Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

by Jon Lee Anderson

The Congo also featured prominently in Che’s speech; just a few days earlier the Lumumbist revolutionaries had been ousted from their stronghold at Stanleyville by Belgian paratroopers flown in on American planes. Che characterized the “massacres” committed in Stanleyville as an example of “imperialist bestiality ... a bestiality which knows no frontiers nor belongs to a certain country. Just as the Hitlerian hordes were beasts, so are the Americans and Belgian paratroopers beasts today, as were yesterday the French imperialists beasts in Algeria, because it is the very nature of imperialism which bestializes man, which converts them into bloodthirsty wild animals willing to slit throats, commit murder, and destroy even the last image of a revolutionary or the ally of a regime which has fallen under its boot or struggles for his liberty.”