=By= Gaither Stewart

“Telling the truth is always revolutionary.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday I visited the tomb of Antonio Gramsci in the Poets’ Cemetery in Rome, a final resting place for artists, poets, writers and illustrious foreigners and lovers of Italy. January 22 is the birthday of the Italian professional revolutionary and founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. An inconspicuous urn resting in the center of the mound contains the ashes of the philosopher and Marxist thinker. The tombstone bears only his name and his dates—1891-1937. Fresh red flowers indicate that the site is regularly tended.

I visited the tomb of Gramsci also because I wanted to speak of the man who in my mind is most representative of the better side of tormented twentieth century Italy, an advocate of a new social-political-economic structure and a major figure in shaping progressive thought from the early XX century.

I wanted to speak of Gramsci because the Italy that many people love continues to be threatened by a contagious right-wing populism. Since the demise of the Italian Communist Party in 1991 and in the wake of successive right, center-right and center governments often led by populists, Italy has experienced depths of reaction and wishy-washy governments that would cause Gramsci’s progressive spirit to wing its way to other worlds.

The figure of Antonio Gramsci is emblematic of the profound dichotomy between progress and reaction that has marked much of Europe since the end of the nineteenth century. The Marxist Gramsci would have ambivalent feelings about his neighbors in the Poets’ Cemetery: lying near him are dozens of “White Russian exiles,” whose culture was dedicated to maintaining the hegemony of the Russian upper class over the masses, which Gramsci opposed. They were the adversaries of the Bolshevik revolution in Tsarist Russia in 1917, which Gramsci supported.

On the other hand, Gramsci must have had sympathy for the progressive English poets, John Keats and Percy Byshe Shelley, who lie under two pines in a distant corner of the same cemetery. Keats (“I saw pale kings, and princes too” from his La Belle Dame san merci) wrote, as Gramsci must have at some point, “I am ambitious to do the world some good.”

Antonio Gramsci, 30 years old, and his Russian wife, Julia Schucht. Gramsci went to Moscow in May 1922 and became a member of the Comintern Executive Committee. He lived in Moscow until November, 1923. During that time he met and married Julia Schucht, a member of the Bolshevik Party, the daughter of a friend of Lenin, Apollon Schucht. Julia was rumored to be an agent of Lenin’s secret services, the OGPU under Feliks Dzerzinsky. So Gramsci’s meeting with her was either a romantic love at first sight or Julia was controlled by Lenin. I set my novel, Time of Exile, at the Poets’ Cemetery and in a house on the short, cobblestone street, Via Trapani in the Nomentano district of Rome, where Julia and some of the Trapani family lived while Gramsci was in prison. Julia returned to the Soviet Union after Gramsci’s death, while some of the family remained in Italy. See Julia Schucht on the web for many curiosities of the era.

Keats arrived in Rome a sick man—as Gramsci was all his life—and died at age twenty-six after choosing the Poets’ Cemetery for his resting place. Shelley, who preferred “painful pleasures to easier ones”, also lived his last years in Italy where he died in a Mediterranean storm near Lerici and joined his friend Keats a year later.

As much as he appreciated their culture and admired Keats’ universal words, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ Antonio Gramsci, did not worship all the names of the Western literary canon because, he believed, there was usually an unacceptable ideology involved in their canonization. In his Selections from the Prison Notebooks he writes of the difficulty of intellectuals to be free of the dominant social group (the major problem of western intellectuals today and especially in the USA!); he was mistrustful of the esprit de corps and the compromises running through the Italian and European intellectual community of his times.

While poetry, for example, in the Anglophone world has often remained distant from the political world in the popular belief that “poetry does not count”, in the world at large poets have often led the charge against colonialism, imperialism and fascism: like Martì in Cuba, Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua, Federico Garcìa Lorca in Spain, Paul Eluard in France, Quasimodo in Italy, Pablo Neruda in Chile.

Poetry can and does fuel free-thinking and democratic strivings. The poet is an intellectual in Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci’s sense: “Non-intellectuals do not exist,” he writes, because “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.” Gramsci suggests that activism, not only eloquence, is a determining principle of the intellectual’s function “as constructor, organizer, permanent persuader, and not just a simple orator.”

