Tell me with a straight face that any socialist country has a bigger cult of personality than the US “founding fathers”.
This shit have Washington as some kind of Zeus, presiding over the American-Roman pantheon and to disperse any doubts the entire fresco is even straight up called The Apotheosis of WashingtonImagine mass exterminating indigenous people, stealing their land, carving your leaders heads into the side of a mountain to desecrate their sacred religious site, then turning around and accusing other countries of having an unhealthy fixation with their leaders.
Because they don’t have capeshit, sponegebob and bideno-trumps but real leaders. More serious answer is that the so called “cults” get incredibly overblown by western propaganda and sourced from Khrushchev lies which got applied universally over all the scary gommulists.
My heroes changed the course of history and ultimatelly improved the lives of millions of people, your heroes literally just sing breakup songs and kick balls.
I think hundreds of millions to billions is more accurate.
Because socialist leaders are revolutionary people, they overcame massive challenges and their leadership ended up steering the course of history of their nations. Kim il sung, Mao, deng, lenin, Stalin, che, castro, etc… straight up challenged and won against the status quo of their respective nations. These are people we should look up to, learn from and ultimately surpass.
Also its not uniquely socialist, the bourgeoisie have their own figures they worship, religions too, heck even sports and other forms of media. On a smaller level even competent workers inspire people around them.
To quote Getty:
The ‘cult of personality’ which developed around Stalin after 1929 (and around Máo in the 1960s) had many purposes. […] It served as a kind of rallying point for much of a population which was used to a system in which one man ruled for life. More importantly, however, the tendency to attribute all things to the ‘wise leadership of Comrade Stalin’ served to hide inner-Party disputes from the public eye.
The oppositional struggles of 1921–1929 had been public disagreements which had nearly torn the Party apart several times. That was not to be allowed in the 1930s. Even though radicals hated moderates and there were serious disagreements about everything from MTS political departments to economic planning, Stalin’s cult of personality managed to hide, but not resolve, the splits until 1937.¹⁷⁷
[…]
Policy disputes and disagreements were hidden behind the iron unity façade of Stalin’s leadership. All policy initiatives were customarily attributed to the ‘great teacher’. […] It would be naïve to assume, as many have done, that Stalin controlled and initiated everything and that his lieutenants simply mechanically carried out his directives on everything from hog breeding to transport. […] Left and right were still there (and, of course, always would be), but were simply not to be allowed to divide the Party as they did in the 1920s.¹⁷⁸
To paraphrase a wise philosopher, if Stalin had not existed, he would have had to be invented. The Stalin cult of personality was invented to fulfil the need for an apparently monolithic leadership and charismatic inspiration in a period of crisis and rapid transformation of institutions and values.
A similar process is common to all societies under similar conditions. The more acute the crisis, the more rapid the transformation, the more intense is the cult of the leader, for example, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill, Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Máo Tse-tung, Khoumicni, Attaturk, Hitler, Mussolini, and so on.
The personality cults that developed around these top leaders never meant that the struggles of different interests and the conflicting social forces operating behind the scenes were suspended in favour of the arbitrary will of an omnipotent individual.
(Source.)
Thank you, very elucidating!
