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Che Guevara and the left:
a response to Louis Nowra
By Bob Gould
The
gap between the rapid right-wing shift in the
public print culture in English-speaking countries and the underlying
persistence, or even new emergence, of radical attitudes among sections
of the
population is underlined by the recent right-wing attack on the
generalised
radicalisation revealed in the population of the movie, The Motorcycle Diaries,
about the young Che Guevara.
One-time
Australian leftist Louis Nowra writes an ignorant attack on Che and the
left generally (Sydney Morning Herald,
January 10), another
one-time leftist David McKnight follows him up, I muscle in with a
careful op-ed
piece tailored to the size allowed, less than 1000 words, and I get a
prompt
rejection from the Herald. I
get an indication that there’ll
be another op-ed piece tomorrow (January 13), by Anne Summers
(prominent feminist and former adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating),
in the McKnight vein of
jumping on Marxism from a great height. So much for the liberalism of
the
Fairfax press.
I’ve
had the experience of writing a number of
carefully crafted op-ed pieces from a leftist point of view, and
they’re
invariably rejected. As Joseph Furphy used to say, such is life. My
op-ed piece
is attached.
It’s
beginning to be my experience that op-ed editors
in the Australian press are chosen for a smarmy liberal demeanour that
masks a
steely spine of deliberate compliance with the right-wing
opinion-moulding
desired by their capitalist masters.
Louis
Nowra, who used to be vaguely leftist, who has
reinvented himself at least once, makes a broad political statement in
the Sydney Morning Herald
of January 10 slandering
a number of political figures on the left, Australian and overseas, all
of whom
for Nowra's purposes are conveniently dead, except for the historian
Stuart Macintyre.
I've
spent nearly 50 years as a socialist opponent of
Stalinism, and I find Nowra's broad attack ahistorical, ignorant and
historically inaccurate.
Nowra
has a problem explaining the appeal of political
figures such as Che Guevara and Lenin to a new generation. He ascribes
it to
banal fashion, but the real source of their appeal is that a big
section of
young people are looking for figures who they can identify with in
their
opposition to the oligarchs and imperialist figures who run the world.
After
all, we live in the West, where Bush, Blair and
Howard took us into a completely unjustified war in Iraq, the awful
consequences of which are now obvious to everybody.
I
wonder if Nowra was one the many who demonstrated
against that war, or in support of refugees who are victims of
imperialist policy adventures in Asia and elsewhere. I see many
greyhairs who
were once
members of the Communist Party in all those movements, and also in the
green
movement.
The
real mystery is, with the public culture so
right-wing in the newspapers and on television, how do oppositional
attitudes
persist?
Nowra's
attack on the now departed Frank Hardy and
Dorothy Hewett is mean-spirited and smacks of a certain literary
jealousy.
Dorothy Hewett, in her autobiography, settled accounts with Stalinism,
for
herself, very thoroughly.
Frank
Hardy did the same in the powerful novel, But
the Dead Are Many, of which Nowra is apparently jealous.
Nowra's
current literary opinion of Hardy's novel was
not shared by a large number of reputable literary critics in the
1970s, when
it appeared. They considered it an extraordinary book inquiring into
the
Stalinist phenomenon.
Hardy
also wrote an important general political piece
attacking Stalinism, The Heirs of Stalin, which
caused considerable
argument at
the time.
Nowra
is none too scrupulous about his alleged historical
facts. Unless you choose to make Lenin responsible for the civil war
that
ensued after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when capitalist
governments
intervened to try to overthrow the Bolsheviks before they'd established
themselves, Nowra's proposition that Lenin killed hundreds of thousands
is
historical nonsense.
It's
also nonsense to make Lenin responsible for
Stalin's coup d'etat after his death, and for Stalin's mass murders,
which
actually did kill millions, including about a million communists.
Stalin killed
the communists to consolidate his power, because they were the ones
most
dangerous to him.
I
find Nowra's attack on Che Guevara utterly bizarre.
He might as well attack the Irish rebel military leader Michael Collins
for the
same kind of crime. Che Guevara was a military leader in a guerilla
rebellion,
and like any military leader he shot several spies and deserters,
agonised
about it, and discussed it publicly in his Memoirs of the Cuban
Revolutionary
War
Perhaps
military leaders such as Churchill and George
Bush are more to Nowra's taste these days.
Che
Guevara's political judgements were sometimes
mistaken, but by any standards he's a towering moral figure. One part
of the
secret of his appeal to idealistic youth is that he put his own body on
the
line. What other revolutionary political leader has participated in the
overthrow of a reactionary regime, been for several years a leading
figure in
the new government and then voluntarily gone off to another front in
the
revolutionary struggle, as he saw it?
His
tactical sense may have been overwhelmed by
romanticism, but no one can doubt the courage of his attempt to
overthrow a
reactionary regime in another country with a small guerilla group led
physically by himself, with the ultimate consequence that he was
murdered by
agents of the CIA after being captured in battle.
The
image of the executed Che Guevara resonates with
the radical section of the youth of the world, particularly in Latin
America,
where he is identified with the other figure in Latin American history
who did
much the same, the liberator, Simon Bolivar.
Louis
Nowra can vent his literary spleen on dead
leftist writers, and Bob Gould can snap back at him in relatively
comfortable
Australia, but Che Guevara died in the Bolivian jungle fighting for his
cause,
which is on an altogether different plane to Australian literary
disputes.
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