Born in Sardinia, Gramsci moved to Turin in 1913. At the university there he came into contact with the strong Socialist movement. He was then a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became its head the year after. He was elected to Parliament in 1923. Three years later he was arrested by the Fascist police and spent most of the rest of his life in prison.

Like most great men Gramsci hoped to change the world. His point of departure was the Marxist idea that everything in life is determined by capital. The class that controls capital is the dominant class. The capitalist class formulates its ideology to secure its control—or in Gramscian language, its hegemony—over the people. Class struggle results when the people try to change the rules and take power.

The task of intellectuals is to lead and act politically in order to change the world. “Let men be judged by what they do, not what they say.”

The Marxist Gramsci knew nothing of Lenin until 1917 and Lenin probably only learned of Gramsci when he founded the Italian Communist Party and while he was in Moscow. In any case, Leninism was only one ingredient in Gramsci’s theory for social change. While Leninism is now largely history, many of Gramsci’s contributions to Socialist thought are intact: the intellectual pursuit and culture.

Though Gramsci was interested in political action and believed in the necessity of a political movement, in his thinking revolutionary violence is not the only path to challenge the hegemony of the capitalist class. Though a revolutionary, not a pacifist, he did not advocate a Leninist totalitarian world outlook.

Gramsci amended Marx’s conviction that social development originates only from the economic structure. His distinction of culture was a major advance for radical thought, and it still holds today. His point was and is: although culture does not lead social change, it is just a step behind.

The Italian Marxist recognized that political freedom is a requisite for culture; if religious or political fanaticism suppresses the society, art will not flower. To write propaganda or paint conformist art is to succumb to the allures and/or the coercion of the reigning system. For that reason most artists, like Keats and Shelly, are countercurrent. That is also why artists should stay far away from the White House or the Elysées Palace.

Gramsci like other Marxists insisted on the role of intellectuals to lead the way toward reform. Gramsci believed that mass media, the instrument used by the dominant class to spread its hegemony, can also be used to counter that hegemony. Throughout the world today we see the confrontation—still unequal—between establishment media on the one side and the spread of alternative media on the other: independent publishers and filmmakers and the free “alternative” press.

Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

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Holding True

=By= Ramzy Baroud

Ali Abumghasib knows little about the current intrigues of the Fatah Movement, or, perhaps, he is just not interested. Although he has dedicated most of his life fighting within its ranks, he never saw his membership in Fatah as his defining identity. For him, it was, and will always remain, about Palestine and nothing else.

Now living in an old, rusty and tiny caravan somewhere in Gaza, Ali has no money, no family, but also no regrets. We spoke at length about his life. He wanted to share his story, and I wanted to understand what went wrong in what was once Palestine’s leading movement.

Now that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who is also the Head of Fatah, is fighting an open and covert war to keep his party together, Fatah is facing yetanother crisis.

The current struggle to inherit one of the two largest political movement in Palestine (the second being Hamas) promises to be dirty, especially since the Old Guard is losing its grip, as a younger, more vibrant, generation is ready to step in and take over long-overdue power. A split in Fatah could mean the partial or total collapse of the PA, which is dominated by Fatah members. When rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently ordered his government to prepare for the possible collapse of the PA, the Fatah leaders immediately took notice, dismissing Netanyahu’s claims and asserting that everything is still under control.

But this is not the same Fatah that Ali had fought for or, more precisely, fought within; because, for the 65-year-old man, with failing health and marks of torture that can be traced all over his body, Fatah was a mere platform that allowed him to fight Israel, with the promise that his struggle would take him, and a million other refugees, back to their villages and homes in Palestine. Since he joined Fatah’s military bases in Jordan, in 1968, refugees have not returned, as their numbers have now exceeded the five million mark. Concurrently, Fatah morphed to become the Palestinian Authority, whose very survival is dependent on Israeli political support and the West’s financial handouts.

