A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader, is the result of an effort which is made to create an idealized and heroic image of a glorious leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Historically, it has developed through techniques of mass media, propaganda, spectacle, the arts, patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established by modern social engineering techniques, usually by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. Cults of personality often accompany the leaders of totalitarian or authoritarian governments. They can also be seen in some monarchies, theocracies, failed democracies and even in liberal democracies.
Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century CE
1859 carte de visite of Napoleon III by Disdéri, which popularized the carte-de-visite format
Statue of Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, who is revered as their Al-Abad (Immortal Leader) by followers of Syrian Ba'athism
"Smith of the New Great Argentina" (poster 1947)
Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media.
Totalitarian dictator: Il Duce Benito Mussolini was supreme leader of Fascist Italy (1922–1943).
Anti-totalitarian: Hannah Arendt thwarted the totalitarian model Kremlinologists who sought to co-opt the thesis of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) as American anti–Communist propaganda that claimed that every Communist state was of the totalitarian model.
Anti-totalitarian: the American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski popularised combating Left-wing totalitarianism in U.S. foreign policy.
President Isaias Afwerki has ruled Eritrea as a totalitarian dictator since the country's independence in 1993.