{"id":27881,"date":"2015-08-17T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27881"},"modified":"2017-06-24T11:40:33","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T15:40:33","slug":"qotd-totalitarian-movements-as-a-substitute-for-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/17\/qotd-totalitarian-movements-as-a-substitute-for-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Totalitarian movements as a substitute for religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it\u2019s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren\u2019t just called \u201cpolitical religions\u201d by scholars today. In all three cases, observers at the time recognized and worried about the movements\u2019 religious natures. Those natures were no accident; Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology \u201cnot only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

One reason that observers saw the great totalitarianisms as religious was that each had its idol: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Lenin in Russia, followed by Stalin. Take Grigory Zinoviev\u2019s description of Lenin: \u201cHe is really the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the Grace of God. He is the authentic figure of a leader such as is born once in 500 years.\u201d Stalin\u2019s cult of personality was far more developed and sometimes explicitly idolatrous, as in the poem that addressed the despot as \u201cO Thou mighty one, chief of the peoples, Who callest man to life, Who awakest the earth to fruitfulness.\u201d And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, \u201cintellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.\u201d<\/p>\n

To point out these words\u2019 uncomfortable similarity to the journalists\u2019 praises of Obama is not to equate the throngs who bowed down to totalitarian dictators with even the most worshipful Obamaphiles. But the manner of worship is related, as perhaps it must be in any human society that chooses to adore a human being. The widespread renaming of villages, schools, and factories after Stalin, for example, finds its modern-day democratic parallel in a rash of schools that have already rechristened themselves after Obama, to say nothing of the hundreds of young sentimentalists who informally adopted the candidate\u2019s middle name during the presidential race. Even the Obama campaign\u2019s ubiquitous logo \u2014 the letter O framing a rising sun \u2014 would not have surprised the scholar Eric Voegelin. In The Political Religions<\/em> (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun \u2014 a symbol of \u201cthe radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom\u201d \u2014 from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.<\/p>\n

Benjamin A. Plotinsky, “The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm: The Left\u2019s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience”, City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2010-02-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it\u2019s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren\u2019t just called \u201cpolitical religions\u201d by scholars today. In all three cases, observers at the time recognized and worried about the movements\u2019 religious natures. Those natures were no accident; Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology \u201cnot only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53,41,11],"tags":[158,780,457,969,572,1135,269],"class_list":["post-27881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-barackobama","tag-communism","tag-fascism","tag-hitler","tag-leadership","tag-mussolini","tag-propaganda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7fH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27881"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32324,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27881\/revisions\/32324"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}