Ali Abumghasib is a Palestinian Bedouin, from the nomadic tribes that lived in the Bir Al-Saba region in Palestine. In 1948, his family lost everything. His father became a squatter in the land of some Gaza feudalist, herding a few sheep in a pitiful attempt to survive. Ali, who was born in 1951, ran away from home just months after Israel occupied the Gaza Strip (and the rest of historic Palestine) in 1967, without even informing his parents of his decision. The parents died as poor refugees in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza, without ever going back to Palestine, without ever seeing Ali again, and without their pride.

This may seem like a typical refugee story, but it is far from that. For Ali’s odyssey that followed was not only compelled by circumstances, but also choices that for the rest of us may seem extraordinary. From Gaza, he sneaked through the ‘death zone’ border area to Israel, then to the occupied West Bank, where he hid in the Hebron hills, before being smuggled with a tribe that escaped the war to Jordan. There, he joined Fatah and, only months later, enlisted in his first mission, code-named the ‘Green Belt’. The daring operation represented the rise of Fatah, following the collapse of the Arab armies in the 1967 war.

But the sudden collapse of pan-Arabism, following the ‘Naksa’ or ‘Setback’ of 1967, ushered in the rise of Palestinian nationalism, led by Arafat, George Habash and others, who took charge of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and began articulating a unique, unprecedented Palestinian discourse. The new struggle for Palestine had shifted from seeing Palestine primarily as an Arab priority, into one that was essentially Palestinian.

Although Arafat is often remembered for signing the Oslo peace accords with Israel, which led to the rupture of Palestinian unity and the breakdown of the entire national liberation project, Ali remembers him as the man who managed to restore Palestinian hope after the defeat of 67. To assert the rise of the new war of liberation, a guerrilla warfare, by the logic of that period, was a must, and Ali fought many battles so that Fatah and the PLO could make it clear to Israel that sealing the fate of Palestinian refugees was far from over. In the ‘Green Belt’, Ali and 39 other fighters selected from four factions, infiltrated Israel from the Jordanian border, killing several soldiers and capturing two in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners.

However, the real rise of Fatah was truly marked in the Al-Karameh battle in 1968, in which the Jordanian army, together with various PLO factions, took part. True, the Israelis destroyed most of the PLO camps at the Jordan border, but were driven out in what, unexpectedly, turned into an all-out war. Ali fought that war too, and remembers how the morale of the fighters, despite their heavy losses, changed overnight. Soon, however, the empowered PLO factions found themselves in another all-out war, this time against the Jordanian army. The outcome was devastating, not just because it saw the death of thousands and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, but the capture of Ali himself. Injured in the civil war, Ali was sentenced to death and was held in Al-Jafr desert prison before he escaped to Syria.

There was, indeed, a time when Fatah and the Hafiz Al-Assad regime got along just fine, but that was a short phase in what later became quite a tumultuous relationship between Fatah and the Assads throughout the years.

Ali fought since he was a teenager, and spent most of his life either in battle (as a member of Fatah) or in prison. In all the Arab jails where Ali was held prisoner, he was a guest in Syrian dungeons the longest, staying a total of 10 years. In his last prison stint he was held, along with 80 other people, in a four by four-meter prison cell. Following the Syrian-uprising which turned into war, he was deported to Lebanon.

That was the same Lebanon where Ali fought the Israelis, and also fought the Phalange Christians. After the PLO left Jordan, Lebanon became the new battlefield. But Lebanon’s protracted conflicts made it an unsuitable host for the PLO. In 1975, Fatah-led PLO factions were at the heart of Lebanon’s civil war, triggered partly by the Phalange massacre in Ein Al-Rumaneh, where nearly 50 Palestinian children were ambushed and murdered. The details of that dirty war are still as fresh in Ali’s memory as if it happened recently. His anger is still palpable, as is his defense of the PLO conduct there.

Ali, despite old age, failing health and the awful scars of bullets and torture marks, insists that if he were to have the chance again, he would fight the Israelis with the same enthusiasm as a young man. In fact, when the Lebanese deported him to Egypt in 2014, and the Egyptians deported him to Gaza a few days later, he tried to volunteer with the Gaza Resistance. The young men respectfully declined. Ali is handsome, but disheveled, with a bushy beard, missing teeth and many wrinkles. When he walks his left foot seems to drag behind him as if it is connected to his torso by mere skin.

