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August 14, 2004

Che and Osama: poster-boys forrevolutionary chic and spoilt rich kids

BEN MACINTYRE

IF YOU had told the Bolivian soldiers who finally captured Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967 that they were about to forge one of the world ’s most potentmyths, they would have snorted with derision. Che was caught near theBolivian village of Villagrande, dishevelled and defeated, the final act of adoomed attempt to foment revolution in a country that did not want one. He wastied up, shot four times, then arranged on a grimy sink and photographed toprove he was truly dead. Finally the soldiers cut off his hands, and buried himin an unmarked grave. Another failed revolutionary, dead at 39.

Thirty-seven years later, Che lives — nay, thrives — in posters on

student walls from Bolivia to Bulgaria to Belgravia, in novels, films

and musicals. The famous Warholised Korda image of Che in red-

star beret is used to flog everything from beer to jeans to fridge

magnets. Madonna and the rapper Jay-Z have both dressed up as

Che for their album covers; Liz Hurley, that celebrated anti-

capitalist revolutionary, sports the T-shirt; Mike Tyson has the

tattoo.

Next week, the Edinburgh film festival hosts the premiere of The 

Motorcycle Diaries , based on Che’s account of his journey with a

friend through Latin America at the age of 23. The film stars the

art-house idol Gael García Bernal, and offers a gauzy, romantic

image of the pre-revolutionary Che. In some ways, this is the

ultimate expression of the Che myth: there is little hint of theviolent revolutionary to come, let alone the repressive communist

state that Che helped to create. He is simply a romantic rebel, an

idealistic hunk on a motorbike.

At this point it is worth remembering who Che was: born into

Argentina’s aristocracy, he evolved into a totalitarian guerrilla with

a fondness for Stalin, who authorised death with the easy

conscience of the unimaginative revolutionary. Peasants lacking

the necessary zeal were expendable. His rhetoric was straight out

of the Marx-Lenin handbook of approved cliché. “I believe in the

armed struggle as the only solution.” He was handsome, vain,

splenetic, confused, media-obsessed and ruthless. As an

administrator in his adopted Cuban homeland, first as director of

the national bank then as Industry Minister, he was useless. The

revolutions he tried to spark in Congo and Bolivia failed utterly; the

one that succeeded, in Cuba, left behind a failed and oppressivestate, the residue of a discredited idea.

There is only one comparable example of a revolutionary whose

image among a vast swath of people is so utterly divorced from

reality: and that is Osama bin Laden. Across the Islamic world,

Osama’s image is pinned up as an icon of rebellion, but most of

the young Muslims who voice support for Osama have as little idea

of what he really stands for as the companies that market Che to

sell their wares. Osama may not have Che’s pin-up looks to

Western eyes, but as Jonathan Randal observes in his new book

Osama: The Making of a Terrorist , to young, angry Saudis and

millions of other Muslims, he has genuine “pop star” appeal, with

all the superficiality that that implies.

Che and Osama, the atheist anti-capitalist and the capitalist

theocrat, would not be comrades in politics, yet the parallels

between them are striking, and chilling. Both were children of

privilege, deriving credibility from their rejection of the world they

were born into, preaching hatred and moving restlessly from place

to place; both espouse a violent, global revolutionary creed; both

combine physical infirmity (asthma in Che’s case, kidney disease

for Osama) with the image of the fighter immune to physical

hardship. Both men were radicalised by observing the work of the

CIA: Osama as a Mujahidin volunteer fighting to oust the Soviet

Union from Afghanistan; Che by witnessing the CIA-backed coup

to overthrow the socialist Government of Guatemala in 1954.

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8/14/2019 Che and Osama Poster-boys for Revolutionary Chic and Spoilt Rich Kids

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As Lawrence Osborne observed in The New York  Observer , both

men share the same hackneyed revolution-speak: “Our every

action is a battle cry against imperialism, a battle hymn for the

people’s unity against the great enemy of mankind: The United

States of America.” That was Che Guevara, but it could just as

easily have come from the soundtrack of one of Osama’s videos.

Like Osama, Che was prepared to countenance the death of

unnumbered innocents in pursuit of his ideological ends: at the

height of the Cuban missile crisis, Che was in favour of unleashing

Soviet missiles on the USA.

But in nothing are the two revolutionaries more alike than in their

shared determination to forge and sustain an iconic public image.

Che appreciated the value of photography and media coverage as

much as any modern celebrity; he once remarked that having a

 journalist on hand during the fighting, preferably an American, was

more important than military victory. Osama has been just as

assiduous in turning himself into a poster-boy for a different

audience, with the appropriate symbols of revolution: for Che these

were the cigar, the beret and the wispy beard; for Osama they are

the turban, the Kalashnikov, and the wispy beard.

Che’s after-life was sanctified by the manner of his death: shot

down for what he believed in by a grunt in uniform, a fate the

passes for heroism in the adolescent romantic mind. All Osama

needs, to ensure permanent pin-up status among radical Muslim

 jihadis, is the right sort of death. Al-Qaeda itself is predicated on

explosive self-sacrifice, and as Randal observes, “for years Osama

has honed his hero-cum-martyr image”. A violent martyr’s death

will crystallise his myth, and Osama knows it. Many analysts

expected him to choose Tora Bora as his own Villagrande, the site

of hopeless last stand that would send him straight into the arms

of the 72 maidens that await Islam’s martyrs. Instead, Osamaslipped away to the fastness of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

As the US election approaches, the Americans are probably

closing in on Osama; he probably knows it, and his final photo

opportunity may turn out to be his most powerful weapon of all. As

Che demonstrated, in life and in death, the click of a shutter may

be all that separates a grubby and violent terrorist from a hallowed

freedom fighter.

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