So apparently Mercedes-Benz is so in love with the Communist ‘Killing Machine,’ Ernesto “Che” Guevara, that they will choose cozying up to his Satanic image, over selling automobiles to humans with a clue about world history, and the evils of Communism.

Not just stupid, but truly reprehensible. The late founders of Mercedes-Benz, Gottlieb Daimler of Cannstatt, Germany, Karl Benz of Mannheim, Germany, and Wilhelm Maybach of Heilbronn, Germany, are turning over in their graves, right about now.

Those three men, usually credited for founding what is today known as Mercedes-Benz,
were consummate capitalists, whose legacy of hard work, engineering excellence, and world-beating automobiles, is absolutely dependent upon the free market, upon economic freedom, upon CAPITALISM.

And now the company they began is promoting Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the evil Communist mass-murderer, who is documented to have said the following:

Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.
Letter to his aunt Beatriz describing what he had seen while traveling through Guatemala (1953); as quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997) by Jon Lee Anderson ISBN 0802116000

I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ…. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.
Letter to his mother (July 15, 1956) as quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997) by Jon Lee Anderson ISBN 0802116000

If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.
As quoted in The Nuclear Deception : Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis (2002) by Servando Gonzalez, p. 111

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].
As quoted in The Cuban Revolution : Years of Promise (2005) by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay, p. 57, citing “Che Guevara: Assassin and Bumbler” by Humberto Fontova from Mensnewsdaily.com, 2 March 2004

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,’ who murdered hundreds of innocent people himself, cannot rightly be praised, and when Che is used to sell automobiles, all sane Americans must then figure that reprehensible bit of information into their automobile purchase choices from that point on, unless they apologize, retract, and make a grand gesture of reconciliation. Somehow, I doubt Mercedes-Benz is going to do the right thing.

Here’s a reminder of who Che Guevara really was:
In 1959, Cuba had a population of 6.4 million people (with a higher per capita income than most Europeans, by the way). According to Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans have passed through Cuba’s prison systems, proportionally more than went through Stalin’s Gulag. And many of Che Guevara’s political prisoners qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel and Che’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

In 1956-7, this world-famous “Anti-Imperialist” who often signed his personal correspondence with the moniker “Stalin II,” appalled some of his fellow anti-Batista rebels by applauding the Soviet slaughter of Hungarian freedom fighters. All through the horrifying Soviet massacre, Che dutifully parroted the Soviet script that the workers, peasants and college kids battling Russian tanks in Budapest with small arms and Molotov cocktails were all “Fascists and CIA agents!” who all deserved prompt execution.

“Executions?” Che Guevara exclaimed while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly Dec. 9, 1964. “Certainly we execute!” he declared, to the claps and cheers of that august body. “And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the death against the revolution’s enemies!”

…firing-squad executions had reached 14,000 by the end of the ’60s, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of more than 3 million executions in the U.S. “I don’t need proof to execute a man,” snapped Che to a judicial toady in 1959. “I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him! … Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute from revolutionary conviction.”

Upon arriving in Havana in January 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war (The New York Times breathlessly reported of “thousands dead in single battles!” The official tally compiled by the U.S. embassy after two years of ferocious “civil war” was 184 dead on both sides, half New Orleans’ annual murder tally.), Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana’s old Spanish fortress La Cabana as a handy-dandy, ready-made execution pit. So he promptly put his firing squads to work in triple shifts.

Edwin Tetlow, Havana correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, reported on a mass “trial” orchestrated by Che Guevara in February 1959, where Tetlow noticed the death sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” former Cuban political prisoner, Roberto Martin-Perez, told me, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”

“Castro ordered mass murder,” remembers Martin-Perez, “but for him it was a utilitarian slaughter, in order to consolidate his power. A classic psychopath, the butchery didn’t seem to affect him one way or the order. But Che Guevara, as his chief executioner, relished the slaughter.”

As commander of this prison/execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing squads at work.

[…]

Even as a youth, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s writings revealed a serious mental illness. “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” This is from Guevara’s famous “Motorcycle Diaries,” though Robert Redford somehow “overlooked” it while directing his heartwarming movie of the same name.

