Rossi di Oviedo Zelaya, and I apologize for all the mispronunciations, the school's headmistress and Shea's third grade teacher remembered him as a mischievous, bright boy, undistinguished in class, but one who exhibited leadership qualities on the playground.
Shea Guevara later noted that Elba Rossi had been a strict disciplinarian and was always spanking him.
In elementary school, Ernesto became famous for his exhibitionist behavior that shocked the adults and awed his peers.
He ate chalk during class, drank ink out of a bottle, explored a dangerous abandoned mineshaft, and played bullfighter with a ram.
This is sort of like Michelle Rhee, the Washington school superintendent who tried to reform the schools, who ate a bee that flew into her classroom just to get the kids' attention.
As a kid, Ernesto also engaged in borderline criminal behavior.
In the company of his bar of friends, he went around Alta Gracia shooting out streetlights with a slingshot.
To settle a score with a rival gang member, Ernesto shat on the ivory keys of a piano that belonged to his rival's parents.
I guess they then played chop shits?
Anyway.
On another occasion he shot burning firecracks through a neighbor's window and into a dinner party, scattering the guests and ruining the event.
His parents' social status allowed him to get away with all of these transgressions.
Now, the Spanish Civil War Began in 1936 when young Ernesto was eight years old and for more on this you can of course read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.
His mother's sister Carmen stayed with the family while her husband was deployed as a correspondent for a Buenos Aires newspaper.
She read the letters she got from him to the entire clan bringing home the reality of the war in all its details and inspiring Ernesto Jr.
to follow the unfolding events by marking the movement of the republican and fascist armies On a map.
And there was great hope for the left anarchists that the Spanish Civil War was going to bring to fruition the communist anarchist dream of a propertyless, stateless society.
It generally descended into the usual totalitarian horror show.
But we'll talk about that in another podcast or video.
But the fact that his father was out there basically praising the war, writing about how wonderful it was and how exciting it was, these things have a very, very deep impression upon an eight-year-old boy.
Now, of course, September 1939, World War II began in earnest after the British declared war on Germany for the invasion of Poland, and Ernesto Sr.
threw his energy into the pro-Allies ASEAN Argentina group.
He and his colleagues monitored suspicious activities in their community, fearful of a Nazi infiltration or a possible invasion.
Ernesto Jr.
was very enthusiastic about joining the youth wing of ASEAN Argentina.
All the free time he had outside of his playtime and studies he spent collaborating with us, recalled his father.
So Shay, or Ernesto Jr., had sex for the first time with a servant girl from a friend's house when he was about 14.
He and his friends continued to target women of low social status, primarily servants, for sex.
This behavior continued into his adulthood.
So...
Basically, this preying upon the economic underclasses and then complaining about capitalists preying upon the economic underclasses is obviously just a matter of psychological projection.
That he himself, just like Marx, preyed upon women of low status sexually and then thought that the major problem was the United Fruit Company.
According to one of his childhood friends from Altagracia, Yang She earned the nickname Fast Rooster when he, in the middle of having dinner with his friends, forced a servant girl to climb onto the table and had sex with her.
After he finished, says the friend, he got rid of the poor devil and continued eating as if nothing had happened.
So, I mean, just take a moment and picture this, that you're having, as a mid-teens, you're having dinner with some friends, and a servant girl is basically thrown onto the table, is raped.
is thrown off the table and then the rapist sits down and just continues to eat as if nothing had happened.
This is so astoundingly disturbed and disturbing behavior that it's almost impossible to comprehend.
This is sort of like a layer of Dantean hell that pure psychopathy and sociopathy would be inhabiting.
And this rapist of the underclass, of economic underclasses, is praised and people wear his t-shirts.
A few years later, Shea had a romantic relationship with his cousin, the daughter of his aunt Carmen.
Quote, one day we were playing on a terrace of my house and Ernesto asked me if I was now a woman, recalled the cousin about the beginning of their relationship.
Ernesto was so handsome.
His cousin wasn't the only one who was attracted to him.
The truth is, we were all a little in love with Ernesto, confessed a well-born girl from Cordoba.
Because sociopaths, rapists, people who engage in physical assault as children and so on, if they're handsome and charming, then the world, tragically, and a future silk print industry is their oyster.
In March 1942, Ernesto began attending one of the best state-run high schools, the Collegio Nacional de Influens in Cordoba.
