Useful idiots
Cole Stangler is a student at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service where he studies [sic] International History .Imagine if this communist were to join the State Department and set loose on the world to “represent” our interests? Of course he’d receive a warm welcome in Foggy Bottom where he’d serve with others of his ilk but for those of us who aren’t communists, the prospect is daunting.
Here’s his take on Che Guevara. You really should read the whole thing but this excerpt will demonstrate what the mush-for-brains idiot is thinking and planning.
British-Pakistani historian Tariq Ali’s reaction to the assassination of Che Guevara on October 12, 1967 was shared by an entire generation of leftists, activists, and youth hopeful for change. Setting aside long-standing debates regarding some of Guevara’s misdeeds, [emphasis added] it’s safe to say Che was the unquestionable symbol of global revolution. He was born in Argentina, became a revolutionary in Cuba, appeared as a statesman at the United Nations in New York City, and returned to the guerilla struggle in Africa and South America. His youthful dynamism, energy, optimism and sense of international solidarity in the pursuit of collective liberation were remarkable and inspirational traits. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, an icon.
As the thirty-fourth anniversary of Che’s death passes, our generation is mourning the death of one could be considered a cultural equivalent—Apple CEO Steve Jobs. At this point, the attention given to Job’s death parallels, if not surpasses, that given to Che’s in 1967. One only wonders if, like Tariq Ali’s generation, an entire generation of youth will “recall every small detail of the day” that Jobs died. This doesn’t seem all that unlikely.
Facebook statuses and profile photos were updated in homage to the head of the corporate giant, and opinion pages worldwide were filled with glowing reflections. My mom sent me an “inspirational” quote of his, and a friend commented on how he watched Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford after hearing the news of the CEO’s passing. Nearly everyone was in agreement: Jobs was a visionary who helped define one of the most important technological achievements in human history. He also had an apparently extraordinary ability to anticipate what consumers would want before they even knew it: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” Jobs famously said.
That this last point has been celebrated is quite chilling for a number of reasons, but it is also remarkably fitting for an entire generation that has internalized the values of corporate capitalism and mass consumption. Jobs created and oversaw a profit-yielding machine that could apparently shape human preferences into desiring more of his company’s products. While Ernesto Guevara represented global solidarity in fighting oppression [emphasis added], our modern icon celebrated and perpetuated the idea that, well, there are really cool things that we must buy—we must own these cool things so we can consume them. Then we repeat this cycle because it makes us feel good.
Having demonstrated his ability to suck $400,000 from his parents for a Brunswick “education” and learn nothing from it, it’s too much to hope that young Cole will read anything of substance during his current stay at Georgetown but other readers might be interested in an alternative to a very stupid sophomore’s hagiography of Che.
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
i certainly don’t begrudge this stupid, silly boy his passion for terrorists and communists and if he wants to enslave his fellow citizens well, we’ve survived such threats before and can surely rid ourselves of the like of Cole Stangler. But I am concerned that he’s part of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service from which, unbelievably, the State Department often draws recruits. Alone, a spoiled Greenwich kid is no threat to anyone; lurking behind the scenes at the State Department is another matter entirely.
For What It's Worth 