Here’s Charlie Chaplin (h/t Agent 99), a classic clip from his satire and first talkie, The Great Dictator, which I’ve only just viewed. It calls for a defiance of fascism.
See also Naomi Wolf’s latest work which considers the fascist blueprint as applied to current times in The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Here is an article drawing upon this work, comparing historical patterns of fascism with today.
Just added: Check out Mark’s new video over at The Peace Tree.
Meanwhile, just a note that I am enjoying catching up with the excellent posts at blogs as well as reading the appreciated comments here while I am inundated with grading papers. Look forward to returning to the blog deck shortly, and to releasing at least a few of the dozens of sketched out posts in the drafts folder!
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You know, I was terribly surprised and angry when I came to know that Charlie was banished from the US. Charges? He refused to hate the Communists.
Land of the free. :)
Manas, very interesting, I hadn’t known about that. It seems he was a target in the McCarthyist witch-hunts, leaving the US in 1952. According to links followed from the Chaplin website, he even made a movie about the experience, A King in New York.
A canny point in your piece there Curt; it would behoove us to have Fischer in one ear when considering history’s lessons. Drawing direct parallels is fraught with over determined danger when circumstances are so contingent rather than fixed, yet that does not preclude learning from the past either as you well note (Santayana).
I havn’t seen that movie yet. I hope I shall, shortly. However, in his Monsieur Verdoux, there is already a good much hint about how disturbed he was about the political elites of that time.