Whether it's Roman emperors, popes, 20th century dictatorships or 21st century depraved democracies, a cult of personality is built to consolidate one man's rule. Whether it is Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the principle is the same: an image is created in the public of a fearless, sinless and infallible leader who demands unreserved support for the sake of the people's well-being; the leader is equated with the people; anyone who is against the leader is accordingly an enemy of the people; no one is equal to the leader, everyone bows down to the leader, anything less than that would compromise the aspired representation of the deity.
Encyclopedic explanations boil down to the fact that the cult of personality is an uncritical worship of one person, which manifests itself in excessive condescension, taking his statements and actions for granted, and is supported by the fear of losing privileges or, in extreme cases, freedom and life. Belief in the leader, regardless of the ideology of the system, becomes an ideology in itself, acquires religious proportions. As a god, the leader decides life and death, or in soft dictatorships who gets a job, money or a trial.
The cult of personality is created and maintained by eulogizing the beloved leader, omnipresence in the media, highlighting images in state institutions; streets and cities are named after the leader, monuments are built to him during his lifetime. Well, we haven't reached that point in Serbia yet.
TITANS AMONG TITANS
It goes without saying that any form of personality cult is contrary to democratic values. Today, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban or Erdogan build and maintain a cult of their own personality in order to stay in power in formally democratic elections. Muscular Putin with such a naked body restores Russia to its old greatness; Orbán saves the Hungarians from the invasion of non-Christians and wants to correct historical injustices; Erdogan creates an image of himself as the sultan of all Muslims and dismantles Ataturk's legacy. Even the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, the "Great Heir", the first chairman of the National Committee, the first secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and the Marshal of the Republic, allows himself to be voted in the elections with about one hundred percent of the votes. The real, or apparent, love of the people for the leader is woven into the cultivation of the personality cult. Any democracy in which the cult of personality is nurtured is monstrous.
photos: appMODERN PERSONALITY CULT: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdogan
As in the 20th, so in the 21st century, mass media control is key to creating a cult of personality. Along with the image of a sinless, fearless leader who tackles dragons and injustice, it is not out of place to control the police, security services, army, judiciary, parliament, financial flows, education, so that something does not accidentally go wrong.
For fascism, national socialism and Stalinism, the principle of the leader and the cult of personality were of key importance: Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Tiso in the First Slovak Republic,
hozya in Stalin.
Unreserved worship of Stalin was mandatory throughout the Eastern Bloc. Based on this example, local personality cults were created in the dictatorships of real socialism: Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia; Boleslaw Beirut in Poland; Walter Ulbricht in the German Democratic Republic; Maćasa Rakosi in Hungary; Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania...
The principle of government was the same. Stalin not only won the Second World War, but the history of the October Revolution, as well as his importance in it, was reshaped according to the creation of the personality cult of Comrade Dzhugashvili, while Lenin was turning over in his grave. Stalin's works were equated with Lenin's, in debates opposing parties would refer to the thoughts and views of Comrade Stalin.
In the extensive selection of personality cults in the 20th century, perhaps the most bizarre thing was how Nicolae Ceausescu allowed himself to be worshiped by Romanians. Leader (
Driver) was celebrated as "Titan among Titans", "Genius from the Carpathians", "earthly god". Romanian writers compared him to Caesar, Alexander the Great, Pericles, Napoleon or Cromwell. Painters painted him as a deity, as a messiah, descending from the sky in front of a glowing horizon. Every day Ceausescu could read in the communist press that he was the biggest and the smartest, the motto in Romania was: "Think, plan and act according to the instructions of Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu." The wife of the "Red Caesar" Elena was celebrated as the "mother of the nation", she received a doctorate in chemistry, although, they say, she left school at the age of fourteen.