A year later, ending their 11-year stay in Altagracia, the Guavera clan moved to Cordoba.
In high school, continuing his exhibitionist behavior, or no boundaries and sexual predation, Ernesto managed to earn himself several nicknames.
As Chey's friend Alberto Granado recalled, they called him el loco, crazy Guevara.
He liked to be a little bit of a terrible lad.
He boasted about how seldom he bathed, for example.
They also called him chancho, which is pig.
He used to say, it's been 25 weeks since I washed this rugby shirt.
How about a hug, comrade?
During his teenage years, Ernesto took great interest in the works of Freud and Bertrand Russell.
He was now reading everyone from the ancient Greeks to Aldous Huxley, Benito Mussolini on fascism, Joseph Stalin and Karl Marx on Marxism.
He also enjoyed the works of Franz Kafka, whose novels had a profound impact on him, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre, of course, was also a sexual predator who used his position at a university to engage in threesomes with Simone de Beauvoir, his wife, who actually kind of hated them.
In 1945, the 17-year-old Ernesto decided to take a course in philosophy and became fascinated by the discipline.
Not so much at practicing it, I guess just studying it.
He began writing the first of several philosophical dictionaries where he quoted passages from his favorite authors.
On love, patriotism, and sexual morality, he consulted Bertrand Russell's old and new sexual morality.
Bertrand Russell, serial affair monger, not exactly a sexual predator, but...
Not of the highest level of romantic integrity.
He was also captivated by Freud's work, dreams, libido, narcissism, and the Oedipus complex.
He quoted Nietzsche on death and Jack London on society.
He was also interested in Hitler's thoughts on Marxism, which he found in Mein Kampf.
The dominant figures of his later diaries were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin.
So, pretty much rapist, parasite on the working class, and mass murderer.
Can't go badly from here, right?
Around the time he became involved with philosophy and psychology, his family and friends were noticing that he became a lot more withdrawn.
He no longer sought constant attention, preferring isolation instead.
In May 1947, Ernesto's paternal grandmother died after suffering a stroke, leaving her grandson inconsolable.
Celia, his younger sister, recalled that she'd never seen Ernesto so grief-stricken.
It must have been one of the great sadnesses of his life.
His grandmother's death and his desire to cure his asthma influenced his decision to become a physician, and in 1948, he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine.
Ernesto's inner turmoil is very apparent in a poem he wrote when he was 19.
I know it.
I know it!
If I get out of here, the river swallows me.
It is my destiny.
Today, I must die!
But no, willpower can overcome everything.
These are the obstacles I admitted.
I don't want to come out.
If I have to die, it will be in this cave.
The bullets What can the bullets do to me if my destiny is to die by drowning?
But I am going to overcome destiny.
Destiny can be achieved by willpower.
Die, yes, but riddled with bullets, destroyed by the bayonets.
If not, no.
Drowned, no.
A memory more lasting than my name is to fight, to die fighting.
Now, his grandfather killed by drowning.
He almost died by drowning and so on.
So a lot of these early childhoods Memories are still resonating in his mind.
By the early 1950s, the deep-seated hostility towards the United States had already taken roots in Ernesto's mind.
You know, for those who don't know the intricate history of the expansion of Marxism and Communism, there was to be a world revolution which was to be provoked by reminding the working classes of how badly they were being exploited by the bourgeoisie and capitalist classes and the United States was a huge problem.
For a communist thought, because according to communist thought, the communist economies, Marxist economies, Soviet economies should be vastly outstripping, without the profit motive, vastly outstripping the capitalist economies in terms of wealth, growth, freedom, power, and so on.
The United States was vastly outstripping the rest of the world economy after the Second World War for a variety of reasons, which is a huge problem for Marxist theory.
So the fact that Marxists have a hostility towards the United States is...
As much ideological as it is out of some pretty legitimate criticisms of US foreign policy.
So Dolores Leona Martin, a childhood friend of Shea's, said, in his eyes, the twin evils in Latin America were the native oligarchies and the United States.
He would disconcert both nationalists and communists by being anti-American without subscribing to either of their points of view.
I was never able to convince him that the United States foreign policy was more often than not the bumbling creature of ignorance and error rather than the well-designed strategy of a sinister cabal.
He was convinced of the dark princes of evil who directed every U.S. move abroad.
