12-15-2020, 12:31 PM
(12-15-2020, 04:21 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-15-2020, 01:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: 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.
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.
You should look at the left wing Obama posters and see the similarities. Trump will be leaving office soon enough. You don't have to worry about Trump scaring you or upsetting you for at least four more years. What you have to worry about is Joe Biden leaving office within a couple years after being sworn in. I think that it will become impossible for them to continue to hide his obvious problem. Plus, there is also an investigation involving his sons shady business dealings that may implicate him and force him to resign. Either way, I don't see him making it through a full term as President. My mother started showing the same signs as him at his age and she got noticeably worse each year that followed and she wasn't the President of the United State at the time.
A personality cult is, above all else, a lie. It is the assertion that something horrible is the diametric opposite -- the ideal. I can think of something else that deliberately confuses opposites and prevents thought: the Newspeak that George Orwell associates with the monstrous "Oceania" in which words are turned into lies, as was so in Stalinland and Hitlerland. A personality cult is a fraud, as in an attempt to make a thug seem a saint.
I searched "cult of personality Obama" and found only crackpot sites such as The American Thinker. I also checked on some other Presidents (OK, Kennedy and Hoover -- and Hoover was looked upon very highly soon after he was elected -- before the Stock Market Crash). About the same. I checked Wikipedia for cults of personality and found mostly the Bad Guys of history. The personality cults included the Left (Castro), Right (Mussolini), and people hard to place either way (Ataturk, Pilsudski). No democratic figures.
Quote:Oh, by the way, you should not expect help or support from the Republican base or the Republican party because we are going to put fire under their asses and force them to start taking much tougher positions with the Democrats and expect them to answer their threats with greater threats. I agree that Americans have the right to make their own choices. Americans can choose to completely break with the the Democratic Party and choose to leave the states that are controlled by it and move to the Republican states where American rights will be recognized and honored and protected by the state. The right to murder an unborn human may no longer exist and be outlawed but murder has always been illegal in America. Like I said, handing a couple of Senate seats to the Democratic party is probably all that's needed for a century worth of political tradition to be broken/come to an end.
We Democrats have adopted some conservative traits, including respect for tradition, law and order, and protocol. We will use those traits because they are good for America. We are no longer radical Leftists.
I'd be wary of saying which way America is going. Liberals leaving Illinois for Texas are taking their values with them. Voters under 40 are much more D than R, and the GOP has little to offer them than economic abuse of ther precious children. We liberals give a d@mn about those kids of poor working-class minorities. We want them to get solid education so that they not be consigned to a permanent underclass. We have a healthy respect for science and learning, and we will need the first to get any economic gain and the second to make life something other than numbing absurdity.
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.
