Cult of Personality

What do these images have in common?

Answer: they all show the "cult of personality" in various countries led by totalitarian dictators. Nikita Khrushchev, commenting on Stalin's reign, aptly coined this phrase. These photographs are of 1.) the USSR's Josef Stalin, 2.) Kim Il-Sung of North Korea, 3.) Communist China's Chairman Mao as a young man and a painting of a "happy home" from the 1950s with Mao's portrait in the background, 4.) Iraq's Saddham Hussein statue toppled down, 5.) The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's (1938-1975) statue being dismantled, and 6. and 7.) Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marco's statue, which was later blown up. (source: http://www.michaeljohngrist.com/)

Common attributes of these statues are their sheer colossal size, dwarfing the common man, and a vertical supremacy, forcing the viewer to look up, deifying the leader and relegating the viewer to a lower position in power and status. Often there are multiple statues or replicas in various cities in a country. In North Korea, it is mandatory to an images of the "Dear Leader" Il-Sung in every household. The concept of hero worship, infallibility, and charisma apply to this type of leader.

In Animal Farm, Napoleon (Josef Stalin) is given similar deifying treatment in Chapter 8: After the violent purges, when Napoleon is (now more rarely) seen on the farm, he is flanked by his “retinue of dogs” and also by a rooster who trumpets his arrival. He has a separate apartment in the farmhouse. He “took his meals alone, with two dogs to wait upon him… It was also announced that the gun would be fired every year on Napoleon’s birthday…” He was always referred to in formal style as “our leader, Comrade Napoleon” and the pigs liked to invent for him such titles as Father of All Animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Sheep-fold,”...

So George Orwell in 1944, a decade before Khrushchev coined the term "Cult of Personality" in 1954, gave us a clear and vivid sense of the concept with how Napoleon was presented.