The old thing, never ascribed to malignancy that which can be more accurately explained by incompetence.
On January 4th, 1952, Ernesto set out on a motorcycle journey across South America that he documented in his famous motorcycle diaries.
You may have seen the 2006 movie.
He often boasted about his noble ancestry.
In his diary, Ernesto wrote, the blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave, the Portuguese.
And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles.
Discrimination and poverty unite them in a daily fight for survival, but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely.
The black is indolent and a dreamer, spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink.
The European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.
So, kind of a racist as well.
In the margin of his diary, Ernesto scribbled the following, I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people.
I know this.
I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches, will take my blood-stained weapon and, consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands.
So it's a good thing he didn't release this on YouTube prior to going down to Isla Vista with Guns and Knives.
And I see, as if a great exhaustion smothers this fresh exaltation, I see myself immolated in the genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa or confession.
I feel my nostrils dilate, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, the enemy's death.
I steal my body, ready to do battle and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the bestial how All of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope!
Well, he was to get his wish for all the power his shredded heart could desire.
In June 1953, upon returning from his South American journeys, Ernesto completed his study and obtained a medical degree.
Now, of course, where did he get the money for this rambling around?
Motorcycle journey, well, from others, not from his own work.
So again, preying upon the working classes in one form or another is a consistent theme in young Marxists.
Ernesto went on another trip immediately after graduating.
His family kept funding these adventures as he was constantly unemployed.
In December 53, he stopped in Guatemala.
There he was introduced to his first wife.
Hilda Gadea Acosta, a wealthy Peruvian economist and communist leader who had ties with high-ranking officials in the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.
Ernesto fled the company with Gaida in June 1954 after Arbenz was overthrown in a coup d'etat.
In his mind, the U.S. had toppled the last Latin American revolutionary democracy.
Gadea Leti wrote, it was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism.
By the time he left, he was sure of this.
Although it could also be that his narcissism, his grandiosity, his capacity for violence saw the overthrow of a government and thought he would like to do that himself, to have the power that he saw other people taking.
Guevara arrived in Mexico City in early September 1954 and started working in the allergy section of a hospital.
In June 1955, through his Cuban contacts, Ernesto met Raul Castro, who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, a revolutionary plotting to overthrow the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista, also because he could not grow quite the beard he needed to be the bass player in ZZ Top.
Many years later, declassified Soviet documents revealed Raul Castro as a reliable KGB contact since 1953.
Now again, you've...
Probably you have some awareness of the history of communism, but the history of communism, to those who look at the history of the 20th century with any remotely objective eyes, is far more violent, egregious, and murderous than the history of Nazism.
So it basically is being introduced to Hitler by Himmler, the idea that you are going to be introduced to Fidel Castro by a KGB agent, by a Nazi agent.
In June 24, 1956, Che Guevara was arrested alongside other future guerrillas and the card of the local KGB agent Nikolai Leonov was found in his wallet.
During his interrogation by the police, he openly admitted his communism and declared his belief in the need for armed revolutionary struggle, not only in Cuba, but throughout Latin America.
After learning she was pregnant with his daughter, Che Guevara finally married Gadea in September 55.
On November 25th, 1956, Guevara Castro and the guerrillas set fail for Cuba to overthrow Batista's government, announcing themselves as pro-democracy and anti-communist freedom fighters.
Great idea!
They're communists, but they're going to announce themselves as pro-democracy and anti-communism, and you will see how long that lasted after they were able to seize power.
The U.S. media would later explode with stories of bloodbaths and brave guerrilla warriors led by their fearless commander, Che Guevara.
As is often the case, the reality of what happened is quite different.
The stories of Shea's military exploits are a fabrication.
Castro had figured out a different way to take over Cuba.
In a deal called the Miami Pact, he conspired with anti-Batista Cuban politicians and wealthy exiles to acquire a large fund that he later used to bribe military commanders in Batista's army.
Thus, once again showing how non-armies are better at fighting armies than armies.
Having secured their position in Cuba, the guerrillas invited US media and started reporting manufactured stories of their fights with Batista's army.
In 1958, Washington decided to ban arms sales to Batista's forces, thereby announcing that the US no longer supported his regime.
Abandoned by both his soldiers and US allies, Batista was forced to leave the country.
