Why did the US government exile Chaplin? The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) – the country’s political police – investigated Chaplin from 1922 onwards for his alleged ties to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Chaplin’s file – 1900 pages long – is filled with innuendo and slander, as agents exhausted themselves talking to his co-workers and adversaries to find any hint of Communist association. They found none. In December 1949, for instance, the agent in Los Angeles wrote, ‘No witnesses available to testify affirmatively that Chaplin has been member CP in past, that he is now a member or that he has contributed funds to CP’.
 
Beside the charge that he was a communist, Chaplin faced the accusation that he was ‘an unsavory character’ who violated the Mann Act – the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. Chaplin had paid for the travel of Joan Barry – his girlfriend – across state lines. Chaplin was found not guilt of these charges in 1944. It has subsequently been shown in a number of memoirs and studies that Chaplin was cruel to his many wives (many of them teenagers) and ruthless in his relations with women (Peter Ackroyd’s 2014 book has the details). In 1943, Chaplin married the playwright Eugene O’Neill’s daughter – Oona. She was 18. Chaplin was 54. They would have eight children. Oona Chaplin left the United States with her husband and was with him when he died in 1977. There was much about Chaplin’s life that was creepy – particularly the way he preyed on young girls (his second wife – Lita Grey – was 15 when they had an affair and then married; he was then 35). FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had considerable evidence to sift through here, but none of it was found to be sufficient to deport Chaplin.
 
What was the smoke that got into Hoover’s nose from the fire of Chaplin’s politics? From 1920 onwards, it was clear that Chaplin had sympathies for the Left. That year, Chaplin sat with Buster Keaton – the famous silent film actor – to drink a beer in Keaton’s kitchen in Los Angeles. Chaplin was at the height of his success. With Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith, Chaplin created United Artists, a company that broke with the studio system to give these four actors and directors control over their work. Chaplin was then working on The Kid (1921), one of his finest films and based almost certainly on his childhood. Keaton recounted that Chaplin talked ‘about something called communism which he just heard about’. ‘Communism’, Chaplin told him, according to Buster Keaton, ‘was going to change everything, abolish poverty’. Chaplin banged on the table and said, ‘What I want is that every child should have enough to eat, shoes on his feet and a roof over his head’. Keaton’s response is casually insincere, ‘But Charlie, do you know anyone who doesn’t want that?’
 
Chaplin came to the United States just after the Russian Revolution. He saw the growing lines of unemployment and distress in the United States – an unemployed population that grew from 950,000 (1919) to five million (1921). This was a time of great class struggle – the Palmer Raids conducted by the government against the Communists, on the one side, and the general strike in Seattle as well as the Battle of Blair Mountain by the mineworkers of Logan County, West Virginia, on the other side.
 
Chaplin’s silent films were anchored by the figure of the Tramp, the iconic poor man in a modern capitalist society. ‘I am like a man who is ever haunted by a spirit, the spirit of poverty, the spirit of privation’, Chaplin said. That is precisely what one sees in his films – from The Tramp (1915) to Modern Times (1936). ‘The whole point of the Little Fellow’, Chaplin said in 1925 of the tramp figure, ‘is that no matter how down on his ass he is, no matter how well the jackals succeed in tearing him apart, he’s still a man of dignity’. The working-class, the working-poor, are people of great resourcefulness and dignity – not beaten down, not to be mocked. Chaplin’s sympathy for the working-class defines all his most famous silent films.

 

 
It was Chaplin’s popularity and his message that disturbed the FBI. ‘There are men and women in far corners of the world who never have heard of Jesus Christ; yet they know and love Charlie Chaplin’, noted an article that an FBI agent clipped and highlighted in Chaplin’s file. Chaplin’s plainly depicted criticism of capitalism did not fail to impress the world’s peoples nor disturb the FBI. ‘I don’t want the old rugged individualism’, Chaplin said in November 1942, ‘rugged for the few and ragged for the many’.
 
The great limitation in his films is the depiction of women. They are always damsels in distress or rich women who are desired by poor men. There are few ‘women of dignity’, women who – at that time – were in pitched battles for their own rights. In fact, many silent films in both the UK and the US disparaged the Suffragette movement of their time – from A Day in the Life of a Suffragette (1908) to A Busy Day (1914, which was originally titled A Militant Suffragette). In this latter film, only six minutes long, Charlie Chaplin plays a suffragette who is boorish and then dies by drowning.
 

