Torturing and killing people, including children, won’t keep you from being celebrated at Syracuse University. It’s celebrating the brutal Cuban communist killer and mass murderer Che Guevara, who called himself “Stalin II,” after the Communist Soviet dictator whose regime killed at least 20 million people. Campus Reform reports:
Syracuse University is honoring former radical left-wing figures like Cuban Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara and black nationalist Malcolm X with a mural framing, depicting them alongside figures like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr.
The university is showcasing these two individuals in spite of the fact that Guevara was a mass murderer, and Malcolm once met with the KKK to suggest the anti-Semitic idea that Jews were behind the integration movement that the Klan opposed.
The mural is located in the Goldstein Student Center on the school’s South Campus, a high-traffic, residential area primarily for non-freshman students.
Syracuse Chancellor Ken Syverud told Campus Reform he has not seen the mural and does not know whether it is intended to convey the figures as role models. Although he noted that he does not consider Guevera to be his own personal role model, he stressed that Syracuse features the displays as a matter of “free expression.”
”Nevertheless, as you know, free expression is a value we protect when we are at our best here … That is particularly true for artistic expression,” he said.
Like the other figures in the mural, Guevara is associated with four positive attributes that form a cross pattern in the artwork. These consist of the words “Celebrate,” “Imagine,” “Question,” and “Explore.” All individuals in the mural are accompanied by a plaque that provides some brief descriptors accompanied by a quote.
Guevara and Malcolm are depicted in a similar fashion to that of other 20th century icons like MLK, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, thereby implying a moral equivalence.
Guevara’s plaque refers to him as an “Argentinian, Author, Guerilla [sic] Leader, Revolutionary Theorist,” but makes no mention of his time as a brutal executioner and suppressor of dissent.
Che Guevara helped install the brutal Castro regime in Cuba, which resulted in Cuba being poorer, more backward and eventually less healthy.
The Syracuse Chancellor’s claim that the Che Guevara mural was being displayed as “a matter of ‘free expression'” was very dishonest, because Syracuse regularly punishes speech that is either conservative or critical of Syracuse’s shortcomings. “Syracuse University’s speech codes stifle free expression,” notes an op-ed written by a staffer of the non-partisan civil-liberties group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. As FIRE notes,
“Syracuse University is, unfortunately, a red light school, having several policies that severely restrict free speech….Students at SU seeking to protest and speak out against injustice should not have to fear suffering the fate of Matthew Werenczak, expelled by SU’s School of Education for commenting on Facebook about a racially charged remark in 2012, or Len Audaer, investigated by the College of Law for his satirical blog on law school life in 2010. SU’s insistence on punishing its students for nothing more than expressing themselves landed the university on FIRE’s list of worst schools for free speech in the United States in 2012. The university found itself embroiled in another free speech controversy in 2016, when it disinvited — and then reinvited — an Israeli filmmaker due to the anticipated reaction to his documentary film.
Syracuse University is one of the universities most likely to censor speech, and is regularly ranked at, or near, the very bottom of college rankings for freedom of expression.
As Human Progress notes,
Che Guevara also helped establish the first Cuban concentration camp in Guanahacabibes in 1960. This camp was the first of many. From the Nazis, the Cuban government also adapted the motto at Auschwitz, “Work sets you free,” changing it to “Work will make you men.” According to Álvaro Vargas Llosa, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and others who were believed to have committed a crime against revolutionary morals, were forced to work in these camps to correct their “anti-social behavior.” Many of them died; others were tortured or raped.
Guevara also espoused racist views. In his diary, he referred to black people as “those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing.” He also thought white Europeans were superior to people of African descent, and described Mexicans as “a band of illiterate Indians.”
In the article “My Cousin, El Che,” Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr. describes how Che Guevara enjoyed torturing animals —a trait common to serial killers. His record of murdering and torturing people is extensive. Researchers have documented 216 victims of Che Guevara in Cuba from 1957 to 1959. Suspicion was all that was needed to end a life. There was no need for trial because he said the Revolution could not stop “to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.”
Syracuse University is not alone among progressives in celebrating the brutal Che Guevara. Under the Obama administration, the EPA honored Hispanic Heritage Month by promoting Che Guevara, who killed many Hispanics. As Buzzfeed noted:
The Environmental Protection Agency commemorated the start of Hispanic Heritage Month with a picture of Che Guevara and a bit of plagiarism. An internal email . . . distributed to agency employees . . . this Saturday, featured [an] image of a horse and buggy passing a billboard of the Marxist revolutionary, in addition to a listing of facts about Hispanic culture. . .that text and the photo appear to be lifted word-for-word and without attribution from the website Buzzle.com.
As Humberto Fontova notes, Che Guevara was very good at slaughtering innocent people in Cuba, including minors, but not so good as a revolutionary in South America:
Even as a youth, Ernesto Guevara’s writings revealed a serious mental illness. “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” This passage is from Ernesto Guevara’s famous Motorcycle Diaries, though Robert Redford somehow overlooked it while producing his heart-warming movie.
The Spanish word vencido, by the way, translates into “defeated” or “surrendered.” And indeed, “the “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” very, very rarely reached Guevara’s nostrils from anything properly describable as combat. It mostly came from the close-range murders of unarmed and defenseless men (and boys.) Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley….
The one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara’s life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically.
During his Bolivian “guerrilla” campaign, Che split his forces whereupon they got hopelessly lost and bumbled around, half-starved, half-clothed and half-shod, without any contact with each other for 6 months before being wiped out. They didn’t even have WWII vintage walkie-talkies to communicate and seemed incapable of applying a compass reading to a map. They spent much of the time walking in circles and were usually within a mile of each other. During this blundering they often engaged in ferocious firefights against each other.
