Big Boss as Che Guevara

 

“In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Che is referenced several times in the audio briefings, and several aspects of his persona are discussed. Additionally, the main character, Big Boss, resembles Che in both appearance and ideology, leading other characters in-game to point out the resemblance.”

-From Wikipedia

After Snake Eater, starting with Portable Ops, something happened to Metal Gear. Kojima seemed to like the Che Guevara thing of recruiting locals into your cause and using sneaky hit and run tactics in stealth, sabotage and assassination missions. I can’t speak for the entire fanbase, but I was thrilled by the gameplay in Portable Ops, greatly enjoyed its story and was very interested at how the new characters introduced (quite a lot) would be depicted in future games. Peace Walker changed all this; it ignored completely everything in Portable Ops including just one dismissive line to acknowledge it; “we can finally leave all that crap in San Hyeronimo behind.” If there ever was a line designed specifically to completely forget the events in a previous game, this has to be it.

The thing with Portable Ops is that, although sadly forgotten by the fanbase and by Kojima, it introduced a very addictive and interesting structure involving organizing soldiers into different units and assigning weapons and equipment individually, and selecting different missions from a map. It also introduced the feature of capturing soldiers and even playing as them. But most important of all, Portable Ops is the game that first showed us the charismatic Big Boss, the leader of men, the legendary mercenary who would eventually challenge the unilateralist vision of the US and point out its hypocrisy, a hypocrisy Solid Snake himself would grow to resent in his later years. All of this got carried over to Peace Walker, where we get to basically emulate Che Guevara. No, really.

That Big Boss bears similarities to Che Guevara is almost shouted by Peace Walker. In the game’s narrative and in the optional briefing files, characters compare Big Boss to Che constantly and positively, and even seem suspiciously well-read about Che beyond amateurish admiration. The aesthetic similarities between Big Boss and Che Guevara are everywhere. We cannot ignore the similarities in their personalities either; humble, sensitive people of keen intelligence, world-travelers, hard-workers, natural born leaders, great warriors, trying to fulfill the dream of a mentor (Marx for Che, The Boss for Big Boss). They cannot run away from the battlefield and are depicted as being strongly fond of children and wanting to rescue them from harm. They are so charismatic that they manage to recruit people into their cause, who pretty much worship them as legends. They are also cigar-smokers rebels. And a cigar-smoking rebel, mind you, is always a badass. If you doubt me, look at how Kojima has been portraying Big Boss since Peace Walker. This cannot be unintentional. Hideo Kojima sure wanted to convey this feeling badly.

The following is from a Peace Walker briefing file;

[SNAKE]
I noticed you call Che Guevara “El Che.”

[AMANDA]
Not just us. Everyone in these parts does. “Che” was always his nickname. It does not feel right to call him by his last name. …I was shocked the first time I saw you. You look so much like him.

[SNAKE]
I look like “El Che”, huh?

[AMANDA]
Sort of. Not in the face. It’s more… the way you carry yourself…

[SNAKE]
I guess Che’s a hero to the Sandinistas, too?

[AMANDA]
Of course. The FSLN was formed in the spirit of the ideologies championed by El Che and Fidel.

[SNAKE]
Fidel… Fidel Castro. So you’re trying to bring the Cuban Revolution to Nicaragua.

[AMANDA]
Well, we were. But Cuba isn’t what it once was… Not since El Che left. El Che was a true revolutionary. He fought – and died – for the people. He worked harder than anybody, and he was a righteous man. Even as a minister of Cuba, he gave up his weekends to work on the farms and public works. As a volunteer, no less.

[SNAKE]
Yeah, I’ve heard the stories. But when you think about it, wasn’t it that obsession that did him in?

[AMANDA]
How do you mean?

[SNAKE]
We can’t all be supermen. He thought the ideals he applied in Cuba would work in Bolivia. But, he failed to win converts and the support of the peasants, and it cost him his life.

[AMANDA]
Maybe… maybe you’re right. But at least he did not steal from those peasants, no matter how hard things got.

[SNAKE]
Yeah. I can sympathize with that. There’s plenty of guerrillas out there who’d rob their own people to feed their revolutions.

[AMANDA]
If we had a comandante like him, the Sandinistas would find the will to fight.