Ali Abumghasib may seem like a relic of a bygone era. But the fact is, Ali has remained committed to Fatah’s early revolutionary principles, where the fight was, in fact, for a homeland and not international handouts; for freedom, not false prestige; for national liberation, not useless titles.

Those involved in the current power struggle within Fatah are possibly unaware of who Ali is and of the values which he stubbornly defends to this day. It is important, though, that they take notice, before all is lost

Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Contributing Editor Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Revolutionary Pen

=By= Gaither Stewart

The short biography: Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario in western Argentina on June 14, 1928 of well-to-do, leftwing parents, the oldest of five children, He died in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39. His family moved to Buenos Aires when he was 17. He learned chess from his father of Irish heritage, read from the family of library of 3000 books and was home-schooled by his radical mother. He read Pablo Neruda, John (I want to do the world some good) Keats, Walt Whitman, Jack London, Federico Lorca, Faulkner, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Marx, Engels, Lenin and many Latin American writers. He studied medicine and motorcycled through much of Latin America. He studied Marxism also while in the youth brigades in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz leftwing government before it was crushed by a CIA-organized coup d’état. In 1955 he joined Fidel Castro in Mexico where the Cubans began calling him el Che because of his constant use of the common Argentinean interjection, Che, that means something like Hey! Or, Eh? Argentineans use the interjection so often that other Latin Americans sometimes use the word for a man from Argentina. In effect, “Che” Guevara came to imply also something like “our comrade from Argentina.”. Despite their contrasting personalities he and Fidel formed a “revolutionary friendship to change the world”, which expressed their common desire. He sailed with the Castro brothers and Cienfuegos on the Granma to Cuba where they overthrew the corrupt Batista regime—the four who made the Cuban Revolution. Twelve years later, as a commander of the guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was wounded, captured and executed by a Bolivian soldier on orders from the CIA.

CHE GUEVARA – A HERO OF OUR TIMES?

Some accommodating persons believe that there are more heroes in life than we imagine. Sophistic claim! Which I doubt. It depends on what qualities constitute a hero, which in my opinion include a consistent state of bravery, dedication and above all commitment to an ideal to which the person gives his or her life.

Superhuman requirements. Perhaps the real hero is still a figure of myth as in the ancient Greeks when the heroic was divine and there was no clear distinction between super humans and the gods.

More reductively we should speak of the heroic actions of which people are capable at certain moments, under particular emergency conditions. Heroic acts may be spontaneous and instinctive, or acts of desperation triggered by fear, or a one-time display of human decency or duty to dive into a raging river to save the life of a child. However, as often the case, the heroic action may be an ego-driven and temporary urge to perform an act of bravado, a pose for show. Sorry for that! In a way I hate that affirmation.

But then some solace! For there are those precious few persons so obsessed by a positive idea that they dedicate their entire (often) short lives to one idea in the most heroic of fashions. Lenin is an example: his life was the Russian Revolution … and he changed the world. Ernesto Guevara’s obsession was world revolution against imperialism. Neither family—parents, wives and children—nor even the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro succeeded in deviating el Che, the man from Argentina, from that one objective: revolution against imperialism.

So the real HERO does not exist only in myth.

While living in Buenos Aires in 2007 I acquired a book by the Argentinean journalist, Julia Constenla, Che Guevara, la vida en juego (Che Guevara, Life At Stake). Moved by her first acquaintance with Ernesto Guevara that lasted several days at a conference of the Interamerican Economic and Social Council in Punta del Este, Uruguay in August of 1961 and a lifelong friendship with Ernesto’s mother, Celia, the Argentine writer offers new materials about the Latin American revolutionary’s extraordinary life. Her three hundred-page biography is illustrated with hundreds of photos, letters, papers and drawings, many of which had never before been published, of the man who became el Che. The documentation for the book plus videos were then shown in an exhibit in the Centro Cultural of the Buenos Aires barrio of Recoleta in 2007 near my residence.