Skeptical of the media reporting about the heroic Che Guevara-led violent insurrection, officials from the Cuban U.S. Embassy used their local information networks to find out that the total number of combat casualties on both sides of this giant island-spanning bloody revolution was 182.
Che's own diaries reveal that his forces' losses during a two-year civil war amounted to 20.
Or I guess it's the rough equivalent of those who would have died through bee stings.
As British historian Hugh Thomas puts it, quote, In all essentials, Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign fought in New York and Washington.
What?
During the rebels' advance, staunch anti-communists started disappearing from their ranks, fueling the growing fear that Soviet agents had infiltrated Castro's army and were now getting rid of any political or potential opposition.
On January 24th, 1959, shortly after entering Havana, Shea arranged for 3,000 books to be publicly burned.
As it turned out, those books belonged to Cuba's Anti-Communist League, a private research organization who had accumulated information for 250,000 Latin American communists, agents, and KGB contacts.
So the reason for the burning was less censorship and hiding the agents of communism.
The Cuban Revolution officially ended on January 1st, 1959.
Despite promises of democracy, Cuba officially declared itself to be a Marxist-Leninist state only four years later.
After the revolution ended, Che Guevara divorced his first wife and married a member of Castro's army, Aleida March, with whom he had four children.
In late January 1957, at the beginning of the revolution, Guevara wrote to his first wife, I'm here in Cuba's hills alive and thirsting for blood.
A few weeks later, on February the 18th, 1957, he got to quench that thirst.
Utimio Aguero, a rural guide helping out the rebels, was accused of treachery, and Fidel Castro ordered his bodyguard to execute him.
Feeling uncomfortable about killing the man, the bodyguard tried to postpone the execution.
Taking advantage of his comrades' hesitation, Che Guevara stepped out and fired a pistol, point blank, in Guerra's temple.
He wrote, he went into convulsions for a while and was finally still.
Now his belongings were mine.
I'd like to confess, Papa, at that moment, I discovered that I really like killing.
And what better a chance to satisfy his thirst for the blood of others than joining a communist revolution?
Che Guevara wasn't known for his military prowess.
In fact, he openly admitted to some of his comrades that he knew nothing about tactical military matters.
However, Castro recognized Guevara's bloodlust as a valuable asset, and so the Argentine physician quickly rose in ranks to become the regime's chief executioner.
The Himmler to Castro's Hitler.
While few died in combat, countless corpses trailed after the rebels' victories.
Che Guevara kept executing captured soldiers and anyone suspected of supporting Batista.
Damn, but Shea has drowned this city in blood, recalled his comrade, Camilio Sinfurgus, about the city of Santa Clara, which the rebels captured on January 1st, 1959.
Seems that on every street corner there's the body of an execution victim.
This is basically a Marxist-Leninist combine harvester decapitating the unjustly conscripted victims of the Batista regime.
I mean, these men were forced to fight and he's executing them for treachery?
For treachery?
Make up whatever you want.
He just loved to kill.
I mean, he was a wonderful serial mass murderer.
In 1959, Rivera sought the help of Francisco Sueta de Miguel, a Soviet GRU, the main intelligence directorate, officer in establishing Cuba's secret police and training his firing squads.
In their book, Brothers in Arms, the Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder, Gus Russo and Stephen Moulton write, Cuitat insisted that all executioners use live ammunition.
There would be no shooting of blanks by morally queasy gunners.
He called it el compromiso sangriento, or the blood covenant.
It rendered everyone complicit at the killing, thus assuring their loyalty through the bonds of guilt and promising remission through the grace of the Castros and Shea.
So if you don't know, so some firing squads, they put blanks in a few of the people's weapons so that not everyone, nobody really knows if they actually shot someone or not.
They did not do this in Cuba.
All Cuban military cadets were subsequently forced to enter into a compromiso sangriento as a prerequisite for graduation.
So you had to murder someone in cold blood, almost certainly an innocent person, in order to graduate.
This also makes people fanatically defensive of the regime.
Because if another regime comes into power, you would be tried for war crimes for executing people who had not gone through any proper trial.
So it makes you basically fight to the death for your existing regime to be bound into murdering others because you will probably be shot as a war criminal by any other regime that takes over so you might as well fight to the death.
Che Guevara's secret police would go on to commit countless atrocities, often wiping out entire families.
