Che Lives! (In Our Colleges, Anyway)

Che Lived! Che Lives! Che will never die!

Che lives. But in Guatemala, Che only lives on T-shirts sold in T-shirt shops which are usually located next to a McDonalds, a Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, etc., or a distinctive and very successful Latin-American fast-food chain founded in Guatemala over thirty years ago, Pollo Campero.

The face of Che is ubiquitous, but his beliefs aren't.

“Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism.” Extolling Globalization, Thomas L. Friedman wrote this in “The World is Flat,” and added that “Capitalism made people unequally rich.”

Besides totally agreeing with Friedman, I would extend his assessment to communism’s bastard step-child, socialism, and add that capitalism succeeds wherever it is tried.

Of course there are many true believers in Communism, but few of them live in the former citadels of Communism, the Soviet Union and China. Even most North Koreans and Cubans have lost their Marxist zeal; they saw their countries go from the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the deification of dictators. But now the Gods of Communism are either dead, discredited, or disregarded: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Mao, Castro, and Kim Il Sung.

I've seen some of their statues already on junk piles, and look forward to see others added to the trash heap of history. How delightful to think of Mao in his mausoleum observing China's mad race down the capitalist road Mao devoted his life and the deaths of a hundred million Chinese to stop.

Now the only place communism and socialism are valued and revered are amongst ignorant and illiterate peoples of undeveloped countries, and in the halls of academia amongst Progressive economists, environmentalists, and anti-Globalizationists.

They and Che are good company.