>>4299485Che is dead, and we all mourn him. Why? How is it that so many libertarians mourn this man; how is it that we just received a letter from a brilliant young libertarian, a former Objectivist and Birchite, which said, in part: "If they did finally get Che . . . I am sure that his memory will live to haunt both Latin America and the U.S. for decades to come. Long live Che!" How come? Surely not because Che was a Communist. Precious few people in this country or anywhere else will mourn the passing, for example, of Brezhnev, Kosygin, or Ulbricht, Communist leaders all. No, it is certainly not Che's Communist goals that made his name a byword and a legend throughout the world, and throughout the New Left in this country.
What made Che such a heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of "professional revolutionary." And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy-that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U.S. imperialism.