>>A seminar was organised by the Progressive Youth Front (PYF) to commemorate the 83rd birth anniversary of South American Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara here on Sunday.>>

See: http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=55794&Cat=4&dt=7/4/2011

Many years ago on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, I saw students protesting against the death penalty. I had no quarrel with them. After all, I’m against the death penalty myself.

But they were all wearing Che Guevara T-shirts! It struck me like demonstrating against Apartheid while wearing a Hendrik Verwoerd T-shirt. Or, in Australian terms, like demonstrating in favour of a carbon tax while wearing a Tony Abbot T-shirt.

I wondered whether the protesting students actually knew that Che Guevara was Fidel Castro’s executioner. I asked them but they looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

How did this happen?

How did the executioner of a blood-thirsty tyrant become a symbol for – well what exactly?

Why do so-called "progressive" organisations all over the world revere a mass-murderer

"Why do so-called "progressive" organisations all over the world revere a mass-murderer"

For the same reason that teen-agers drink, smoke and take drugs: THEY WERE TOLD NOT TO.

The South-African Apartheid regime was so fearful about communists that anyone (even whites) caught with a photo of Che Guevara at home would disappear for years in the secret-police's torture cellars. Having one was therefore like an extreme-sport, and showing it to a friend was the ultimate proof that you really trusted them.

The iconic Che symbol is about a struggle against oppression and authority. It's a symbol for rebellion.

The details about his life are irrelevant, it's what that part of him represents.

Maybe that's why you'll never see anybody wearing a T-Shirt celebrating the the oppressive Batista regime that he helped overthrow.

>>Maybe that's why you'll never see anybody wearing a T-Shirt celebrating the the oppressive Batista regime>>

No. Apparently we'll just see poor deluded sods wearing a T-shirt celebrating the oppressive Castro regime.

Wobbles,

Do the socialists have any successful leaders that weren't mass murderers?

SM,

How about - Tolstoy, Gandhi, Orwell, Chomsky, Karl Marx, Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King Jr., Moses, Golda Meir, Lech Walesa, Vytautas Landsbergis, Jesus, to name just a few.