 
The film was released the same year as Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes to unite suffragette politics with socialism. Pankhurst, unlike Chaplin, would join the Communist Party and – in 1920 – would author A Constitution for British Soviets. She would leave the Communist Party, but remained a devoted Communist and anti-fascist for the rest of her life. If only Chaplin’s sexism had not blocked him from celebrating his contemporaries such as Pankhurst, Joan Beauchamp (another Suffragette and founder of the British Communist Party) as well as her sister Kay Beauchamp (co-founder of The Daily Worker, now Morning Star) and Fanny Deakin.
 
What drew Chaplin directly into the orbit of institutional left-wing politics was the rise of fascism. He was greatly troubled by the Nazi sweep across Europe. Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator (1940) was his satire of fascism – a film that should be watched by all in our times.
 

 
Two years after that film was out, Chaplin flew to New York City to be the main speaker at a Communist-backed Artists Front to Win the War event. Chaplin took the stage at Carnegie Hall on 16 October 1942, addressed the crowd as ‘comrades’ and said that Communists are ‘ordinary people like ourselves who love beauty, who love life’. Then, Chaplin offered his clearest statement on Communism – ‘They say communism may spread out all over the world. And I say – so what?’ (Daily Worker, 19 October 1942). In December 1942, Chaplin said, ‘I am not a Communist, but I am proud to say that I feel pretty pro-Communist’.
 
Chaplin was impressed by the principled and unyielding stand taken by the Communists against fascism – whether during the Spanish Civil War or in the Eastern Front against the Nazi invasion of the USSR. In 1943, Chaplin called the USSR ‘a brave new world’ that gave ‘hope and aspiration to the common man’. He hoped that the USSR would ‘grow more glorious year by year. Now that the agony of birth is at an end, may the beauty of its growth endure forever’. When asked a decade later why he was so vocal about his support for the USSR – including with appearances at the Communist fronts such as the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship and the Russian War Relief – Chaplin said, ‘during the war I sympathized much with Russia because I believe that she was holding the front’. This sympathy remained through the remainder of his life.
 
Chaplin had not calculated the toxicity of the Cold War era in the United States. In 1947, he told reporters, ‘These days if you step off the curb with your left foot, they accuse you being a Communist’. Chaplin did not back off from his beliefs or betrayed his friends. At that same press conference he was asked if he knew the Austrian musician Hanns Eisler, who was a Communist and who wrote the music for many of Bertolt Brecht’s plays. He had fled Nazi Germany for the United States to work in Hollywood. Eisler had composed songs for the Communist Party (he would write music for the anthem of the German Democratic Republic – Auferstanden Aus Ruinen). Chaplin came to his defense. When asked about his association with Eisler at that 1947 press conference, Chaplin said that Eisler ‘is a personal friend and I am proud of the fact…I don’t know whether he is a communist or not. I know he is a fine artist and a great musician and a very sympathetic friend’. When asked directly if it would make any difference to Chaplin if Eisler was a communist, he said, ‘No it wouldn’t’. It took a lot of courage to defend Hanns Eisler who would be deported from the United States a few months later.
 
When Chaplin died in Switzerland in December 1977, he was mourned far and wide. In Calcutta, where a Left Front government had only just come to power in a landslide in June, artists and political activists gathered the next day to mourn him. The main speaker at the memorial service was the Bengali film director Mrinal Sen. In 1953, Sen had written a book on Chaplin – illustrated by Satyajit Ray.
 

 
Neither Sen nor Ray had made any of their iconic films as yet (both released their first films in 1955, Ray’s Pather Panchali and Sen’s Raat Bhore). ‘Without a moral justification’, Sen said at the memorial meeting, ‘cinema is ridiculous, is atrocious, is an outrage. It is a social activity. It is man’s creation’. The gap between art and politics should not be too wide, Sen warned. He was thinking of Chaplin’s films, but also of his own. At that time, Sen was working on Ek Din Pratidin (One Day, Everyday), a superb film that chronicles the possibilities of women’s emancipation. Here Sen went far beyond Chaplin. His communism included women.

