Deification of a dictator

 Far-right mob hunts woman for defacing Stalin icon in Georgian church.   Georgia-born Stalin, who infamously suppressed religion in the Soviet Union, was featured on an icon in the country’s main cathedral.

The state uses religion or tries to replace it. Napoleon explained :

"How can one have order in the state without religion? Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and inequalities of fortunes cannot exist without religion. How can a man dying from hunger sit next to a man who is belching from overeating, unless there is an authority that says ‘God wills it so.’” And added: “It is necessary that there be rich and poor in this world. We need religion to say that in eternity it will be different. I see in religion not the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of the social order. It relegates to the heavens the idea of inequality so that the rich are not massacred here on earth.”

In the 1930s Stalin outlawed abortion and homosexuality and  pursued state capitalist industrialisation, at the cost of millions of lives, and in 1936 announced that Russia was ‘socialist’.   That very year, Pravda (28 August) proclaimed him divine:

'O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,

Thou who didst give birth to man,

Thou who didst make fertile the earth,

Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries,

Thou who givest blossom to the spring... '

Little wonder Bakunin: said “A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”