January 22, 1959 The Real Che

Valkyrie. Che. Two films, both produced by the Great Hollywood Myth Machine. Both released to US audiences in December, 2008. One tells the story of Claus von Stauffenberg, the disillusioned, war-crippled German patriot who led the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The other is Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, a middle-class Argentinian intellectual and accomplished athlete, despite a life-long problem with Asthma. One, the towering Aristocrat. The bearer of hereditary titles of nobility.  The other the left-ish physician radicalized by the poverty of his day to become the Marxist Revolutionary.

Some 4,980 Germans were murdered for complicity real or imagined, in the Valkyrie plot.  Many slowly strangled with piano wire, their death agonies filmed for the delectation of a Dictator.  Von Stauffenberg himself met his end, before a firing squad.

Guevara breathed his last before a Bolivian firing squad.  The similarity ends there.

Ernesto Guevara trained and motivated firing squads…