It’s not just the long hair, the beards, the berets, the olive fatigues, or the badass somber-smoking. Kojima also chose to have Big Boss use Che’s exact photographic camera, which Chico immediately expresses an interest in. The series is well-known for providing the players with an in-game camera to take pictures around the game freely, but did Kojima necessarily have to make a fuss about it being the same as Che’s? No, he didn’t. He also didn’t have to include a unit of FSLN left-wing guerillas who admire Che so much they confuse Big Boss for him, and eventually adopt him as their new leader. So you may get an idea of how strongly Kojima is trying to tie Che to Big Boss, here is another Peace Walker briefing file about Che:

[MILLER]
So I hear Amanda mistook you for Che Guevara, Snake. That’s not too bad, huh?

[SNAKE]
Yeah, right. I’m not even worthy of polishing his boots.

[MILLER]
Don’t be so modest. From where I’m standing, your men see you as a great man.

[SNAKE]
As great as “the century’s most complete human being”?

[MILLER]
That’s Sartre, right? Well, there’s hardly been a more iconic figure of his times than Che.

[SNAKE]
He was more than that. He was a true revolutionary, and a great warrior.

[MILLER]
I’m with you there. Can you believe that when he first went to Cuba with Fidel, they only had 12 guys with them?

[SNAKE]
But they rallied. They brought in new recruits, won the support of the peasants, expanded their organization…

[MILLER]
And in the end, they overthrew the Batista regime…

[SNAKE]
People flocked to them because they were honest. They won because they were strong. Those are the qualities that make men great.

[MILLER]
You know, we’re kind of in the same boat they were back then. Here we are, a handful of mercenaries taking on an army backed by the United States.

[SNAKE]
Yeah, we’ve got a long way to go.

[MILLER]
But we’ve got to keep on going. It’s not just about winning in battle. You need to think about recruiting people and growing this operation.

[SNAKE]
Got it.

And you think that’s bad? Wait until you see this. If this is not Kojima provoking US audiences, I don’t know what is:

[MILLER]
Hey, Snake, I’ve been thinking… Maybe Che couldn’t find a place for himself outside the battlefield, either.

[SNAKE]
How so?

[MILLER]
He led the Cuban Revolution to victory. That’s quite an accomplishment. He could have called it quits there and nobody would have blamed him. But he left behind a loving family and a cabinet post to plunge back into the struggle. First in the Congo, then in Bolivia – where he met his end.

[SNAKE]
You’re overthinking things. Che went back to the battlefield because he was needed there. Read his “Farewell Letter,” then you’ll understand.

[MILLER]
Some say he was too idealistic to fit in with a government.

[SNAKE]
Too many scruples, most likely.

[MILLER]
Maybe so… But I still can’t help thinking the reason you look up to Che is because you see something of yourself in him… You left your country behind and plunged into battle. You wander from one battlefield to another, going wherever you’re needed…

[SNAKE]
Che was a revolutionary as well as a warrior. He took up arms to fight for his beliefs. I don’t do what I do for any ideology. I’m a warrior. Nothing more, nothing less.

[MILLER]
OK, Boss. You’re right. Just wanted to see how we stacked up against a real hero.

I can’t begin to imagine what the average Unitedstatian who’s been told his entire life that Che was a vicious murderer and that socialism equals evil totalitarianism views this. But there it is. And Kojima, releasing a game mainly for Western audiences, made sure to include these briefing tapes in a semi-hidden way, not compulsory and not featured in the narrative, but still in the game regardless. I must point out, Big Boss is deliberately being compared to Che Guevara, who in-game is called a hero. Big Boss, who by this point is regarded as more of the protagonist of the Metal Gear series since he has been in more games than Solid Snake, is being compared to Che because of his astounding qualities and the love and admiration he receives from those around him. To the average Metal Gear fan, this surely cannot go unnoticed, and it seems to be designed to create in Western fans a paradox between loving Big Boss as a character and thinking of Che as a hero. If the person fails to view Che as a hero, then he will not see Big Boss as one, and this is what I think Kojima was trying to pull off.

Finally, we have a briefing file about Guerilla Warfare, hinting at how Kojima researched even the minutest detail about Che’s intellectual contributions to strategic warfare;

[MILLER]
Boss, did you ever read Che Guevara’s book “Guerrilla Warfare”?

[SNAKE]
I, uh… can’t remember if I got to that one or not.

[MILLER]
You should have, that’s why I lent it to you. A lot of the guerrilla tactics it covers apply to sneaking missions, too. Che was one of the first people to articulate the theory of guerrilla warfare. T.E. Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia” – was another one. And Mao Zedong and his “On Protracted War”… Theory aside, Nicaragua’s General Sandino was one of the first to put guerrilla tactics into practice. Which explains why the Sandinistas named themselves after him.

