12-15-2020, 01:50 AM
Election posters can resemble a personality cult in a dictatorship -- but the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that one at least has choices.
![[Image: th?id=OIP.B2VHeMwaodkVjLXjbnxJlQHaEC&pid...=285&h=156]](https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.B2VHeMwaodkVjLXjbnxJlQHaEC&pid=Api&P=0&w=285&h=156)
The French would eventually tire of the man who was at first the conscience and hope of Free France, then its leading French liberator... I did a search for "personality cult" and "de Gaulle", and this was the closest that I got. No worse than Eisenhower. Petain was far more blatant, hollow, and objectionable.
OK, the man who saved Chile from what he saw as another Fidel Castro only to establish the repression without much pretense of social justice unless one's idea of social justice is "He who owns the gold makes the rules"...
No, I don't see him as a liberator; he is an example for the rest of the world, all right -- of how to destroy what remaining democracy there is and institute a fascist reign of terror and a cultural morgue; he is now certainly no more the pride of Chile than Saddam Hussein is the pride of Iraq.
At least he didn't start any wars. Political prisoners died, and Chile was one of the worst countries in Latin America in which to be poor at the time despite having a fairly high level of development.
Here is something a bit more subtle. A partial analogue for Charles de Gaulle is Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who was in occupied Yugoslavia throughout the Nazi occupation as a leader of partisan bands that eventually became the source of his leadership of postwar Yugoslavia. Once getting through the blood-letting paroxysms of killing off (mostly) collaborators with Nazi Germany who really did deserve to die, Tito broke with Stalin and allowed small business to flourish. Still, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was the only political game in town, so to speak. Tito may not have been an international trouble-maker like Castro, but he did have a secret police. In the 1970's Yugoslavia had a reputation as a good place to take a vacation if you did not want to get ripped off but were not intent on seeing some particular historical or cultural site.
This video seems to be at first a travelogue with some patriotic sentiments that could as easily apply to most countries. But keep watching and you will notice some effusive praise of Marshal Tito.
Considering what happened under Milosevic, whom I considered one of the closest potential analogues for Donald Trump, maybe Tito wasn't so bad after all.
The French would eventually tire of the man who was at first the conscience and hope of Free France, then its leading French liberator... I did a search for "personality cult" and "de Gaulle", and this was the closest that I got. No worse than Eisenhower. Petain was far more blatant, hollow, and objectionable.
OK, the man who saved Chile from what he saw as another Fidel Castro only to establish the repression without much pretense of social justice unless one's idea of social justice is "He who owns the gold makes the rules"...
No, I don't see him as a liberator; he is an example for the rest of the world, all right -- of how to destroy what remaining democracy there is and institute a fascist reign of terror and a cultural morgue; he is now certainly no more the pride of Chile than Saddam Hussein is the pride of Iraq.
At least he didn't start any wars. Political prisoners died, and Chile was one of the worst countries in Latin America in which to be poor at the time despite having a fairly high level of development.
Here is something a bit more subtle. A partial analogue for Charles de Gaulle is Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who was in occupied Yugoslavia throughout the Nazi occupation as a leader of partisan bands that eventually became the source of his leadership of postwar Yugoslavia. Once getting through the blood-letting paroxysms of killing off (mostly) collaborators with Nazi Germany who really did deserve to die, Tito broke with Stalin and allowed small business to flourish. Still, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was the only political game in town, so to speak. Tito may not have been an international trouble-maker like Castro, but he did have a secret police. In the 1970's Yugoslavia had a reputation as a good place to take a vacation if you did not want to get ripped off but were not intent on seeing some particular historical or cultural site.
This video seems to be at first a travelogue with some patriotic sentiments that could as easily apply to most countries. But keep watching and you will notice some effusive praise of Marshal Tito.
Considering what happened under Milosevic, whom I considered one of the closest potential analogues for Donald Trump, maybe Tito wasn't so bad after all.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