Ibrahim Quintana, a Havana mortician who escaped to Cuba in 1962, recalls, quote, The murder victim was always taken to a government first aid station.
The reason for using the government aid station as an intermediary is so the government official there can make out a death certificate claiming the dead person was killed by means other than shooting.
The government always orders the mortuary not to permit the family to see the body in...
80% of the cases where the body came in with a death certificate saying it had died of something other than shooting, we found one or more gunshot wounds in that body.
Due to these falsified death certificates, the number of people killed by Che Guevara's secret police is unknown.
From January 2nd until June 12th, 1959, Che Guevara stayed in La Cabana Fortress, Which he converted into a prison and used as a torture and execution ground.
Many of the executed prisoners were children.
There are numerous accounts of the brutality with which Che Guevara ran his prison.
A Cuban political prisoner who was sent to La Cabaña remembered when a boy between the ages of 12 and 14 was thrown into the prison because he tried to prevent his father's execution.
The boy was brought in front of the firing squad the same day.
A former prisoner recalled, we simply couldn't believe they'd murder him.
Then we saw Che Guevara unholstering his pistol.
He put the barrel to the back of the boy's neck and blasted.
The shot almost decapitated the young boy.
A Cuban dissident who was imprisoned for 28 years said, There was something seriously wrong with Guevara.
Castro killed an ordered killing, for sure he killed, but he killed, it seemed to us, motivated by his power lust.
To maintain his hold on power, to eliminate rivals and enemies, along with potential rivals and potential enemies.
For Castro, it was a utilitarian slaughter, that's all.
Guevara, on the other hand, seemed to relish it.
He appeared to revel in the bloodletting for its own sake.
You could somehow see it in his face as he watched the men dragged out of their cells.
Child rapist.
Sexual sadist.
Adult mass murderer.
Based by a feminist.
A priest tasked with performing confessions and last rites claimed Che Guevara personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad in the six months he spent in La Cabaña.
Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA agent who assisted in tracking down Che Guevara in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, claims that Che, during his final talk, admitted to a couple thousand executions in which he shrugged off as The Black Book of Communism,
a joint effort by French scholars who documented the human cost of communism in the 20th century, puts the number of people executed by Shea's firing squads in the first year after the revolution at 14,000, which is the equivalent of over 3 million executions in the United States based on population figures.
This is the man loved by Nelson Mandela, admired by Christopher Hitchens.
Remember, Christopher Hitchens had huge problems, huge problems with Mother Teresa, but licks the eyeball-dripping blood-soaked boots of this mass murderer.
Three million Americans slaughtered by a mass murderer.
And can you imagine people wearing The t-shirts of this monster.
In 1960, Che Guevara opened a forced labor camp in the Guanahasabibis Peninsula, similar to the Siberian Gulag's style and only scorching hot.
In Guevara's own words, We only sent to this camp those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail, people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals to a lesser or greater degree, because remember, morals are so important to mass murderers.
It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions there are hard.
By doubtful cases, he means homosexuals and anyone who rejected the regime's ideology.
In an article for the Independent Institute, Alvaro Vargas Losa writes, This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camuguay, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, herded onto buses and trucks.
The unfit would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahasebebe's mold.
Some would never return.
Others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated, and most would be traumatized for life, as Nestor Almendros' wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.
The man ordered the mass murder of homosexuals.
Can I get a hell no?
1957 It was reported that Cuba had a large middle class.
And, quote, The average wage for an eight-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, and Germany.
The report went on to say, Cuban labor received 66.6% of gross national income.
In the U.S., the figure is 68%.
In Switzerland, 64%.
44% of Cubans were covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time.
You have a country here, basically a first world country, a country with a great future, where the supposedly oppressed working classes are getting more of the gross national product than in Switzerland and almost as much as in the United States.
A Shea biographer writes, In 1958, Cubans owned more televisions per capita than any other Latin Americans and more than any other continental Europeans.
And Cubans owned more cars per capita than the Japanese in half of the countries of Europe.
In short, Cuban workers had purchasing power.
In 1958, Cuba had the hemisphere's lowest inflation rate, 1.4%.
The US rate that year was 2.73%.
The Cuban peso was historically equal to the US dollar, completely interchangeable, one-to-one.
So you have an economy that is on parallel, almost, and in some ways exceeding the strongest economy in the world at the time.