There is Ernesto in the video and photographs, the newborn child in his mother’s arms in Rosario in 1928, his features already recognizable. There he is on his bike traveling through South America; there he is with wives and children, with his companions, then, there is a victorious Che in Cuba, a defeated Che in the Congo, riding on donkeys with his rifle in his arms, and there he is reading, writing, revolutionizing. And there he is, at the end, a prisoner, weak, dirty and wounded, in La Higuera, Bolivia. He is about to be executed. And then, there he is, Ernesto Guevara, el Che, dead.

Posters hanging on the walls of youth of the world testify that Ernesto Che Guevara is widely considered a hero of our times. A profound explanation of the universal appeal and impact of this single Argentinean is found in the words of Jean Paul Sartre that “Che Guevara was the most complete human being of our age.”

I have long wondered what took place in some brain cell of that young Argentinean, Ernesto, to transform him into the man of action who became the idol of generations of world youth. For if he had not become a revolutionary, he would most certainly become a great writer.

Let’s see: he arrived from the provinces to the metropolis of Buenos Aires, a handsome, smart young guy, both John Keats and Karl Marx in his head, who wanted to make good, to make a mark, to leave a footprint. He wanted to divest himself of everything provincial and to distinguish himself in the world at large. But such considerations are reductive, in fact not even applicable for a man who wanted the whole world.

From Buenos Aires he wandered off with a friend on their bikes and ended up in Guatemala at the time the small country was experimenting with Socialism under Jacobo Arbenz. And his life began to change.

Here I turn to Wikipedia for details: Elected President in 1950, Arbenz’s modest policies of land reform and other social measures like eliminating brutal labor practices, displeased the United Fruit Company and the U.S. government who considered it Communism. In 1952 President Truman approved a CIA plan to bring down the Arbenz government. The operation was aborted because it became too public.

Then President Eisenhower, elected that year on a platform of a harder line against Communism, authorized another CIA coup d’état (John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles in the lead) with an invasion, bombings of Guatemala City and psychological warfare. Arbenz resigned and the United Fruit Company and the CIA won. That coup reinforced Guevara’s anti-imperialistic instincts.

Those events had a galvanizing effect on the 22-year old Ernesto Guevara, prompting him to move up to Mexico City to the north where he joined up with Fidel Castro, only two years older than him.

Now Ernesto was helping to make a real revolution. He was one of its leaders. He walked the streets of Mexico City, a still rather provincial city, nothing like the Buenos Aires he had left, but it was another world capital to add to his “captured places”. A place to spend his personal ambition (he was still emerging from the distant provinces of Argentina) and at the same time to fight the Yankee imperialists.

The Cuban revolutionaries, Fidel and Raul Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos, took to calling him Che, the Argentinean comrade. He began smoking his symbolic cigar and adopted his famous beret with the red star. Perhaps he was still speaking in his Argentinean accent while learning the rapid fire Cuban of the revolutionaries; they were all heroic young men about to change the political landscape of all of Latin America.

In an article in the leftwing Buenos Aires daily, Pagina 12, Julia Constenla described her personal meetings with Ernesto Guevara across the Rio de la Plata in plush Punta Del Este in Uruguay where she was covering that conference organized by U.S. President Kennedy “to discipline the Latin American continent.” Though Cuba was not to have been invited, after complex diplomatic maneuvers, Che (by then a Cuban citizen) arrived to represent Cuba. Also Guevara’s parents came and they lived in the house of the journalist Constenla. There began her days together with Ernesto Guevara and his parents.

“I was not aware that I was involved in world history but only with one of the Barbudos of the Cuban Revolution. They had been in power two years in Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara. For days I had meals with Ernesto, interviewed him, conversed with him. He was very self-sure, with an extraordinary capacity to go straight to the point, had an acid irony, and was very seductive: when he entered the conference room everything centered on him.”

The journalist-writer says that by the mid-seventies, after Che’s death and the establishment of the dictatorship in Argentina, she realized he was one of the most important persons of the XX century. “He went down in history as the best our century could produce. In Mexico and in the mountains of Cuba, Ernesto became the famous Che.

“Before, he was a young Argentinean, brave, generous, intelligent and politicized, but not yet el Che. I see in him a level of commitment greater than I’ve ever known.” The video shown at the exhibit of him in Cuba shows a man constantly among the masses, talking, explaining, working. Electrifying speeches that many of us leftists dream of pronouncing ourselves. A man of the new state of Cuba who traveled to China and met with Mao Tse-Tung, met Nehru in India, Khruschev in the USSR.

