Teaching Students to Follow a Mass Murderer at the University of Texas‏

Frontpagemag.com

Che Guevara was Castro's executioner and a mass murderer, as Humberto Fontova and others have documented. He was also a Maoist, which is to say a bone-headed Marxist whose views, along with those of every Communist, were discredited twenty years ago by the fall of the Soviet bloc regimes that had bankrupted an entire continent and created more human misery than all the tyrannies in history put together. Yet, the history department of the University of Texas is offering a course whose declared intention is to indoctrinate students in the ideas -- in the worldview -- of this monster and, as a matter of course, to indict America as the imperialist "Great Satan."

The University of Texas is in the new book Jacob Laksin and I have written, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy. In it, we show how courses like this violate university standards and students' academic freedom. Somehow we missed this one, however. Which suggests that our estimate of 10,000-20,000 courses just like it in universities across America may be on the low side.

HIS 363k - Title Che Guevara's Latin America
Substantial Writing Component: No
UniqueDaysTimeBldg/RoomInstructor
86899- BROWN, JON

Course Description
This course will cover Latin America during the era of the Cuban Revolution through the travels, observations, and revolutionary activities of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The course builds on the sudden revival of Che's image in pop culture throughout the world, the movie Motorcycle Diaries, and the three additional movies on his life that are now in production. We intend to convert this popularity into a serious investigation of the social unrest into which Latin American countries had entered in the post-World War II period. It was a time in which dominant economic policy of import-substitution-industrialization reached the end of its possibilities, inflation upset the alliance between labor and the middle class, the landholding elites strengthened their control of land while the growing population of landless peasants slid silently into poverty, US companies dominated the most important industries, and dictators reigned.

Che Guevara grew up in C órdoba. He took the first of two trips through Latin America in 1951 while studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. After graduating as an M.D., he began a second trip in 1953, visiting two revolutions in progress before reaching Mexico in 1955, where he met the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro. Students will survey class relations in those countries mentioned in Che's memoirs - Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. Then they will examine the Cuban Revolution in which Che rose from combat doctor to comandante, to economics minister, to international statesman, and to revolutionary provocateur. We conclude with a discussion of Ches attempt to export the revolution to Bolivia, where he met his death by execution in 1967.

Texts
Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries
Guevara, Back on the Road
Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War

http://web.austin.utexas.edu/cola/students/courses/coursedetail.cfm?courseID=20201
Thanks Miguel T.