Outside of Stalin's direct influence, the cult of Enver Hoxha was created in Albania, Mao Zedong in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba. The cult of leadership was created for Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
WHITE VIOLET
In Yugoslavia, we sang "comrade Tito, we swear to you", "white lilies", went to the "Zvezda" cinema in Maršala Tito Street, drove to the sea via Titograd, they took us out of school to wave pioneer scarves when we went somewhere Comrade Tito passed by, we participated in the landings as Tito's pioneers, we wrote compositions about Comrade Tito, they took us to the cinema to watch
Sutjeska i
Neretva, we carried batons…
It does not occur to me to put Tito in the same basket with the above-mentioned historical villains, nor open Yugoslavia with the closed systems of the Eastern Bloc, but the creation of a personality cult of the beloved marshal was also aimed at strengthening the power of the Communist Party and communist ideology. The unquestionability of Tito and his decisions in public, the lack of criticism to the detriment of democracy, were the biggest flaw of socialist Yugoslavia. Although credible witnesses say that Tito was annoyed by this mass, kitsch worship of his own personality, the fact is that he did nothing to prevent it. Mass mourning and crying all over Yugoslavia after Tito's death, scenes like when Hajduk and Zvezda na Poljud football players fall on the grass crying, and the audience in the stadium stands up and starts singing "comrade Tito, we swear to you", contradicts the claims of the current falsifiers historians who write about "Broz's dungeon of the people". We had passports, whoever wanted could go where they wanted.
BLIND WITH LOVE
German psychologist Alexander Kirchner says that consciously staged personality cults in authoritarian systems, just like sects or criminal gangs, play with love. For the benefit of the system, the love of the leader or leader is instrumentalized, in order to lead people to behave, which is often against their own interests. As a classic example, he cites North Korea, where the people accept to live in very bad conditions and even starve, all in the hope that the leader knows what he is doing and that it will definitely get better.
Kirchner talks about propaganda personification, as in the case of the famous highways in the Third Reich, for which the Germans allegedly had Hitler to thank. It goes one step further, the construction of highways is raised as something ingenious, and the leader is presented as a hero, everything takes on mythological proportions. Controlling the media is important for creating such a perception, says Kirchner. However, groups of people, even when it is available to them, begin to voluntarily renounce information from other sources because they do not want something to irritate them and shake their view of the world.
Something like when one partner in an emotional relationship notices all the symptoms of adultery and lies, but refuses to face reality.
A CHARISMATIC LEADER
British historian Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography of Hitler, explains the rise of the Führer based on the "charismatic rule" model of Max Weber (1864–1920), the favorite sociologist of President Aleksandar Vučić. Kershaw argues that Hitler's power was based on the fact that his supporters and large sections of German society were prepared to "act in the Führer's sense" without direct orders.
At the same time that the painter and corporal Adolf Hitler was still only dreaming of great achievements, Weber was in his prime
Economy and society, in which he writes about the types of government, introduced the concept of "charismatic government". He coined the term for a phenomenon in society that did not have its own name until then. There is no data, nor assumptions, that Hitler and Weber met, or even that Hitler would recognize himself in Weber's model of the "charismatic leader" Kershaw refers to. But it is symptomatic of the spirit of the times that theory and practice in this case simultaneously moved along the same path.
Weber describes a charismatic leader as a person who comes to the role of leader and thus to power in an unusual way. With such a model of government, the connection of followers with the leadership of a political party is no longer conditioned by social interests or social origin. It was primarily based on the personal qualities of the leader, on his attractiveness, charisma. Many elements of Weber's explanation of charismatic government can be recognized in Hitler's rule. And not only in Hitler's.
Weber writes that in conditions where everything else has failed, people are inclined to entrust their destiny to the groups that lead them, which offer hitherto untried solutions. The uncertainty of the effect of the new "recipes" is compensated by the charisma of their representatives. A charismatic leader has the gift to convincingly present himself as the messenger of a new message and to convince others that this message is correct. After the first successes, writes Weber, the leader develops a sense of his own omnipotence.
Thus, after the defeat in 1918, a large number of Germans felt humiliated, their self-confidence was shaken. Adolf Hitler's message was measured against that sense of humiliation. It essentially stated that the German people would win the next wars and that the Germans were destined to be the leading people in Europe. Of course, dissidents who questioned such lofty goals had to be expelled or destroyed.
Hitler's shouts addressed to the Jews had no scientific or social basis, they were magical, mythologically colored, feeding collective fears. Hitler's charisma was enough for a large number of Germans to accept the extermination of the Jews as necessary for the rise of the German nation.