In 1959, Castro appointed Che Guevara as Minister of Industries because he was a doctor who liked murdering children, effectively allowing him to take control over the Cuban economy.
The results were so catastrophic that even massive Soviet subsidies weren't enough to keep the country afloat.
As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises has pointed out, without price, you really can't figure out Where goods and labor and services should be directed in the economy.
You know, price is a signal, right?
When a price gets bid up, it means there's a higher demand.
That's where stuff should go.
Without price, you can't possibly push an economy.
Economy has to be a pull economy based on price.
You can't push stuff out, which is why central planning always fails, and fails disastrously, murderously, and for generations to come.
Fontova writes, quote, By late 1964, the Minister of Industries had so badly crippled Cuba's economy and infrastructure, had so impoverished and traumatized its workforce that the Russians themselves were at their wit's end.
They were subsidizing the mess, and it was getting expensive, much too expensive for the paltry geopolitical return.
So basically, when the Soviets are complaining that your economy is inefficient, well, I don't really know what to say other than You know, it's like Charles Manson saying, man, you're bad!
René Dumont, a French socialist economist, tried to counsel Castro as the Cuban economy was spiraling out of control.
The Cuban revolution has gone further in its first three years than the Chinese in its first ten, he said, regarding the economic havoc.
But no luck.
No listening.
Again, the grandiosity, the bloodlust, the control freak sociopathy of Che Guevara and Castro was above and beyond moral, economic, or basic empathetic reality.
In 1964, the Russians gave an ultimatum to Castro.
Che Guevara has to go.
The Soviets simply refused to bankroll Che's harebrained fantasies any longer, writes Vontova.
In December 1964, Guevara tried to retaliate by giving his famous anti-Soviet speech in Algeria, but he was quickly brought back under control after he returned to Havana.
Castro's intimidation was enough to scare his executioner into submission.
In other words, Castro probably said, if you keep acting against me, I'm not going to give you children to shoot.
Okay, what do you need?
On November 17, 1962, the FBI upended a terrorist plot created by Cuba's CIA equivalent, Direction General de Intelligentsia, which Che Guevara established after the Cuban Civil War, ended.
Cuban agents were targeting Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's, and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal train station with 500 kilos of TNT. They were planning to set off all that explosive power the day after Thanksgiving.
For comparison, Al-Qaeda's 2004 Madrid attacks used a total of 100 kilos of TNT. So...
When you see pictures of Che Guevara, a complete terrorist, bombing and destroying innocent civilians, far worse than Al-Qaeda, far worse than Osama bin Laden.
On February 18th, 1965, the FBI and the NYPD cracked another terrorist plot that Che hatched with the help of the Black Liberation Army.
Raymond Wood, a black NYPD cadet, managed to infiltrate the organization and uncover a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument.
If Shea's plan was successful, he could have triggered a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviets who backed Cuba.
So, kind of a dangerous, deranged and evil bastard.
The world's most wanted terrorist, Ilish Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, was trained in one of Shea's guerrilla camps.
In an interview he gave after 9-11, Sanchez claimed, Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed.
I follow news of the September 11th attacks on the U.S. nonstop from the beginning.
I can't describe that wonderful feeling of relief.
The man trained in one of Che Guevara's guerrilla camps.
After his disastrous economic policies and the terrorist attacks he plotted against the U.S., Che Guevara fell out of favor with Moscow.
Not only did he cost the Soviets a lot of money, but they also feared that his continued aggression towards the U.S. may provoke an all-out nuclear war.
Dariel Alassan Ramirez, a former Cuban guerrilla, accused Fidel Castro of siding with the Soviets to eliminate Che Guevara, who Moscow considered, quote, A very dangerous personality for their imperialist strategies.
Castro supposedly yielded for reasons of state, given that Cuba's survival depended on the help of Moscow.
However, at the time, Castro had already secured his position in Cuba, so he no longer needed his bloodhound.
In fact, the dictator was already planning to kill off Che Guevara soon after the Cuban revolution ended.
Know what I'm going to do with Che Guevara?
I'm going to send him to Santo Domingo and see if the Dominican Republic dictator kills him.
In November 1966, Che Guevara was sent to Bolivia to organize local communist insurgents and topple the existing government.
Unlike Batista, the Bolivians fought back and cornered Che.