[SNAKE]
If you think about it, guerrilla warfare itself has been around since ancient times. There’s only so many ways a small group can upset a large army.

[MILLER]
There was a samurai in Japan who excelled in guerrilla warfare.

[SNAKE]
No kidding?

[MILLER]
Kusunoki Masashige. He was a warrior who lived in the medieval era. He used unconventional tactics to help overthrow the Kamakura Shogunate.

[SNAKE]
Like what?

[MILLER]
Trojan Horse-style maneuvers and decoys to confuse the enemy… The best one was when the enemy was climbing his castle walls – he dumped boiling water and human excrement on them…

[SNAKE]
Sounds great. Let’s put it in the MSF playbook.

[MILLER]
…You’re not serious, are you, Boss?

[SNAKE]
Why not? We’ve got plenty of crap to unload.

[MILLER]
Uh…. yeah. I’ll think about it.

 

“Big Boss’s character has been praised by video game publications for his role as a villain as well for his relationship with Solid Snake. As the series’ chronology progressed, his exact allegiance and motivations became increasingly complex; in his first appearances, he is depicted as a traitor dreaming of a world of perpetual war, but subsequent appearances have revealed him to be a key figure in an ideological dispute that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century, and a man whose conscience was disturbed by the attitude of leaders towards soldiers, prompting his decision to become a soldier of fortune.”

-From Wikipedia

We see even more Che parallelisms here. Nothing is ever black and white; Che had serious reasons to do what he did, same as Big Boss, and they would eventually grow to become despised and reviled by the Western world, leading to their assassinations by US operatives. I must add, the Big Boss who established Outer Heaven resembles more of a Fidel Castro than a Che Guevara, in contrast to his depiction in Portable Ops and Peace Walker, because of his status as leader of men and the resources at his disposal, those of a modern nation-state. In typical Western fashion, Big Boss is reviled as he is feared, and in the first Metal Gear games where Big Boss is the antagonist, we fight on the side of the “good guys,” that is US government, to protect the world from him. As it turns out, Big Boss wasn’t the monster we are led to believe. Outer Heaven, Big Boss’ utopian society, involved ending the abuse and exploitation of soldiers by governments, an ideology based on his interpretation of The Boss’s will.

“By the mid-1980s, Big Boss had completed more than 70 missions, and went on to participate in several regional conflicts and ethnic liberation wars. He fought in the Mozambican Civil War where he was reunited on the battlefield with Frank Jaeger (then a RENAMO soldier), and rescued him from imprisonment and torture. Big Boss later took both Jaeger and his foster sister, Naomi Hunter, to the United States where he helped them establish normal lives. Big Boss and Jaeger eventually returned to Africa to continue fighting, leaving Naomi behind in America.

Big Boss achieved near-mythical status due to his extraordinary military career, earning him the “Legendary Soldier” moniker. He was heralded as a true hero and made the front covers of popular magazines in many countries. Afterwards, he served as a combat instructor and worked to reintegrate former child soldiers into society.

-From Metal Gear Wiki

 

Hardly a bad guy, right? Wait till you hear this;

“Big Boss survived and escaped Outer Heaven before its destruction. Following NATO’s subsequent bombing of the area, Big Boss rescued many of the survivors, including refugees, orphans, and Resistance members, the latter of whom he would forgive for their opposition. He later fled with the survivors to Central Asia.”

-From Metal Gear Wiki

Keen on helping child soldiers and war orphans and saving them from the horrors of the battlefield, forgiving bitter enemies, rescuing the survivors of bombing runs … this is not your regular Bond villain, who’s ready to kill his own henchmen, and we’re talking about the Big Boss of the two first Metal Gears, before his personality was fully developed. Just like Che Guevara, whether you agree with Big Boss’ vision or ideology is irrelevant. His motives are clear, his nature is noble and coherent in accordance to his ideals, and his willpower proves a strong obstacle to overcome even for the combined might of the West. His figure is revered and worthy of admiration for a reason, and it doesn’t matter whether you consider him to be a monster or not. Those who stand by him stand by him fiercely, to the end, with perfectly sound motives (like those of Sniper Wolf).