The concept of cult of personality and Weber's "charismatic authority" are related concepts. The difference is that, according to Weber, charismatic power tends to be legalized, that is, power is less and less legitimized over time by the extraordinary personality of the ruler, and more and more by impersonal legal procedures and institutions. With the cult of personality, however, there is no transition from the personal form of exercising power to the legal exercise of power, there the willingness to obey those who are ruled is primarily based on the connection with the ruler and there is no tendency for such a situation to change.
Weber also distinguished personal charisma from official charisma and hereditary charisma in monarchies.
ONE NATION,
ONE EMPIRE,
ONE LEADER
Nineteen years after Weber's death and six years after the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) came to power, on April 28, 1939, in a speech before the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler said, among other things: "I overcame chaos in Germany, restored order, incredible raised the production of our national economy... I managed to put all seven million unemployed people, who are close to all of our hearts, back into useful production without exception... I I not only united the German people politically, but I also strengthened them militarily and tried to remove page by page that treaty (Versailles), which in all its 448 articles contains the most corrupt rape ever imposed on nations and people. I restored to the Reich the provinces that had been taken from us in 1919, I returned millions of us displaced, deeply unhappy Germans to their homeland, I re-established the thousand-year-old unity of the German living space and... I tried to do all this without shedding blood and that my or I do not inflict war suffering on other peoples. I... who only 21 years ago was an unknown worker and soldier of my people, I achieved all this by my own strength..."
Me and me and me. On this occasion, Hitler does not mention the extermination of the Jews or the war for a new living space. He is speaking to the people for whom it is important to revive the economy, establish order, reduce unemployment, cancel the hated Treaty of Versailles, and establish national unity. All this was not approved only by the Nazis, but by the majority of Germans. The Gleichschalt media broadcast his speech. Germans adore the Führer.
Sieg Heil!
Heil hitler! A charismatic leader ruled Germany, just as Weber described it even before Hitler stinked up the Munich beer halls. A cult of personality was created, a cult of a leader who stands above all laws.
Such a development was first hinted at by the front pages of a German newspaper on August 4, 1934, which read: "Today, all of Germany is Hitler." It was two days after the death of the president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler immediately abolished that function and introduced a personal oath for soldiers who swear allegiance to him personally as "the leader of the German Reich and the people". Thus he proclaimed himself head of state, commander-in-chief, head of government and leader of the Nazi party, all in one person. The title "Today, all of Germany is Hitler" not only speaks of a change in the structure of government, but also equates Hitler with the state and implies that he and the German people are most closely connected.
The "referendum" on August 19, 1934 subsequently legitimized the change of government and power in Germany and demonstrated the unity of leader and people. The slogan read: "Hitler for Germany - all of Germany for Hitler."
EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIP
As Weber writes long before those fateful events in Berlin: The authority of a charismatic leader is based on his unique personal qualities, and the people, those who believe, follow his charisma, identify and are motivated to a large extent with the leader's goals and visions. This is how a primarily emotional and less functional relationship develops between the leader and the led.
The German sociologist Mario Rainer Lepsius developed Weber's model of the charismatic leader and charismatic government. He writes about the "latent charismatic situation", which is a prerequisite for people to accept a charismatic leader.
For example, when the authorities are unable to overcome some kind of crisis. Then the delegitimization of those responsible creates a power vacuum in which the people hope for the leadership of a "strong man".
The manifestation situation arises when the "charismatic" has already gained the trust and faith of the people. As a rule, he then refers to "rescue from destruction", but does not mention concrete solutions. A charismatic leader speaks of "hope for something new."
When the French sociologist and anthropologist Gustave le Bon (1841–1931) wrote
Mass psychology, which can also be read as a manual for dictators and demagogues of all stripes, Stalin was sixteen, Mussolini twelve, Hitler six. Embracing his "racial soul" and fondness for measuring skulls and obscure gender theories, he described how an unscrupulous politician could only use "demonic oratory" to send the masses into mass psychosis.
"Leaders are generally not thinkers, but men of action," writes Le Bon. "They are not particularly shrewd and could not be otherwise, for shrewdness leads to suspicion and thus to inaction." We find leaders among the nervous, the irritable, the half-mad, those who are on the edge of madness."
In Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political cult of personality was almost eradicated. The attempt to reduce politics to the worship of a single personality is a symptom of a serious disease of a society. Temporary dictators come to him like a sneeze.
