A Holiday Message From The Great Dictator...
Just periodically I like to watch this, Chaplin's presentation of the antithesis of dictators, his dig at Hitler. From a story at Zero Hedge,...here.
In September 1939, six days after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, Charlie Chaplin began filming one of his most epic films ever… and the first “talkie” for the silent film star. It was a courageous project - the ‘Great Dictator’ directly poked fun at Adolf Hitler.
This did not win Chaplin any friends in Washington who were keen to maintain official neutrality. And he paid dearly for it; the Great Dictator was the beginning of an entire decade of turbulent trouble between Chaplin and the US government.
FBI director J Edgar Hoover opened a file on Chaplin and launched a smear campaign to tarnish his public image. The mainstream media quickly jumped on board, accusing Chaplin of being a communist sympathizer.
In his autobiography, Chaplin sums up his troubles with the US government as follows:
“My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a nonconformist. 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 one.”
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It's like we are going back in time, some days...
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