On October 7, 1967, without any support from Cuba, Che was captured, interrogated, and executed by a firing squad two days later.
The operation was supervised by the CIA. A far worse murderer per capita.
A far greater sadist than Osama bin Laden.
And yet people mourned his death on the left.
Not only do U.S. media outlets run manufactured stories about the Cuban Revolution, but Fidel Castro's regime was also the publisher of the vast majority of Shea's personal work.
The Shea Diaries, the secret papers of a revolutionary, and the reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.
This is all Soviet-style, Nazi-style propaganda.
During the Cuban Revolution, Carlos Lazo, a Cuban Air Force lieutenant serving under Batista, managed to acquire Che Guevara's notebooks and diaries after scattering Che and his guerrillas.
The documents found by Lazo vastly differed from what Castro's regime published, as you can imagine.
While historians rely on Lazo's documents, most of Che Guevara's biographers stick to the information provided by the Cuban government.
In fact, John Lee Anderson, the author of what is considered the Bible on Che's life, wrote his book under the supervision of Of Castro's regime and often used Cuban agents as sources of information.
The thousands of Cuban exiles in the US were ignored by both media and biographers.
It's like going to Goebbels for the history of World War II. Fidel Castro, a well-known master of propaganda, used Che Guevara's manufactured story as an advertising campaign for his regime.
The millions of people wearing Shea's face on their t-shirts, hanging posters of him on their walls, and considering him being a hero are a testament to Castro's success.
So...
The initiation of force, which is the violation of any basic moral system, is foundational to Marxism, to socialism, to communism.
You cannot understand why the mythology of Shea, the charismatic revolutionary hero and advocate and savior of the working class when he raped and murdered thousands and thousands and thousands of them, you can't understand why this These evil doctrines continue if you don't understand that the great battle in the 20th century and into the 21st century is between
free and voluntary trade and coercive central planning.
Between economic actors trading for mutual benefit without coercion and centralized economic oligarchs using the force of the state to organize and enforce their economic doctrines.
Spontaneous self-organization on a voluntary and peaceful basis versus, which is the free market, versus violent, coercive, indebted and destructive central planning from those who hold a monopoly A monopoly of political, economic, and coercive power.
This is a big battle that's going on.
Now, two aspects of that fell away.
Two aspects of central planning fell away.
Fascism and National Socialism, or Nazism.
Communism has won.
Communism has won for a variety of reasons we can get into, but mostly to do with propaganda and the unwillingness of people to take a moral stand on these egregious evils.
And to openly promote violent, murderous sociopaths as cool guys that actors like.
But communism has won.
Most of the original ten planks of the Communist Manifesto have already been implemented throughout the West.
Communism absolutely won the propaganda battle of the 20th century.
And now the only argument is the degree to which we should be communist.
And the free market is always demonized.
Central planning, government planning, government control, central banking is always considered to be the salvation of the economy and anything that goes wrong is blamed on voluntary free trade and anything that goes right is based upon the actions of central planners, right?
So you've heard the myth, which is completely false, that George Bush deregulated the economy and that's why the economic crash Of 2007-2008 happened.
And you hear this stuff over and over again.
It's all lies.
It's all propaganda.
Bush expanded the regulations of the financial industry, not deregulated.
It's just something people make up.
Like, when there's huge disasters in the economy, the central planners need to find a scapegoat.
Right?
And they can't blame ghosts, and there's a shortage of vampires, so they have to blame the free market.
And so, in the same way that a plantation owner whips the slaves when the slaves don't produce enough for his liking, those who suffer under the state are always blamed for the evils that result from state power, and evils will always result from state power.
It's inescapable.
So this is just generally part of the propaganda machine that occurs, which is really foundational to the success, the incredible victory of communism in the 20th and 21st century.
Hopefully people are waking up to it now, and we are reminding ourselves that voluntary free trade is where we need to go as a society, that central planning, coercion, and the initiation of force, which is at the root of all government economic policies, is morally repugnant, morally evil, and economically incredibly Incredibly destructive.
Thank you so much for watching.
Please take down those goddamn posters.
Please don't wear shirts that make you look like you're wearing this.
And recognize that being the poster child for evil is something we should recognize.
And the only red that makes any sense on a Che Guevara t-shirt or poster is the blood.
The endless blood.
The bottomless pit of blood.
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