The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences | Hacker News Reader

The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences

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> The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock of all of Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of the government and the figure of Stalin.

I guess these indeed are the consequences of developing a cult of personality over decades, that some people just are unable to deal with hearing criticism of the dear leader.

Also the cognitive dissonance at hearing a member of the politburo openly saying stuff that would usually have sent them and their family to the gulag.

I can't help but think that the speech must have been a pretty easy grab of political power and historical significance with - now - relatively low personal risk.

Obligatory, check “The Death of Stalin”. I hadn’t laughed like this in years.

A very unique movie. Would love to see something similar.

Unrelated, but with AI, one could make the actors look exactly like the historical figures. I don't think it's been done yet, would be interesting to see I it would work.

Zhukov's ugly face would ruin Jason Isaacs' brilliant performance.

Uh? Zhukov's face wasn't ugly.

He looked nothing at all like Isaacs, I grant you that.

Funny, for all that communists like to go on and on about 'contradictions' in capitalism meaning it is therefore inevitably doomed, they are completely incapable of seeing the many contradictions of their preferred ideology right in front of their faces. They like to think they are great rationalists, but they are only great rationalizers. Throwing such shade would be gratuitous if not for the fact that an increasingly vocal minority still believes in that crap.

Ignorant statement. There are lots of sub-tendencies in communism, and they argue bitterly over their differences. Groups like tankies and Maoists tend to be authoritarian and pro-Stalinist, while Trotskyists hate Stalinists (guess why!), orthodox MLers dislike both for different reasons, many orthodox Marxists are skeptical of Bolsheviks, and then there are all kinds of socialist tendencies that don't identify as communists at all.

not to forget the confrontation between bakunin and marx in the first international, over several core issues of the movement.

Whatever else you may think of communism, this particular criticism seems misguided: there are as many bitterly opposed branches of communism as there are self-professed communists.

Officially, communists often engage in self-critique (whether this is heartfelt or not is another matter). So they do criticize their own ideology and practices.

A running joke among lefties is that the worst enemy of a communist is another communist with a slightly different ideology.

Also see: Monty Python's Life of Brian and their hilarious "The People's Front of Judea" skit (not to be confused with Judea People's Front -- splitters!).

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