Courtesy: vijayprashad.org
 

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Indian political culture sits atop a fine edged blade. Pushing down on it is the Extreme Right, whose political wing – the BJP – is currently in power. Intolerance is the order of the day. India’s celebrated Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen recently said, “India is being turned intolerant. We have been too tolerant with the intolerance. This has to end.”

In the marrow of the Extreme Right is a demand for discipline enforced by violence. Anyone who strays from the authority of its world-view – Hindutva – is either anti-national or a terrorist. Political murders of well-regarded intellectuals and activists, such as Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and MM Kalburgi, put the nation on alert.

The death of a young student – Rohit Vemula – of the University of Hyderabad sent all kinds of people onto the streets. Rohit had been hit hard by social discrimination, which manifests itself as a political assault on socially oppressed communities. “From shadows to the stars,” wrote this young man who was fascinated by astronomy. It was an indictment of the social disorder.

“Mother India lost a son,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I felt the pain.” He had waited five days to react, and reacted only after mass demonstrations of great feeling across the country. Rohit Vemula’s family rejected the Prime Minister’s remorse. They want to know why their son died. The answers lie firmly in the tentacles of the Extreme Right. It is where blame will eventually rest.

When Richa Singh, the new student leader at Allahabad University, invited senior journalist Siddharth Varadarajan to campus to talk about free speech, the Extreme Rights’s students’ group (the ABVP) blocked him. They called Varadarajan, who had been the editor of The Hindu, a “Naxalite” (Maoist) and “anti-national.” This is the chosen vocabulary. Singh later said, “There is a surge in intolerance in this country. The ABVP leaders are not willing to listen to anyone who contradicts their ideology.”

For generations, the Extreme Right in India has sought to erase the Left. But the Left in India is not near as strong as it should be to pose a threat to the Right. So what is it about the Left that the Extreme Right fears? It fears that the Left has an alternative narrative of India’s history and of its possible future – it is one that is rooted not in social exclusion and economic inequality, but in the very opposite of that. Whereas the Congress Party is hated by the BJP for its history and for its hold on institutions of power, the BJP does not believe that the Congress has an alternative powerful enough to challenge its own vision. Talking to Extreme Right leaders about the Left is always an experience in paranoia and hatred – venom holds the words together in their sentences.

For generations, the Extreme Right in India has sought to erase the Left. It fears that the Left has an alternative narrative of India’s history and of its possible future – it is one that is rooted not in social exclusion and economic inequality, but in the very opposite of that

One of the great citadels of the Left in New Delhi, the nation’s capital, is Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – founded in 1969. From then till now one or another part of the Left has won student elections, and the struggles of the broad Left have allowed the campus to be democratic and decent. In the first half of the 1970s, the Students Federation of India (SFI), the student front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPIM, fought alongside the workers on the campus to improve their wages and rights. It fought to ensure a powerful students’ union and to create structures where the students did not toil at the mercy of their professors. It fought for decent living conditions for the students. This struggle set the template for the JNU that has existed since then. As SFI leader Prakash Karat wrote at that time, the students “have used every opportunity to challenge the government’s educational policies, and to defend democratic rights.”

Over the years, the same issues have re-emerged – treatment of staff and rights of students. The Left – now much more fractious – has continued to dominate the elections, keeping out the forces of the Extreme Right. Punctually, the Extreme Right – and the national media, which is based in Delhi – attack the students for being pampered and for being political. It has been said – over the decades – that the tax-payer should not have to underwrite the political lives of the students. They are there to study. This argument intensified after India “liberalised” its economy in 1991. Since then, private universities have been formed in and around Delhi, putting pressure on this flagship to reform its curriculum and change its standards. But the JNU Students’ Union (JNUSU) is strong and unyielding – resisting any attempt by the management to change the character of the culture.

Last week, a group of students held a forum on Afzal Guru, who had been executed by the Indian state in 2013. At the forum, some people yelled anti-Indian slogans. It is not clear who raised these slogans. This provided the Extreme Right with an opening. Strangeness was in the air. This government seems to rely on protocols of evidence that mean nothing. A fake twitter account of Hafeez Saeed, a terrorist leader based in Pakistan, was cited by home minister Rajnath Singh as evidence of collusion from across the border.

