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A cult of personality or personality cult arises when a country's leader uses mass media to create a larger-than-life public image through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are often found in dictatorships but can be found in some democracies as well.

A cult of personality is similar to general hero worship except that it is specifically built around political leaders. However, the term may be applied by analogy to refer to adulation of non-political leaders.

Throughout history monarchs were almost always held in enormous reverence. Through the principle of the divine right of kings, rulers were said to hold office by the will of God. Imperial China, ancient Egypt, Japan, the Inca, the Aztecs, and the Roman Empire are especially noted for elevating monarchs to the status of god-kings.

The resurgence of ancient Greek democratic ideas in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries made it increasingly difficult for monarchs to preserve this aura. However, the subsequent development of photography, sound recording, film and mass production, as well as public education and techniques used in commercial advertising, enabled political leaders to project a positive image like never before. It was under these circumstances in the 20th century that the best-known personality cults arose.

Generally speaking, personality cults are most common in regimes with totalitarian systems of government, that seek to radically alter or transform society according to revolutionary new ideas. Often, a single leader becomes associated with this revolutionary transformation, and he becomes treated as a benevolent "guide" for the nation, without whom the transformation to a better future cannot occur. This has generally been the justification for personality cults that arose in fascist and Soviet Bloc states of the 20th Century such as that of Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong.

Not all dictatorships foster personality cults, however, and some leaders may actively seek to minimize their own public adulation. For example in Cuba public images of Fidel Castro are rare, and a personality cult around Castro is not officially encouraged, although images, posters, and billboards of Che Guevara abound. Even in the totalitarian regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia the image of Pol Pot himself was rarely seen, though in the latter's case this was merely to perpetuate the image of a faceless, invisible, omnipresent state leadership.

The criticism of personality cults often focuses on the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. During the peak of their reigns, these leaders appeared as god-like infallible rulers. Their portraits were hung in every home or public building, and artists and poets were legally instructed to produce only works that glorified the leader and their political movements. The term cult of personality comes from Karl Marx's critique of the "cult of the individual" - expressed in a letter to German political worker, Wilhelm Bloss. In that, Marx states thus:

From my antipathy to any cult of the individual, I never made public during the existence of the [1st] International the numerous addresses from various countries which recognized my merits and which annoyed me... Engels and I first joined the secret society of Communists on the condition that everything making for superstitious worship of authority would be deleted from its statute.

Nikita Khrushchev recalled Marx's criticism in his 1956 "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin to the 20th Party Congress:

Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person. . . . One of the most characteristic examples of Stalin's self-glorification and of his lack of even elementary modesty is the edition of his Short Biography, which was published in 1948..^[1].

This book is an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, "the greatest leader," "sublime strategist of all times and nations." Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens.

We need not give here examples of the loathsome adulation filling this book. All we need to add is that they all were approved and edited by Stalin personally and some of them were added in his own handwriting to the draft text of the book.

Journalist Bradley Martin documented the personality cults of North Korea's father-son leadership, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.^[2] While visiting North Korea in 1979 he noted that nearly all music, art, and sculpture that he observed glorified Kim Il-sung, whose personality cult was then being extended to his son Kim Jong-il. ^[2] Kim Il-sung rejected the notion that he had created a cult around himself and accused those who suggested so of "factionalism." ^[2] A US religious freedom investigation confirmed Martin's observation that children learn to thank Kim Il-sung for all blessings as part of the cult.^{[citation needed]}

• Anax
• Apotheosis
• Charisma
• Charismatic authority
• Dictator
• Emperor
• God-King
• High King
• King of Kings
• Monarch
• Propaganda