“After his defeat in the Congo he could have returned to Cuba for a comfortable life of work and study; instead he chose to go to Bolivia. His level of commitment is incomparable. Therefore people who believe they are followers of Guevara because they have a poster of him sicken me.”

The Constenla biography denies the rumored rupture between Fidel and Che as the reason he went to Bolivia, labeling such charges as propaganda to denigrate the Cuban Revolution. She says that Che Guevara always recognized Fidel Castro as the chief. Castro on the other hand gave him the most important assignments. Though Castro did not agree with Che’s adventures in the Congo and Bolivia, he accepted his ideas.

Constenla also rejects the idea of Guevara’s suicide at the end: “He was in Bolivia to win or to die!” He lost. She recalled the strange coincidence that some eighteen people—Bolivians and others—involved in Che’s almost certain assassination died soon after in still unexplained circumstances.

Since Italy and Argentina are considered cousins because of the huge Italian immigration there, the Italian Left has strong feelings for the figure of Che Guevara. The Italian journalist Gianni Minà did a major interview with Castro back in 1987, which regularly resurfaces when news concerns Castro, especially since the Leader’s retirement.

In that long interview of many hours spread over several days Minà concentrated on the figure of Che Guevara and his revolutionary vocation. Castro stressed el Che’s altruism, his determination, his impulsiveness and his fear that the revolution in Latin America against imperialism would end like the others.

About Guevara the man, Castro recalled that when they were in Mexico together, Ernesto, despite his asthma, was determined to scale the gigantic Popocateptl peak near Mexico City. He never succeeded but he never gave up.

Che Guevara believed above all in the exportation of the revolution. And for him Bolivia was a stepping-stone back to his native Argentina. First Bolivia, then Argentina. As usual his foresight was striking. The explosive year of 1968 was just around the corner and Che Guevara was to be its symbol.

Now again today Leftists consider Bolivia a key to the future of a democratic Latin America. Readers might be aware that the socio-political movement of miners and peasants headed by Bolivian President Evo Morales emerged from the resistance that el Che had furthered forty years earlier.

Some political observers credit Che Guevara for transforming the Cuban nationalist Castro into the Latin American revolutionary he became. (Romantic thought!) Maybe it is true. For on every occasion Che’s slogan was ‘resistance to imperialism’. He must have hammered that idea into Castro’s head.

At the time of the great escalation in Vietnam in 1964-66, Guevara created the phrase of universal resistance: “Create two, three, many Vietnams,” a slogan that reverberated in Germany in the minds of the “terrorists” of the Red Army Faktion, and from there to the Red Brigades in Italy.

In his “Message to the Tricontinental,” the then newly formed Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a paper written before leaving Cuba for Bolivia, then published in April 1967 in the organization’s magazine Tricontinental, under the title “Create two, three…many Vietnams, that is the watchword,” Che wrote:

“How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe, with their quota of death and their immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the peoples of the world!”

Che’s credo was, “Any nation’s victory against imperialism is our victory, as any defeat is also our defeat.”

Among Ernesto Guevara’s many epiphanies on the road to world revolution was that of “guerrilla warfare”. Resistance, resistance and again resistance. Guerrilla warfare was the shortcut to the victory of Socialism and the birth of the New Man. He must have first seen the light after the CIA crushed the Arbenz revolutionary government in Guatemala. Like Saul on the road to Tarsus, his eyes were opened and he became a revolutionary.

Maybe he left Cuba and a life of ease for Bolivia because his vision was broader in scope than that of Castro. In fact, he had never belonged exclusively to Cuba. From Guatemala to Mexico City, from Cuba to the Congo, East Europe, Asia, his vision became universal. In Algiers, nine years after the CIA coup in Guatemala, in his last recorded major speech he criticized the Soviet Union and socialists countries for doing too little to help developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa and for not supplying arms to the poor to rise up against their oppressors.