Plain-clothes security forces entered the campus and arrested the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar – who is a leader of the Communist Party of India’s student wing, All India Students Federation (AISF). They took him under the colonial era Sedition Law (Section 124-A). During a parliamentary debate in 1951, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru – after whom the university is named – said, “Take Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code. Now as far as I am concerned that particular Section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.” It remained. Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on that basis and held for three days [On February 17, a Delhi court has ordered 14-day judicial custody for Kumar].

Students knew intuitively that this was not about the forum,  it was an attack on their democratic culture. Large sections of the press merely repeated what the government said, drawing a stark connection between the tragic death of an Indian soldier – Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad – on February 11 and the forum on Afzal Guru, who had been convicted on terrorism charges. It was enough to put these side by side to pillory the students. No one challenged the government, and previous governments, for failure to demilitarise the Siachen Glacier, where Lance Naik Koppad was serving. Since 2003, over two thousand Indian and Pakistani soldiers have died from frostbite and avalanches. It is anti-national and indeed anti-human to have soldiers at that altitude.

A close ally of a leading BJP politician, Jawahar Yadav said, “For the girls who are protesting in JNU, I have only one thing to say that prostitutes who sell their body are better than them because they at least don’t sell the country.” 

The JNU Teachers’ Association released a statement asking the administration “to maintain normalcy on our campus by immediately withdrawing the police and releasing all those detained.” It was not to be. A massive rally on campus brought leaders of the various Left parties and the Congress Party to campus. Students came to show solidarity for their president. Nearby, a small wake of Extreme Right students chanted slogans of disunity and anger. Defiance, by the rest of the students, was the mood against those chants These students would then form a human chain as a wall around their campus. Amartya Sen’s slogan – This has to end – seemed to inform their commitment.

Vandals of the Right targeted the office of the CPI-M, painting the words “Pakistan” across the signboard. Threatening phone calls came to the CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury. A cartoon appeared in the world of social media that linked the communists to the terrorists, with a tag line that said “Jihadi Naxal University” (Naxal is a reference to the Maoists). The picture showed stereotypical images of “jihadis” and an image of a boy and a girl kissing, with a liquor bottle flying out the car – it condensed all the frustrations of the Extreme Right: against Islam, against Communism, against social freedoms enjoyed by young people.

The images of kissing are telling. Events such as this bring out the worst in the Extreme Right. Its toxic constipation ends. A close ally of a leading BJP politician, Jawahar Yadav said, “For the girls who are protesting in JNU, I have only one thing to say that prostitutes who sell their body are better than them because they at least don’t sell the country.” The Extreme Right likes to call journalists “presstitutes”. One person, on Twitter, sends out a tweet, “All anti-national pigs should be slapped with seduction charge by our PM.” It was a Freudian slip, seduction for sedition. But this is appropriate for the Right. Politics for them is suffused with the language of sex and with the fear of sexual freedom.

On Monday, Kanhaiya was to appear in court for the first time. A WhatsApp message went out amongst a network of lawyers. “Peacefully, we will teach these anti-nationals a lesson as per the law. We will show what it takes to be a patriot.” All the window dressing was there – peacefully, as per the law. But the venom tied these pieties together – teach these anti-nationals a lesson, show what it takes to be a patriot. They arrived for violence. As students and teachers went into the courts, these men – some in lawyers’ garb – beat them and went after the journalists. Some were beaten very badly. One of those who did the beating is a BJP Member of the Legislative Assembly – O. P. Sharma.

“There is no cause for despondency,” wrote Ayesha Kidwai, a professor of Linguistics at JNU. “I know that the orchestrated media campaign against JNU is very distressing. Let me assure you that the world knows this already, and knows why all this is happening.”
 

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On the eve of the Pope’s visit to India, the clamouring of Hindu communalist and fanatic groups within the country was matched by a statement issued by the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) on the eve of Diwali, praying for the deliverance of Hindus from all sin. Protests against this statement were made by both Indian secular groups, members of the Indian Catholic clergy and groups of non-resident Indians (NRIs) in the USA. Here is the text of one such statement issued by the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL), USA:

"On Tuesday, October 19, 1999, the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) released a statement instructing their followers to "pray that the world’s Hindus might be convicted of sin and see Jesus is the Light of the World" (www.sbc.net/bpDownload.asp).

