Daniel Wolf

According to Jean Paul Sartre, he was ‘the most complete man of his age’. John Berger likened the photograph of his corpse to Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. When I went up to university, in the month of his death, October 1967, the walls were quilted with his image — the famous Korda photograph of the implacable revolutionary, with the beret, the Comandante star, the wispy hair and beard. I remember particularly a sickly poster version in psychedelic colours — mauve and turquoise and green — taped to the wall of a friend’s room. Even then, I thought, Che Guevara was unlikely to have had much to recommend him, a mythic fanatic adulated by ersatz revolutionaries in Cambridge.

If there is a crisis in a remote place, and governments, newspapers and aid agencies start to agitate for ‘action’, you naturally begin to suspect that much of the information you are being fed is false. When Tony Blair starts talking about intervention, your suspicion turns into virtual certainty. This is not necessarily because journalists, officials, agencies and Blair are ignorant of the facts (although ignorance is invariably a contributing factor); it’s because the tragedy and the publicity exist in different universes.