Shortly afterwards he left Cuba for Bolivia, where he died. Twelve, 12, only twelve fast years had passed since he experienced the CIA coup in Guatemala. That may have been the catalyst for his dedication to world revolution: he was a young leftwing university graduate looking for adventure before; he was a revolutionist afterwards.

Protest and resistance are major phenomena of the modern age, part of contemporary vocabulary. Though often linked together, they are not the same thing. In rich Europe and United States we are familiar with protest against injustice. Protest can be easy and immediately rewarding. But you can protest, then go back home to comfort and ease.

Resistance, as indicated by the dean of Argentine writers, Ernesto Sabato, against all-pervasive power, against the system that stands behind injustice, requires commitment. Resistance and commitment like Che Guevara’s are difficult, a hard way of life. His kind of resistance demands your life; its price is high.

Che Guevara was not a saint. He condemned to death traitors of the Cuban Revolution, according to his belief that in a revolution “you either win or you die.” And he allegedly once said that if the Soviet missiles installed in Cuba were under Cuban command they would have been directed to American cities.

True or not, that shows the stuff Ernesto Guevara was made of. And it underlines his belief in resistance and the revolution. Che Guevara did not become a model for the IRA in Ireland and other European leftwing terrorists as well as for Islamic fundamentalists because of saintliness. Revolution was not a tea party for el Che.

His real legacy was his own life. Most photographs of him show the man of action. Handsome like the photo above, intelligent, writer, doctor, political leader and revolutionary, traveling on his Homerian odyssey through all of Latin America and the Third World.

Movements of resistance, rebellion, revolt and revolution have always been rich in slogans and rituals and symbols that are more powerful and unifying than speeches: the red flag and the hammer and sickle mean resistance. A revolutionary movement needs symbols reflecting its ideology. The Cuban Revolution itself is such a symbol for resistance against imperialism everywhere. Che Guevara himself is a symbol. Since no movement is political without an ideology, we do not mistreat our symbols. They encourage the vanguard and work wonders on the people. The Internationale anthem stirs our emotions. Every society makes some objects sacred—totems, animal images, gods, holy books, flags, or even concepts such as freedom or democracy. Rituals bond members of the society. Symbols inspire devotion and loyalty among those who identify with them.

Ernesto’s beret with the red star and his eternal cigar gave vigor to the Cuban Revolution and linked it to world revolution.

As a result of my Buenos Aires experience and my love for Argentina’s great writers like Ernesto Sabato and Jorge Borges, I try to imagine what the conservative Borges might have said about his fellow countryman, Ernesto Guevara. He would have been curious and intrigued as he was about the Buenos Aires underworld but I wonder if the effete intellectual Borges would have been able to consider Che Guevara a hero of our times. …

Yet, yet, yet, just as I have wondered about Ernesto, who knows what ticked in that huge bourgeois brain of Borges. Both of them, at the end, had their sights set on Argentina and their ways might just have come together, arriving from totally different directions. I like to hope so.

Senior Editor Gaither Stewart based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

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=By= Ramzy Baroud, PhD

M. Abbas

Although intended to inspire his Fatah Party followers, a televised speech by Mahmoud Abbas on the 51st Anniversary of the group’s launch highlighted, instead, the unprecedented crisis that continues to wreak havoc on the Palestinian people. Not only did Abbas sound defensive and lacking in any serious or new initiatives, but his ultimate intention appeared as if it was about his political survival, and nothing else.  

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Courage

=By= Andre Vltchek

Day and night, for years, an overwhelming force has been battering this quiet nation, one of the cradles of human civilization.

Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions have been forced to flee abroad or have been internally displaced. In many cities and villages, not one house is left intact.

But Syria is, against all odds, still standing.

During the last 3 years I worked in almost all of Syria’s perimeters, exposing the birth of ISIS in the NATO-run camps built in Turkey and Jordan. I worked in the occupied Golan Heights, and in Iraq. I also worked in Lebanon, a country now forced to host over 2 million (mostly Syrian) refugees.

The only reason why the West began its horrible destabilization campaign, was because it “could not tolerate” Syria’s disobedience and the socialist nature of its state. In short, the way the Syrian establishment was putting the welfare of its people above the interests of multi-national corporations.

