Ask Lemmygrad

I don't think we should compare everything socialist countries do to the US because the US is not the world. And I don't necessarily agree with Getty either, who is a liberal, and shows his liberal bias by even giving credence to it in the first place.

Furr proved conclusively that Kruschev was the one who played up Stalin's "cult" despite Stalin's reluctance. So Getty's argument is disproven here.

Perhaps the question you should ask yourself is, why would I believe socialist countries had cults of personality in the first place?

People like Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Lenin/Stalin, Mao continue to be very influential to their countries and to the broader struggle. They literally led independence struggles and worked tirelessly for the people. Read into their biographies, the common thread you'll find is they all spent hours a day between shifts doing agitation, party work, educating themselves and others. And then when the conditions were right, using this base of support correctly to lead the struggle for independence.

Apparently to liberals recognizing these achievements and that these very human people worked selflessly is impossible. Nobody is truly selfless to the liberal and so they have to find some silly point to make up to tarnish their legacy. Kim Il Sung was apparently playing the long con of, uhhh, literally leading resistance against the Japanese at 21yo to the point that a company was eventually created tasked solely with hunting him down? He should've fucked off to Miami during the war like Rhee Syngman instead, and then get appointed president by John Foster Dulles, silly Kim.

And these are real people who died less than two generations ago. It's very, very recent history. Like, our grandparents could have met with Stalin or Mao. Literally when Koreans see a statue of Kim Il Sung they remember, oh shit, I could be living under Japanese occupation as a sex slave right now. But I fucking don't.

But we don't get any of that in the west because even in communist circles we don't have any figures to look up to to remind us that the struggle is protracted, and we all need to pull our weight, and it doesn't fall on just one person to do all that. So we point and laugh so that we don't have to look at our own legacy of failure in the past 100 years of "organizing".

Because they don't have capeshit, sponegebob and bideno-trumps but real leaders. More serious answer is that the so called "cults" get incredibly overblown by western propaganda and sourced from Khrushchev lies.

Tell me with a straight face that any socialist country has a bigger cult of personality than the US “founding fathers”.

Because socialist leaders are revolutionary people, they overcame massive challenges and their leadership ended up steering the course of history of their nations. Kim il sung, Mao, deng, lenin, Stalin, che, castro, etc.. straight up challenged and won against the status quo of their respective nations. These are people we should look up to, learn from and ultimately surpass.

Also its not uniquely socialist, the bourgeoisie have their own figures they worship, religions too, heck even sports and other forms of media. On a smaller level even competent workers inspire people around them.

To quote Getty:

The ‘cult of personality’ which developed around Stalin after 1929 (and around Máo in the 1960s) had many purposes. […] It served as a kind of rallying point for much of a population which was used to a system in which one man ruled for life. More importantly, however, the tendency to attribute all things to the ‘wise leadership of Comrade Stalin’ served to hide inner-Party disputes from the public eye.

The oppositional struggles of 1921–1929 had been public disagreements which had nearly torn the Party apart several times. That was not to be allowed in the 1930s. Even though radicals hated moderates and there were serious disagreements about everything from MTS political departments to economic planning, Stalin’s cult of personality managed to hide, but not resolve, the splits until 1937.¹⁷⁷

[…]

Policy disputes and disagreements were hidden behind the iron unity façade of Stalin’s leadership. All policy initiatives were customarily attributed to the ‘great teacher’. […] It would be naïve to assume, as many have done, that Stalin controlled and initiated everything and that his lieutenants simply mechanically carried out his directives on everything from hog breeding to transport. […] Left and right were still there (and, of course, always would be), but were simply not to be allowed to divide the Party as they did in the 1920s.¹⁷⁸

To paraphrase a wise philosopher, if Stalin had not existed, he would have had to be invented. The Stalin cult of personality was invented to fulfil the need for an apparently monolithic leadership and charismatic inspiration in a period of crisis and rapid transformation of institutions and values.

A similar process is common to all societies under similar conditions. The more acute the crisis, the more rapid the transformation, the more intense is the cult of the leader, for example, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill, Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Máo Tse-tung, Khoumicni, Attaturk, Hitler, Mussolini, and so on.

The personality cults that developed around these top leaders never meant that the struggles of different interests and the conflicting social forces operating behind the scenes were suspended in favour of the arbitrary will of an omnipotent individual.

(Source.)