This statement has been timed to coincide with one of the most popular festivals celebrated by Hindus, Deepawali or Diwali (Festival of Lights). Supporting this statement is a nine–page prayer booklet, ‘Diwali: festival of Lights. Prayer for Hindus’, that aids those who wish to pray for Hindus during Diwali celebrations (www.imb.org/frontpage.htm). Along similar lines, the SBC booklet, ‘Days of Awe: Prayers for Jews’, also calls on Christians to pray for Jews from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, while a third pamphlet, ‘Ramadhan Prayer Guide: Prayers for Muslims’, which calls for Christians to pray for Muslims will be re–released during the coming month of Ramadhan (Ramzaan). Yet another pamphlet, directed towards Buddhists is also planned by the SBC.

We, the signatories to this letter, are a collective of various individuals and groups committed to the promotion of secular, democratic and egalitarian principles in the social, economic and political life of South Asians. We believe that the SBC pamphlets promote ignorance, divisiveness and intolerance and concur with Keith Parks, the former president of the SBC’s International Mission Board, when he criticises the campaign for "launching a new crusade that is confrontative and abrasive," and underscores the importance of not caricaturing other religions, insisting that it is "essential that a Christian’s descriptions of other faiths be acceptable to members of those faiths".

It is worth recalling the fact that the SBC argued in the 1950s that racial integration was a sinful idea since "the Good Lord set up customs and practices of segregation" (in the words of John Buchanan of Birmingham). Even as recently as last year, the SBC at their convention amended their statement of beliefs to include a declaration that a woman should "submit herself graciously" to her husband’s leadership and her husband should "provide for, protect and lead his family."

We call upon the SBC leadership to re–evaluate its position on other religions, as well as its position on women’s subordination, in the same spirit that led the SBC to adopt a 1995 resolution repudiating its past advocacy of slavery and lack of support for civil rights. Many of us come from diverse backgrounds and were raised as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jews, Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, etcetera, and have a secular commitment to equal treatment of, and respect for members of all religious communities. We wish to affirm religious diversity and tolerance as important strengths of South Asian society and cultures. The current government of India, whose complicity in the attacks against Muslims, Christians and Dalits has been well–documented, is steadily undermining these values. Despite this climate of intolerance, there have been many dialogues between followers of different faiths. We support the efforts of the citizens of India who continue to affirm tolerance for different religious and cultural practices.

Just as we cannot condone the call by Hindu fundamentalist organisations to "reconvert" Christians and Muslims to Hinduism in India, we cannot condone the Baptist call to "pray" for Hindus, Muslims, Jews or Buddhists to convert to Christianity in the U.S. While prayer for another person or groups of people may be commendable, attempts to clothe bigotry and ignorance with a veneer of theological and cultural analysis is not.

The SBC ‘Prayer for Hindus’ booklet does not show any comprehension of the complex nature of the different theological and philosophical schools that have come to be known as Hinduism. More troubling is the authors’ use of Hindu fundamentalist interpretations of history to suit their own needs. Thus they uncritically accept and reproduce the mythology of a ‘Hindu’ resistance led by the Maratha ruler Shivaji against ‘Islamic’ Mughal rulers of India in the seventeenth century even while calling for active conversions of the Hindu Marathas.

The booklet sometimes veers toward the absurd; for instance, while describing Bangalore "the Silicon Valley of Asia", it calls upon Southern Baptists to pray that all educated Indian computer scientists become "open to the Truth." Moreover, there is not even a pretence of an understanding of, or respect for the cultural context of Indian Christianity.

Nor does the booklet display any knowledge of the historical diversity of Christianity in India, which includes Roman Catholics, Syrian Christians, Anglicans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant denominations. Indians of all faiths and creeds have historically been tolerant and accepting of Christianity in India. It is not Hinduism that has led to attacks on Indian Christians but the communal practices of the Hindu fundamentalist organisations and political parties, which have been well documented by human rights organisations.

Ironically, the SBC pamphlets resonate with the increasingly intolerant practices and policies of the Hindu rightwing government and its cohorts in India. In this context, the response of many Indian Christians who have distanced themselves from the SBC literature is to be applauded. At the end of the millennium, we challenge leaders of religious institutions and progressive people of all faiths to propagate words and deeds that will end and not perpetuate hatred and ignorance".

Archived from Communalism Combat, November 1999, Year 7  No. 53, Special Report 3

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