Indian artists in support of a murderer, part 1

• Well known Indian artists and other arty-sharties pay homage to Che Guevara.

Now why am I not surprised.


“The Victims of Che Guevera” poster, produced by the Young America’s Foundation, a collage that uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba’s communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist icon, Che Guevara.
Larger image here.



First some facts which for some reason are not well publicized or are completely unknown to most(media bias?)-

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was second in command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that outlawed elections and private property. This regime's KGB-supervised police, employing the midnight knock and the dawn raid among other devices, rounded up and jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin's and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler's executed (out of a population of 70 million) in it's first six.
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One week into power the regime Che Guevara co-founded abolished Habeas Corpus. Guevara commanded his regime's prosecutorial goons to "always
interrogate our prisoners at night. A man's resistance is always lower
at night." He boasted that, "we execute from revolutionary conviction!"
and that "judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail." Edwin
Tetlow, Havana correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph, reported on a
mass "trial" orchestrated by Che Guevara where Tetlow noticed the death
sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.

So who loves this creep?

Famous(why?) communist art-critic, Suneet Chopra, well known artists-Arpana Caur, Krishen Khanna, Vijendra Sharma, Dharmendra Rathore, Anoop Kamath, Mohan Singh, Saba Hasan, Vijayata Bhamri, art critics Vinod Bharadwaj and Nuzhat Kazmi, writer Uma Vasudev film persons Arun Vasudev and M K Raina and a large number of intellectuals, artists, writers and leading gallery owners of the capital.


The occasion for all this roses and love was an exhibition dedicated to this lover of freedom in Delhi opened by the ambassador of that paradise of freedom, human rights, free press, free elections and prosperity known by it's shorter name -Cuba.

Suneet Chopra seemed to be in a grumbling mood-

Today imperialism has invented far worse weapons(than atom bombs) that they have tested on the civilian populations Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. In the name of regime change, the elected president of the Chilean people, Salvador Allende, was murdered in an army coup that proceeded to murder thousands after that, including the Nobel Prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda. In 1991 the USSR was dismantled, and dismembered, Grenada was invaded, Nicaragua was destabilised and Yugoslavia with its proud anti-fascist record and one of the founders of the non-aligned movement was torn to bits as was Czechoslovakia, and states that Hitler had created have once more emerged in the Balkans, not as a natural process, but with the armed might of NATO behind them. “Democracy” was being imposed on the barrel of a gun with the help of generals like Pinochet, Sucharto and the like. And it was Che who told us that such a global oppression could only be stopped with a global resistance to it, by creating “twenty Vietnams” all over the world.

Warmonger! Calling for more Vietnams. Does he love war or what. Read the whole thing. Chopra is almost cartoonish in his rage against 'imperialism', a fine caricature of a fuming communist, now fuming more than ever since the collapse of the USSR (result of an evil plot, no doubt, though the liberated countries of the eastern Europe love their freedom from the Stalinist nightmare). Communism and socialism have never produced a free and prosperous society anywhere despite a century of experimentation.Misery, poverty, oppression, totalitarianism, midnight knocks, entrenched rule by a vicious elite, slave labor, 'reeducation' camps, gulags, death of tens and tens of millions-yes; happiness and freedom-no. And this is the 'vision' that Suneet Chopra and countless other intellectuals have supported and defended. One of the consistent themes of the last hundred or so years has been the love affair of the intellectuals with totalitarianism- be it that of the Nazis, of Stalin, Mao, Khmer Rouge, Castro or any other power-seeker who mouths the right cliches against 'imperialism'.

But what about the artists who participated in the Che lovefest?
Artistic freedom is one of the first casualties of the kind of regime that Che wanted to establish all over Latin America and elsewhere and helped to bring about in Cuba(Quick-How free are the artists to criticize Fidel in his land of milk and honey?).
So what explains their participation? True conviction? Or pulling the right social levers and supporting the 'right' causes to further their careers?
Or what?

I think it is legitimate to call them 'Artists against freedom'.

To prevent this post from becoming too long, I am breaking it into parts. See the rest of the article here-
Part 2- Che Myths
Part 3- Alternative Che images one would like to see more of

(emphasis mine)

Crossposted at What the Heck is Art?