Friday 17 February 2012

Charlie Chaplin-a Communist?

Charlie Chaplin has hit the news today, years after his death due to the release of MI5 and FBI documents. It turns out that during the 'red scare' in the US in the 1950s Chaplin was investigated by the FBI to see if he had ever been a member of a communist party. The result was that he hadn't but did have left wing sympathies. What baffled the FBI and MI5 at the time, however, was not Chaplin's politics but his mysterious birth. Neither agency could find a birth certificate for Chaplin! Very bizarre. For more on this see the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17072165

4 comments:

Hels said...

The FBI was insanely paranoid. Had Chaplin ever been a member of a communist party? What were his political goals? Who did he consort with?

Of course he had left wing sympathies - every thinking person in the world did, after the right wing horrors of the Spanish Civil War and WW2.

TammiMagee said...

I think you're absolutely right! I would love to have a look through some secret FBI files and read about some of their paranoia! I would be interested to read documents held by the secret services on ways they tried to assassinate Castro! Explosive cigars lol

Anonymous said...

Yes, there was nothing to worry about. Those communists were only exterminating their own people in the millions. They really weren't bad guys and well, every educated person was left-wing...of course. Only left-wingers knew the right kind of society. They were the smart ones. Yes, and look at the mess they've made out of things. Oh, that's right. You're so smart you know how to run an economy. Just put some business guys in handcuffs and let the cameras catch the perp-walks...kind of like killing the bourgeoisie, isn't it?

pepito533 said...

communism has allways managed to blurr the lines(particularly today) through well run propaganda machines, just like adolph did, and it seems the ones that shouldnt be fooled often are, oh how unfortunate we didnt listen to patton back at the end of ww2,all the pain we might have saved the world.