The Spanish word vencido, by the way, translates into “defeated” or “surrendered.” And indeed, “the “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” very rarely reached Guevara’s nostrils from actual combat. It came mostly from the close-range murders of unarmed and defenseless men (and boys). Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the fi ring squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s and Che’s theft of their humble family farm.

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. Remember the gallant Che Guevara’s instructions to his revolutionary courts: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” And remember that Harvard Law School’s invitation to Fidel Castro to speak on campus, and rollicking ovation he received, happened in the very midst of this appalling and lawless bloodbath.

The victims of this Stalinist bloodbath were not exclusively men and boys. In fact, the Castroites were well ahead of the Taliban. On Christmas Eve 1961, a young Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Che’s term for Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight his theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes). When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.

The term “hatred” was a constant in Guevara’s writings. Here’s a taste from this icon of flower children: “Hatred as an element of struggle”; “hatred that is intransigent”; “hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him a violent and cold-blooded killing machine.”
[…]

Che’s genocidal fantasies included a continental reign of Stalinism. And to achieve this ideal, he craved “millions of atomic victims”—most of them Americans. “The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” raved Guevara in 1961. “Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination. We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus, we’ll destroy him! We must keep our hatred against them [the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysms!”

This was Che’s prescription for America almost a half-century before Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Al- Zarqawi appeared on our radar screens. Compared to Che Guevara, Ahmadinejad sounds like the Dalai Lama.

On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI discovered that Che Guevara’s bombast had substance. They infiltrated and cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba’s “Foreign Liberation Department” at the time.

A little perspective: For the March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, al Qaeda used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro’s and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in some of the biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.

A month earlier (during what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis), Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had salivated over the prospect of a much more satisfying holocaust. “If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S., including New York City,” boasted Guevara in November 1962. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” Che thought he was speaking “off-the-record” to Sam Russell of Britain’s Daily Worker at the time.

As anybody with a head and a functioning heart can see, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was a cold-blooded, genocidal maniac who wasn’t only responsible for the death of thousands; he desperately wanted to slaughter millions of Americans.

Here’s what Glenn & Co. had to say about Che the last time he was brought up on Glenn’s radio show:

From CBS News

Under a huge portrait of Che Guevara, Mercedes’ Dieter Zetsche touted a vision of car-sharing.

They said it, not me.

“Some colleagues still think that car-sharing borders on communism,” Mercedes-Benz Chairman of the Board of Management Dieter Zetsche said onstage at CES today, speaking about Mercedes’ new CarTogether initiative. “But if that’s the case, viva la revolucion!”

To be sure, a luxury-car maker like Mercedes is not actually promoting communism. But during his CES talk, Zetsche pushed hard on a vision that the company has for a greener future that allows drivers to reduce emissions by using connected and social technology to easily find compatible passengers to share rides with.

Still, it’s odd–and no doubt intended to stir up conversation–to hear a company so inexorably tied to money and lavish lifestyles invoking philosophies like communism. Especially with a picture of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara towering over Zetsche as he talked. Of course, Che’s signature beret sported a Mercedes logo.

Either way, Mercedes’ car-sharing technology is part of the company’s larger vision for a smart-car future, one it’s already implementing in its cars, and which it thinks can help drivers save money on fuel, and save the earth from excess emissions at the same time. As well, Mercedes wants to leverage the latest in telematics technology to give those who plunk down small fortunes on its vehicles the most up-to-date driving/technology experience.

To begin with, Mercedes promoted a new telematics system it called @yourCOMMAND. “The car becomes a mobile communications center than enables driver and passengers to access all modern media and services at any time,” it said in a release this morning. “Uncoupling from the conventional vehicle development cycles is achieved on the one hand through secure and comfortable integration of the smartphone in the vehicle, and on the other hand through the use of a consistently cloud-based solution. This ensures that one is always in close touch with the rapid developments in the smartphone and computer world.”

According to the release, @yourCOMMAND focuses on four areas: sensory perfection, holistic experience, natural interaction, and a convenient remote control.

