[Pen-l] Obama and the Cult of Personality

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ken hanly wrote:
>    Watching all the hoopla  re the inauguration and all the marketing hype re Obama as president and the mass uncritical acceptance of Obama I am reminded of all the criticism in the west of the Stalin and Mao cult of personality. Surely there are a lot of family resemblances between the cult of personality used by some Communist leaders and what is happening in the US although no doubt criticizing Obama won't entail being sent to northern Alaska.<

^^^
CB: Actually, the "cult of the
 personality" criticism
of Stalin did not come from
 the West. It came
from the Communist leader, 
Nikita Khrushchev 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev 

It was self-criticism.

People in the US can't very well 
make a thing about "cults of the
 personality" as its political culture
 is saturated with personality cults, 
"popularity contests" .  For example,
 Reagan, a movie star to boot. 
 Now that's a personality cult, yuk.

If we had no personality cults,
 there wouldn't be any elected officials in America.

At any rate , the mass acceptance 
of 
Obama is thinking, not 
"uncritical" as you say,
so that criterion fails in 
this case.



"He (Khrushchev ) pursued a course of reform and shocked delegates to the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956 by making his famous Secret Speech denouncing the "cult of personality" that surrounded Stalin, though he himself played no small part in cultivating it, and accusing Stalin of crimes committed during the Great Purges. This effectively alienated Khrushchev from the more conservative elements of the Party, but he managed to defeat what he termed the Anti-Party Group after they failed in a bid to oust him from the party leadership in 1957."





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