Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

A message from Charlie Chaplin

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!

4 comments on “A message from Charlie Chaplin

  1. Pingback: Ten Steps to a Fascist America « can’t see the forest

  2. Manas
    23 September, 2007

    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. :)

  3. Ann El Khoury
    23 September, 2007

    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).

  4. Manas
    24 September, 2007

    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.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on 23 September, 2007 by in Fascism, Video and tagged , , .

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


Categories