oh wait….

It’s not to my point whether or not he was a communist – my point is that he was naive, and that one might perhaps be cautious about jubilation over soaring political rhetoric that champions ‘the People.’ In fact, Chaplin, like many people on the left in his time and even many decades later, sympathized with the USSR out of just that sensibility. There is a long history of naivete on the left that can’t be made to disappear by breathing McCarthy. (I say as someone who categorizes himself as on the left – ameliorative rather than transformative left.)

Here’s a quote from Chaplin at a dinner given in 1942 (wonder how this would sound side by side his Great Dictator speech): ““In those (Stalinist) purges the Communists did away with their Quislings and Lavals, and if other nations had done the same there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today. The only people who object to Communism and who use it as a bugaboo are the Nazi agents in this country. . . . I am not a Communist but I am proud to say that I feel pretty pro-Communist.””

It looks like the suspect donations actually took place in the 1920s, and were through a labor leader rather than made directly to Russians. It is much easier to forgive blinkered sympathy with communism in the 1920s than in the 1940s, when information about the Great Terror was available. And much much easier to forgive those sympathies in the 40s to those lingering into the 60s and 70s.

~

That might be one of the earliest documented uses of the ban stick.