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Wednesday, June 3, 2009 Orono Weekly Times - 7 Basic Black by Arthur Black Heroes with feats of clay As long as people worship Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable. Aldous Huxley I own a book entitled The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush. It is not a satire and it was not written tongue-in-cheek. It was penned and published in all seriousness, back in 2003, early in the 43rd President's mandate, before his career turned into a careen and his cartwheeling catalogue of colossal disasters became embarrassingly obvious to all but the most blinkered Republican diehards. Point is, such diehards still exist. There are people - plenty of them - who still believe that Dubya was a great President and a misunderstood hero of his time. Yes, Virginia, dinosaurs do roam the earth. And not exclusively in America. Recently, the citizens of Russian were asked to select The Greatest Russian of All Time. There's a challenge - Russia's produced literary giants like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol and Turgenev to pick a random half-dozen. And Russian musical geniuses Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich spring to mind. Pianists like Horowitz and Richter; violinists such as Oistrakh, and Rostropovich; dancers from Nijinsky to Nureyev... Russia has given the world outstanding philosophers, engineers, statesmen, athletes - name a category and it wouldn't be hard to appoint a Russian name to it. So who did Russians pick as the All Time Greatest Russian? A 13th century saint, prince and politician by the name of Alexander Nevsky, actually but that's not what caught my eye. Neither was the chap who notched second place, a Russian prime minister from the early 1900's named Stolypin. Nope, what got my attention was the guy who took the bronze. Third most popular Russian of all time, chosen freely and without coercion by fifty million voters? Joseph Stalin. Think about that for a moment, tovarich. Joe Stalin: one of the greatest mass murderers and certifiable madmen of all time. A megalomaniacal drunk who had his enemies either murdered outright by firing squad or lingeringly in brutal Siberian prison camps. They reckon Stalin had at least 800,000 enemies executed. Another 1.7 million 'officially' perished in the Gulags. Nobody knows the final tally but it's somewhere between 3 million and 60 million souls. Almost all of them his own countrymen. And their descendants regard him as a hero? It's not like the vote was a fluke. In an earlier poll, Stalin came in second. And in a 2006 survey nearly 40 percent said they would vote for Stalin if he were still alive. What is in human nature that makes so many of us eager to polish our manacles and kiss the cat o' nine tails? Not hard to figure out in a country like North Korea where to diss the repulsive runt who likes to be called Dear Leader can get you killed on the spot - but why Russia? Stalin's been dead for more than half a century and the Putin regime goes to great lengths to distance itself from his grisly legacy. How come millions of Russians still think Joe was a stand-up guy? Even weirder - look at Britain. The English have been tugging their forelocks and prostrating themselves before royalty ever since a guy named Offa, son of Thingfrith convinced them it would be a good idea, back in 774 AD. Offa no doubt had some muscle for backup, but nowadays? Nobody's going to get sent to the Tower by royal edict yet still there are staunch loyalists who are happy to pledge loyalty to a family based solely on their DNA. Granted, Britons have an admirable and worthy woman as Queen currently, but they've been equally reverent and deferential when the throne was occupied by dipsomaniacs, syphilitics, lechers and raving loons. Mao Zedong, another monster and a contemporary of Stalin, once mused that his 'popularity' was a consequence of his superhuman charisma. "People like me to sound like a lot of big cannons," he explained. I expect that Mao merely like to think that he came across as a cannon barrage, whereas he was really just a dumpy little guy with mossy green teeth, halitosis that could blister paint and a penchant for deflowering underage girls. Stalin, too, had delusions of grandeur. His real name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili but he preferred Stalin (it means man of steel). Alas, the Butcher of Georgia was made of less durable stuff. Stalin was only five foot four, had a crippled left arm, pockmarks all over his face and, at his death, only three teeth in his mouth. But people don't buy reality; they buy images. That's how we got The Great Helmsman and the Man of Steel. And that leadership genius George W. Bush. 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