*

More than two years ago, my former Indonesian film editor demanded an answer in a somewhat angry tone:

“So many people are dying in Syria! Is it really worth it? Wouldn’t it be easier and better for Syrians to just give up and let the US have what it is demanding?”

Chronically petrified, this young woman was always searching for easy solutions that would keep her safe, and safe with significant personal advantages. As so many others in this time and age, in order to survive and advance, she developed a complex system resting on betrayals, self-defenses and deceptions.

How to reply to such a question?

It was a legitimate one, after all.

Eduardo Galeano told me: “People know when it’s time to fight. We have no right to tell them … but when they decide, it is our obligation to support them, even to lead them if they approach us.”

In this case, the Syrian people decided. No government, no political force could move an entire nation to such tremendous heroism and sacrifice. Russians did it during World War Two, and the Syrians are doing it now.

Two years ago I replied like this:

“I have witnessed the total collapse of the Middle East. There was nothing standing there anymore. Countries that opted for their own paths were literally leveled to the ground. Countries that succumbed to the dictates of the West lost their soul, culture and essence and were turned into some of the most miserable places on earth. And the Syrians knew it: were they to surrender, they would be converted into another Iraq, Yemen or Libya, even Afghanistan.”

And so Syria rose. It decided to fight, for itself and for its part of the world.

Again and again, it retained itself through the elections of its government. It leaned on its army. Whatever the West says, whatever the treasonous NGOs write, the simple logic just proves it all.

This modest nation does not have its own powerful media to share the extent of its courage and agony with the world. It is always the others who are commenting on its struggle, often in a totally malicious way.

But it is undeniable that whilst the Soviet forces stopped the advance of the German Nazis at Stalingrad, the Syrians have managed to stop the fascist forces of Western allies in its part of the world.

Of course Russia got directly involved. Of course China stood by, although often in the shadow. And Iran provided support. And Lebanon-based Hezbollah put up, what I often describe as, an epic fight on behalf of Damascus against the extremist monsters invented and armed by the West, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

But the main credit has to go to the Syrian people.

Yes, now there is nothing left of the Middle East. Now there are more tears than raindrops descending on this ancient land.

But Syria is standing. Burned, wounded, but standing.

And as is being widely reported, after the Russian armed forces came to the rescue of the Syrian nation, more than 1 million Syrian people were able to return home … often to encounter only ashes and devastation, but home.

Like people returned to Stalingrad, some 70 years ago.

*

So what would my answer be to that question now: “whether it would be easier the other way”, to surrender to the Empire?

I guess something like this:

“Life has meaning, it is worth living, only if some basic conditions can be fulfilled. One does not betray great love, be it love for another person or love for one’s country, humanity or ideals. If one does, it would be better not to be born at all. Then I say: the survival of humankind is the most sacred goal. Not some short-time personal gain or ‘safety’, but the survival of all of us, of people, as well as the safety of all of us, humans.”

When life itself is threatened, people tend to rise and fight, instinctively. During such moments, some of the most monumental chapters in human history are written.

Unfortunately, during these moments, millions tend to die.

But the devastation is not because of those who are defending our human race.

It is because of the imperialist monsters and their servants.

Most of us are dreaming about a world without wars, without violence. We want true kindness to prevail on earth. Many of us are working relentlessly for such a society.

But until it is constructed, until all extreme selfishness, greed and brutality are defeated, we have to fight for something much more “modest” – for the survival of people and of humanism.

The price is often horrible. But the alternative is one enormous gaping void. It is simply nothing – the end, full stop!

In Stalingrad, millions died so we could live. Nothing was left of the city, except some melted steel, scattered bricks and an ocean of corpses. Nazism was stopped. Western expansionism began its retreat, that time towards Berlin.

Now Syria, quietly but stoically and heroically, stands against Western, Qatari, Saudi, Israeli and Turkish plans to finish the Middle East.

And the Syrian people have won. For how long, I don’t know. But it has proven that an Arab country can still defeat the mightiest murderous hordes.

Born in St. Petersburg, Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter. Reach him at andre.vltchek@greanvillepost.com

Source
Article: Simultaneously published at New East Outlook
Lead Graphic: Aleppo in 2013 from Foreign and Commonwealth (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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