The Worship of Villains
Steven Soderbergh’s ponderous hagiography of Ernesto Guevara opens in wide release this weekend, just five years after the last one. As a curative for the delusional adulation of this butcher, reason.tv created this short video.
The historical record is unambiguous: Guevara was a psychopath who valued human life less than Stalinism. He was willing to slaughter millions, including himself, in order to achieve his totalitarian vision. He succeeded in killing far fewer, of course, but only because his zealotry prevented him from accumulating any real power — shrewdness, rather than ideological purity, distinguished successful Cold War thugs. And while we can be thankful his destruction was limited in scope, it unfortunately makes it easier to lie about him.
The throngs of useful idiots decked out in his iconic grimace are merely ignorant of who he really was. A dazzling Hollywood biopic will preserve their ignorance in a shellac of romantic myth. One can only hope that the movie truly is, in the words of one reviewer, “forgettable and wearying.”
While Soderbergh and Del Toro deserve special shame for their recent effort to disguise the sins of an evil man, they are by no means alone. Humans have a special ingenuity for forgetting the crimes of history’s greatest villains, and Guevara is joined by other fashionable items of Soviet kitsch in popular culture.
What is it about tyrants that makes the masses so forgiving? Russians have as of yet failed to immolate the ghastly remains of Lenin, and Uncle Joe still remains popular today — propped up by the support of Uncle Vlad. Mao, arguably the greatest murderer in history, is an even crueler marketing ploy; Cameron Diaz’s faux pas would have gone unnoticed in LA, but she had the ill fortune to stumble upon some of his distant and indirect victims in Peru. And it seems the more remote and few the victims, the easier it is to whitewash the monsters. How incredible is it that people would actually buy and display statuary of Napoleon Bonaparte? And here comes the Houston Museum of Natural Science telling us that Genghis Khan may have soaked the earth with blood, but, dammit, he made the trains run on time. Sometimes it is harder to see which reflects the mostly poorly upon humanity: its ability to produce evil men or to apologize for them afterward.
9 Responses to “The Worship of Villains”
Cool. Now I’ll have a logo’d t-shirt to hang next to my Pilate hoody. And an idea for my next tatoo… if I can find space.
Marxist figures are idolized because a lot of people have real faith that Marxism holds a key (or *the* key, to actual Marxists as opposed to sympathizers) to lifting up the material well-being of the masses. Such folks also do not realize what natural chain of events follow when a utopian sect achieves absolute power through armed force.
Marxism turns the definition of theft on its head: commerce is theft, stealing the means and fruits of commerce by armed force is liberation. Marxism promises a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat phase that will eventually evolve into 100% communal sharing. We don’t need Lord Acton, Orwell, or Coolio that people who achieve this kind of power – and are willing to kill for it – aren’t exactly humanitarians. People who get their jollies taking everyone’s stuff like to keep it for themselves.
The infatuation with Marxists is also blind to their inherent totalitarianism, the logical conclusion of a philosophy that seeks to impose utopia by force. Utopia by definition abolishes social strife, and that can’t happen in a pluralistic society; everyone has to be on board with the same utopian goal. Marxist governments thus seek jurisdiction over everyone’s thought lives.
Suddenly I have a brilliant idea for a business venture…George W. Bush t shirts…worn ironically…
I hope that the irony would be in the idea that someone decided to compare Bush with Genghis Khan, Che Guevara, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao (and not just in the fact that the person wearing the Bush shirt does not actually like Bush, and is trying to communicate the opposite).
Of course, the problem with the Che shirts is they aren’t worn ironically. And there you have a summary of the screwed-up, ill-informed world view of young hipsters: GWB is not just an unpopular President, but a monster, and Che Guevara is a cool guy.
Oops. Karl must have written his comment just as I started reading this post.
has anyone done a Genghis Khan-face version of the Che shirts? that’d be great.
I’ve always been a fan of these shirts: http://www.thoseshirts.com/noche.html
I think the modern phenomenon of tyranny owes a lot to the cult of personality 20th century totalitarians and their champions managed to foster – the Mao/Stalin/Hitler/etc worship really isn’t surprising in that respect.
As for Genghis Khan… on the one hand, of course he committed horrible atrocities in his time. On the other, he was very much a product of his time, and his brutality to maintain power was no more horrific than that used by the legitimate emperors of China or other empires in that period, so perhaps the Houston museum isn’t insane to step back and try and take a more nuanced look at him as a leader, especially considering he’s been demonized for most of history.
In fact, I think the answer to your first question might be found in the Houston museum’s approach. We don’t learn much by demonizing historical figures, and especially if we refuse to acknowledge any good that came of their rule, we blind ourselves to the dangers of the cult of personality and how it operates.