 

Che Guevara and The Soviet Union

This is another interesting topic. In Peace Walker, where we are led to believe that the main bad guys are simply the CIA, a twist makes us see that the KGB operatives in the region represented by Vladimir Zadornov are willing to use the Peace Walker weapon to fire a nuke against Cuba from a US missile base, thus making Communism in Latin America spread unchecked. Before this comes to fruition, the FSLN unit allied with Big Boss comes in and stops the KGB operatives.

It is a well-known fact that Che disliked the USSR under Khrushchev and preferred Maoist China as a Socialist model due to the perceived revisionism (meaning revisionism of Marx’s original ideas) of Khrushchev, represented in his peaceful coexistence policies with the West. As Che understood it, two opposing forces with completely different ideologies could never reconcile or come to peaceful terms (as demonstrated during the Cold War) and one had to emerge victorious (as did the US after the Soviet collapse). For him, delaying this inevitability was pointless, and as such armed conflict against the forces of imperialism needed to be intensified, like he set to do after the Cuban revolution was won, in Congo and then Bolivia. Most recently, many have linked this concept of permanent revolution of his to Trotsky, pointing out it was permanent revolution in practice. For those who don’t know about Trotsky, he was one of the original Bolsheviks who after a power struggle with Joseph Stalin derived from Lenin’s death, was exiled and vilified by Stalinists. Many modern Communist parties, which disagree with Communism as practiced in the 20th century, are usually Trotskyist. However, Trotskyists are perceived as traitors and revisionists by Stalinists. In turn, Stalinists are considered as, to put it in some way, the right-wing conservative faction of Communism. Che Guevara’s true thoughts on Stalin and Trotsky comprise one of the hottest debates about his ideology, but what we can know for a fact is that he supported Mao against Khrushchev during the Sino-Soviet split of the ‘60s. Che pointed out that the Soviets were social-imperialists, betrayers of the original concept of Communism, and that peaceful coexistence with the West would lead to Communism to be gradually abandoned. He correctly predicted what eventually happened to the Soviets, but ironically, this happened to the Communist country he supported in this conflict, China, which adopted capitalist market reforms and even policies of peaceful coexistence, even during Mao’s rule (starting with Nixon’s visit to China in 1972).

In Peace Walker, the FSLN guerilla turning on its Soviet allies may represent Che’s views on this, but it’s still unclear whether Kojima did this knowingly or if it’s just a random plot device. Most certainly, Kojima considers the US and the USSR are simply superpowers bent on global domination, equally cynical and ruthless, both possessing good and bad qualities. What I have been able to discern from the series is that Kojima sees the big game in politics, above ideological stances, and focuses on political pragmatism, on realpolitik and power-play as practiced by the superpowers.

The following briefing file might shed some light on what Kojima thinks about the nature of the US and the USSR;

[MILLER]
Costa Rica isn’t alone. All of Latin America is getting swept up in the superpowers’ Cold War. The whole ideological split between East and West… In the end, it’s just a greedy scramble for wealth by the ruling classes.  The Western bourgeois stand to lose everything if their countries go Communist. After all, the Communists want to abolish private property altogether. So the capitalist rulers desperately tried to halt the global spread of Communism. Hence the phenomenon of red-baiting. And the Communists, for their part, didn’t exactly stay true to their principles. They tried to escape class-based society, but between Stalin’s autocracy and the rise of the nomenklatura, they ended up creating one anyway. Once people have power, they stop caring about equality. That’s where Communism – where society in general – reaches its limits. The rulers only care about their own gain. The opposing side becomes a risk factor that threatens that profit. And thus the ongoing struggle between capitalism and Communism was born.

Another key subject to analyze would be whether Zadornov was actually acting on the Kremlin’s official orders (as he claims) or whether his KGB unit was a rogue unit just as the CIA Peace Sentinels supposedly did not represent Langley’s official plan. Judging by the way he talks and his portrayal in the game, it would most definitely seem he was acting on the Kremlin’s orders. I personally found it to be somewhat disappointing that Peace Walker fell for the typical Western cliché of Soviets as invariably evil and willing to nuke allies to accelerate the accomplishment of their goals, but I tolerated it as the US was portrayed in worse ways throughout the narrative and through briefing tapes, bringing some balance to the story. If I must express my opinion, I would say the negative portrayal of the Soviets was a smoke-screen designed to make the game not seem so anti-Unitedstatian to Westerners. Or perhaps, it’s just what Kojima honestly thinks of the nature of the Cold War.