Mercedes’ vision starts with the notion of the cloud, and giving its cars’ telematics system–known as “mbrace”–the latest in connected apps: software that stays up to date via the Internet. The idea here seems to be that Mercedes’ cloud connection should reduce owners’ reliance on going to dealers for software updates. Essentially, owners should be able to download things like infotainment updates and upload vehicle diagnostics. Zetsche said that mbrace is now available on its German SL model, and should be coming to the U.S. in all new models.

Another big part of Mercedes’ vision of a tech-savvy car is voice recognition–and comprehension. Intelligent cars should be our “digital companions,” Zetsche said, but there’s little value in a car’s tech systems telling you that it’s raining outside. That’s something you already know. What would be much more valuable would be a system that could tell you that it will be raining in a couple of hours at your destination and that you should bring an umbrella. That’s useful proactivity, he said.

Zetsche laid out a picture of a tech-savvy car that has a touch-screen dashboard and an augmented reality overlay. In a video he played, a Mercedes owner sat relaxed in a car, playing with its “Minority Report”-like interface while the vehicle safely drove itself down the road.

Clearly, this is the future, but one that Mercedes wants to make a reality–at least for its customers.

‘Communism’
The next idea Zetsche talked about was CarTogether, the car-sharing application he said could help the world cut down on emissions, while also helping people create new bonds of friendship as like-minded strangers meet for the first time.

Future Mercedes cars will feature CarTogether, an app that can help drivers find people with whom to share rides. This is not quite the same thing, of course, as lending out your Mercedes, as services like Getaround or Wheelz would like to have you do. Rather, the app will help owners find riders. And this is all in a bid to cut down on emissions by cutting down on the number of car rides people have to make.

Zetsche said onstage that car-sharing is sustainable. And with cars with electric drive, “we can effectively push zero-emissions mobility.”

The idea here is that using social tools like Facebook, drivers can find potential riders that share similar interests, serving everyone involved. For example, Mercedes showed a video that depicted a Mercedes owner driving to a concert and using the CarTogether system to find someone looking for a ride to the same show. The driver picks up the passenger, and a lifelong friendship begins. That may be far-fetched, but at least it’s easy to imagine the driver picking up someone with a shared interest.

It’s interesting, of course, to see a company like Mercedes promote the idea of car sharing, since carmakers don’t make as much money on fleet purchases as they do on single-car sales. And while CarTogether seems aimed mainly at individual owners, Zetsche also seemed to be touting a larger car-sharing concept.

This is a graphic depicting CarTogether, the car-sharing concept from Mercedes.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Remote information

Another idea Mercedes wanted to promote was the tight link between cars and smartphones that we’ll all know and love in the future. Especially when it comes to electric cars, something Zetsche talked about at length during his CES talk.

One thing that people who have electric cars worry about is what he called range anxiety. And as a result, Zetsche talked about the idea of a smartphone being the link between the car and the next charging station. “If you like, you can even follow your own car on Twitter,” he said. “It can notify you when your car is charged.”

Apps could show electric-car owners when their vehicle is fully charged.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Zetsche also talked about fuel cells as part of a future of highly fuel efficient vehicles, as well as electric cars as a smart way of storing renewable energy. And he said that production of “B-class fuel cells has already begun.”

But regardless of the amount of emissions being put out by cars, there’s always going to be gridlock, he said. And that’s where connectivity between cars can help. In other words, on-the-fly technology may well be able to help with traffic management. “We use the Web to manage huge amounts of data traffic,” he said. “So why not use it to manage huge amounts of road traffic?”

Here, the idea is to embed cars with sensors that can quickly identify threats. With many cars using them, it could be “crowdsourcing applied to traffic,” he explained. “The trick is using information from the cars ahead of you” to avoid congestion before you reach it. And one way to do that is to aggregate GPS data from smartphones.

Zetsche said Mercedes will be implementing the first private system using tools like this later this year in Germany. He wouldn’t give many details, but did say that “If we bring the best of both worlds together, we will not only protect the traditional strength of automobiles but also make further growth sustainable and create new opportunities.”