Living Through Another Cult of Personality...

Recently, I have been reading Josephine Woll's monograph on the Soviet WWII film, The Cranes are Flying, probably my favourite World War II film of all time. Woll (The Cranes Are Flying, London: Tauris, Kinofiles Film Companion series, 2003) has an interesting discussion about how Cranes, a film released in 1957 during the Thaw in the wake of Stalin's death, differed, Woll argues, from WWII films of the Stalin era.

As I was reading Woll's discussion about Stalin and Stalin era WWII films it was hard not to draw parallels to Donald Trump, the current president of the United States. As Stalin's blunders in the early years of the Great Patriotic War were rewritten in such a way as to turn them into brilliant strategy, so Trump's blunders pertaining to the coronavirus pandemic are being rewritten to turn them into brilliant strategy.

Just as Stalin proclaimed, before, during, and after the Great Patriotic War, that fifth columnists were trying to destroy the USSR, so Trump and his devotees and toadies maintained initially that the coronavirus was a fabricated fifth columnist plot by the Democrat Party plot to bring down their Great Leader. Later, when it became clear even to Trump, his devotees, and his toadies that the coronavirus was real and really dangerous, the lack of preparation for the coming pandemic was blamed on Democrat attempts to impeach Trump during the months when the coronavirus was rearing its ugly head in Wuhan China. Needless to see these fabrications are worthy of Stalin (and American McCarthyites) and the role his devotees and toadies played in rewriting Soviet history during the Stalin era.

Just as there was a cult of personality around Stalin, there was and is a cult of personality around Trump. In the Stalinist cult of personality Stalin was proclaimed the all-knowing, all-brilliant, and all perfect leader of the USSR and brilliant strategist in the Great Patriotic War against the fascist enemy. In the Cult of the Orange One, Trump, Trump is treated as the perfect, all wise, all knowing master of every negotiation and every strategy. The portrayals and depictions of Stalin and Trump and the devotion some showed and show to their totem-messiah-gods is clear evidence that they were and are at the heart of cults or new religious movements dedicated to them. These cults bring with them all of the pluses and minuses of cults or new religious movements.

Finally, Stalin was a flim flam man who distrusted science and so is Trump, both engaged and engage in periodic purges, and both, strikingly, had and have blood on their hands. Now that is what I call a legacy.