Chaplin's "Great Dictator" Speech: Communist?

[Crusade]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IvPIWzQcUY

What else would he be describing? Pretty interesting that there was a speech like that during his era.

[red cat]

Yes it is communist. Wasn't Chaplin targeted in the Mc Carthy era?

[Red Commissar]

The speech in Great Dictator we must also take in the context of Chaplin's time. It was released in 1940, and by that point in time Chaplin was trying to bring attention to the march of fascism in Europe and how people were ignoring the downtrodden in the United States.


The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls - has barricaded the world with hate - had goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

Soldiers! Don't give yourself to these brutes - who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who treat you like cattle and use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! Don't hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural!

He had also eagerly supported the New Deal in its earliest stages, but was disillusioned with how by the late 1930s had virtually been done away with.

Chaplin had left-wing sympathies (I wouldn't say that Chaplin was a full-blown Marxist but had socialist leanings) and was targeted by HUAC as a result after World War II. They had used as "evidence" his relationship with people considered to be radicals- HG Wells, Upton Sincliar, Albert Einsten, Harold Laski, etc, as well as a reception he threw for William Z. Foster.

A lot of his work, particularly through his tramp character, served as a sort of critique on conditions of workers in industrialized societies (Modern Times had a dismal picture of working conditions), and the oppression they had to face from both management and the law. He had also urged the United States and the Allies to quickly open up a second European front to relieve the Soviet Union in its fight against Nazi Germany during WW II.


On the battlefields of Russia democracy will live or die. The fate of the Allied nations is in the hands of the Communists. If Russia is defeated the Asiatic continent - the largest and richest of this globe - would be under the domination of the Nazis. With practically the whole Orient in the hands of the Japanese the Nazis would then have access to nearly all the vital materials of the world. What chance would we have then of defeating Hitler?

The Russians are in desperate need of help. They are pleading for a second front. Among the Allied nations there is a difference of opinion as to whether a second front is possible now. We hear that the Allies haven't sufficient supplies to support a second front. Then again we hear they have. We also hear that they don't want to risk a second front at this time in case of possible defeat. That they don't want to take a chance until they are sure and ready.

But can we afford to wait until we are sure and ready? Can we afford to play safe. There is no safe strategy in war. At this moment the Germans are 35 miles from the Caucasus. If the Caucasus is lost 95 per cent of the Russian oil is lost. If the Russians lose the Caucasus it will be the greatest disaster of the Allied cause. Then watch out for appeasers, for they'll come out of their holes. They will want to make peace with a victorious Hitler.

When HUAC sent him a notice to appear, he responded,


For your convenience I will tell you what I think you want to know. I am not a Communist, neither have I ever joined any political party or organization in my life. I am what you call a "peace-monger". I hope this will not offend you. So please state definitely when I am to be called to Washington.

HUAC ultimately decided against bringing him in because they were worried that Chaplin could turn the hearings into a circus and make them look like morons, and his reputation among his fans could cause them more issues. So they waited until he had left the country to go to London to visit home and a movie premier. J. Edgar Hoover then got into action and had Chaplin's permit to enter the country revoked.


. . . Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America's yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted."

Some quotes from his autobiography


Although we were aware of the shame of going to the workhouse, when Mother told us about it both Sydney and I thought it adventurous and a change from living in one stuffy room. But on that doleful day I didn't realize what was happening until we actually entered the workhouse gate. Then the forlorn bewilderment of it struck me; for there we were made to separate, Mother going in one direction to the women's ward and we in another to the children's.

How well I remember the poignant sadness of that first visiting day: the shock of seeing Mother enter the visiting-room garbed in workhouse clothes. How forlorn and embarrassed she looked! In one week she had aged and grown thin, but her face lit up when she saw us.

I now saw H. G. Wells frequently. After dinner friends arrived, among Professor Laski, who was still young-looking. Harold was a most brilliant orator. I heard him speak to the American Bar Association in California, and he talked unhesitatingly and brilliantly for an hour without a note. At H. G.'s flat that night, Harold told me of the amazing innovations in the philosophy of socialism.

Wells wanted to know how I became interested in socialism. It was not until I came to the United States and met Upton Sinclair, I told him. We were driving to his house in Pasadena for lunch and he asked me in his soft-spoken way if I believed in the profit system. It was a disarming question, but instinctively I felt it went to the very root of the matter, and from that moment I became interested and saw politics not as history but as an economic problem.


When H. G. Wells visited me in 1935 in California, I took him to task about his criticism of Russia. I had read his disparaging reports, so I wanted a first-hand account and was surprised to find him almost bitter about it.

"But is it not too early to judge?" I argued. "They have had a difficult task, opposition and conspiracy from within and from without. Surely in time good results should follow?"

At that time Wells was enthusiastic about what Roosevelt had accomplished with the New Deal, and was of the opinion that a quasi-socialism in America would come out of a dying capitalism. He seemed especially critical of Stalin, whom he had interviewed, and said that under his rule Russia had become a tyrannical dictatorship.

"If you, a socialist, believe that capitalism is doomed," I said, "what hope is there for the world if socialism fails in Russia?"

"Socialism won't fail in Russia, or anywhere else," he said, "but this particular development of it has grown into a dictatorship."

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities — a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.

[khad]

Orwell certainly fingered him as a communist and a Jew. He was apparently wrong on both counts.

[Robocommie]

What struck me as very left wing, and also inspiring, is his comments in the speech about how the "good earth is rich" and can support us all, and his urging to "do away with national barriers." He may not have been Marxist, but he most certainly was a humanist, who cared a very great deal about humanity, and for that I admire him greatly.

[Red Commissar]

Orwell certainly fingered him as a communist and a Jew. He was apparently wrong on both counts.

I know Orwell went around fingering out people for being communist, but I didn't know he had been fingering him out for being a jew. I know Chaplin always had accusations of being Jewish his whole life though.


What struck me as very left wing, and also inspiring, is his comments in the speech about how the "good earth is rich" and can support us all, and his urging to "do away with national barriers." He may not have been Marxist, but he most certainly was a humanist, who cared a very great deal about humanity, and for that I admire him greatly.

He was concerned about the human condition indeed. I think growing up where he did, he had already become distrustful of what unfettered capitalism had reduced his family to.

[Mumbles]

This is the climax to the 1940 Charlie Chaplin film "The Great Dictator". While not completely applicable to anything today, I still find it very moving.

That's what the guy who posted the thing on youtube said. If only he didn't think that stuff like this only applies to the time it came out.

Very moving though. Thanks for sharing.