Why I learned To Love Charlie Chaplin

It would be Charlie Chaplin's 122nd birthday today. When i was young they would show his films on the television along with Harold Lloyd and other silent films and i was never very impressed, Laurel and Hardy hitting each other with ladders or Abbot and Costello being chased by a werewolf were much funnier.
It wasn't until i got older and found out what Charlie Chaplin stood for that i watched his films in an admirable light.
To many Charlie Chaplin was a comedy actor but when you find out he was a Communist, you see his films as he intended them as well aimed shots against poverty and inequality. Ironic as it was that at at his height he was the second largest earner in America, $13,000 a week from the Mutual Film Corporation.
Once he got to write and produce his own films, the common theme was always the poor guy handing it to the wealthy and powerful. This slipped under the radar as possibly Communist, as did his friendship with William Z. Foster, who would go on to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
It wasn't until he gave a speech in San Francisco which he addressed the audience as comrades several times and his powerful speech from The Dictator where Chaplin raged against world governments was reprinted in leaflets by the Communist Party that the FBI began taking a closer look at the Chaplin file.
Joe McCarthy's Un-American Committee and the Immigration and Naturalization Service interviewed him about his Communist links and while he was on a ship travelling to England to promote a film, he received a telegram informing him that his re-entry visa had been rescinded due to 'being a member of the Communist Party, with grave moral charges and with making statements that would indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a country whose hospitality has enriched him.'
When you know all this and hear the Great Dictator speech where he has lines such as: 'In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone' and 'Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security', you realise that far from just being that man with a Hitler moustache who fell over a lot, he was subliminally showing pro-Communist messages to millions of Americans in the most anti-Communist country in the World and got paid $13,000 a week to do it.
Got to love that and now, if you didn't know of Chaplin's Communist leanings, and you have stumbled across this post and have read it down to here, you can never watch a Chaplin film ever again without his pro-Communist messages hitting you squarely between the eyes at every turn. What a stinker.