“There are indications that Trump populism has its clones. I believe that (El Salvadoran President) Bukele and (Argentine President) Milei are clear examples of that type of authoritarianism…It’s concerning, very concerning, that the electorates are seeking people like that to solve their problems,” Jon Lee Anderson told EFE in Panama.
“I don’t have the magic key,” Anderson continues, “but journalism needs to buckle up. It has to be brave; it must face up to the autocrats and those who want to eliminate us.”
On the other hand:
“Bravery, fearlessness, honesty, and absolute conviction. He lived it—Che (Guevara) really lived it!” (from Anderson’s Hagiography, Che; A Revoltuionay Life)
And speaking of autocrats who (literally) eliminate their opponents, Anderson, who also contributes to The New Yorker and The New York Times, wrote this “authoritative” (according to The History Channel) biography of Che Guevara while living in totalitarian Cuba and in conjunction with dictator Fidel Castro and his KGB-founded and mentored propaganda ministry.
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 its first six.
Yet, Anderson’s “concern” about “authoritarianism” is centered on Donald Trump, whereas Che Guevara comes across as “honest and fearless.” You can’t possibly MAKE this sh*t up!
“I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che Guevara executed ‘an innocent' declared Anderson during a PBS interview. “The (53 Cubans executed on Che’s orders) were all torturers and murderers of women and children. “He (Che Guevara) studied the evidence in each case (of the “53” executions) with methodical care.”
Got it, amigos? According to a star writer for The New Yorker Magazine (a publication that sneers at oafish patrons of “disinformation”), Che Guevara only ordered the execution of 53 people, and all whom were subject to an antiseptic judicial process – which declared them murderers and torturers of women and children. (Never mind that Che Guevara – who had a KGB handler since 1956 – transplanted this judicial system to Cuba exactly as it had operated during Stalin’s Great Terror.)
And note the obligatory charge of “torturers of women and children.” We’re talking commie-propaganda 101 here, amigos. Yet Anderson’s unvarnished communist propaganda pamphlet was hailed by the media as “superb!” and “Groundbreaking!”
“The Black Book of Communism,” written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither exactly an outpost of “embittered right-wing Cubans with an ax to grind!”) dares to differ with the New Yorker’s Anderson. This genuinely groundbreaking study estimates 16-17,000 firing squad executions in Cuba mostly during the 1960s. “The facts and figures are irrefutable,” wrote The New York Times (no less!) about “The Black Book of Communism.”
Jose Vilasuso, a Cuban “prosecutor” who quickly defected in horror and disgust from Che Guevara’s murder factory, estimates that Che signed 400 death warrants the first few months of his command in La Cabana. A Basque priest named Iaki de Aspiazu, who was often on hand to perform confessions and last rites, says Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad during the period. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book “Yo Soy El Che!” that Guevara sent 1,892 men to the firing squad.
In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track him down in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk, admitted to “a couple thousand” executions. But he shrugged them off as all being of “imperialist spies and CIA agents.”
Indeed, as mentioned, Anderson wrote his book while living in Cuba using ministers of a Stalinist government as his primary sources. Other sources such as "Che's Diaries" were edited and published by Castro's propaganda ministry with the preface written by Fidel Castro himself! Given the subject, perhaps such a thoroughly "revolutionary" form of historiography is fitting. Let's step back for a second and contemplate it.
Consider: Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Hess, Karl Donitz, Baldur von Schirach and many other Nazi officials were still alive when William Shirer wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." Yet these were not Shirer's primary sources. Therefore, applying The History Channel, The New York Times and The New Yorker’s logic as it applies to Cuban history, Shirer's book should be thoroughly discredited. Anything and everything former Nazi officials had to say should have been taken at face value.
Instead, Shirer relied on sources such as German exile Fritz Thyssen. This man was an "embittered exile," had an obvious "ax to grind" against the Nazi regime, and should have been discounted as biased and not credible by William Shirer and by all right-thinking people.
Robert Conquest was also derelict in using Ukrainian refugees such as Marco Carynnyk as sources for his book, "The Great Terror." From Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov to Nikita Khrushchev, thousands of Stalin's henchmen were available to Conquest as perfectly reliable sources. For not relying upon them exclusively in his studies of Stalinism, Robert Conquest should have been laughed off any lectern. His book consists of nothing but embittered ravings and cheap gossip from people with "an ax to grind."
Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Weisel and Anne Frank all had obvious "axes to grind' against the Nazi regime so nothing they said or wrote should be taken seriously. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cardinal Mindszenty, Natan Sharansky, Vladimir Bukovsky, etc. were all "embittered exiles and cranks" with obvious "axes to grind" against the Soviet regime. So the same applies to them.
The above may sound flippant, but it's precisely the methodology applied in media and "scholarly" circles when it comes to studying Cuban totalitarianism. The normal rules of historiography – and even of decency, logic and common sense – get turned on their heads, resulting in blatant communist propaganda (badly) disguised as “history.”