Its been called ‘the face that launched a thousand T-shirts’ and rebranded into a pop cultural icon. Che Chic, a symbol of resistance and rebellion, of revolutionary cool before any white suburban Gaza groupie had even heard of a fucking keffiyeh. I’m talking about the now iconic image of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in one of the defining photos of the 20th century being plastered all over clothing (and much more, see link).
The defiant stare, patchy beard and wild untamed hair under a Frank Spencer beret helped by sympathetic Hollywood portrayals romanticising him as a poster boy for counterculture and a Latin American folk hero fighting U.S capitalist expansion.
His daughter Aleida said of the fad,
“But look at the people who wear Che T-shirts. They tend to be those who don’t conform, who want more from society, who wonder if they can be better human beings. That, I think, he would have liked”. You haven’t met many modern western leftists have you? Smashing the economic system one overpriced T-Shirt at a time, probably made by some poor cunt in a stinking Asian sweatshop for a few cents an hour too.
Cut through the bullshit and his past becomes a bit ‘problematic’ as the lefties like to say. He was a thug and a murderer who ordered and personally executed prisoners as commander of La Cabana prison in Cuba. He also constructed Cuba’s first concentration camp where crimes against ‘revolutionary morals’ including homosexuality were punished with hard labour under the camps motto “Work will make you men”. How progressive, very 1940’s Poland. His and Castro’s ruinous social and economic policies are still felt today, leaving Cuba one of the regions poorest after previously being one of its most prosperous.
Not that any of this would hold much sway with the type of fart sniffing bourgeois throbbers who wear his mug on a T-Shirt and hate ‘the system’ but can’t live without the system. The naive students, walking middle classes cliches of selective outrage who probably don’t know who comrade Che was anyway, just some guy on a shirt. Or the professional armchair revolutionaries, fighting the capitalist pigs, £800 smartphone in one hand, overpriced fairtrade Starbucks latte in the other.
Cunts of the world unite indeed.
the chec store
Nominated by Liberal Liquidator.
