Beck is right to remind people that the ubiquitous high-contrast image based on a famous poster based on a famous photograph represents the murderous side of Che as much as anything else. However despite appropriate judgments about his bloodiness, typical of every Communist revolution, a truly honest account of the man takes into account the whole life. Beck refers dismissively to Hollywood movies that glorify Che. "The Motorcycle Diaries" (not a Hollywood movie) focuses on the awakening in the pre-revolutionary Guevara that led to the revolutionary. It's all the more poignant for sticking to that (pre)story and leaving it up to the audience, who know the rest, to think about the contrast between that young riches-to-rags idealist and the later flaws. Most people haven't seen Soderbergh's "Che" yet.
Both the communist-yet-capitalist-icon irony and the hero-but-monster irony are there, but don't most heroic icons unrealistically omit the human "dark side" of their lives, in consensual memory? In a post cold war world, isn't it possible that a lot of the hipsters wearing the icon casually actually do get the irony, that being specifically why they don't feel a moral conflict, wearing it? It's been a long time since it was supposed to be ironically hip to wear a Warhol Chairman Mao t-shirt. Wearing one never necessarily meant "All Power to the People's Party!" by any means. Beck is no doubt right to an extent, but maybe not as much as he seems to assume. Maybe I should have just credited him for addressing the moral irony and stopped thinking right there, but I kinda got the feeling that the article was a build-up to the "capitalism always wins" declaration of victory at the expense of bigger pictures.
A a final point of irony, Alberto Korda, the photographer who took the image, has never made any money from its use by others, so I doubt if anyone would be sued for their own commercial iteration, given precedent.
Jim Fitzpatrick's 1967 poster based on Korda's photograph.
Gerard Malanga's forgery of an Andy Warhol print of Fitzpatrick's poster of Korda's photograph.
