Review: The Great Dictator

For "mandatory culture time," I made my son watch this 1940 Charlie Chaplin movie. It's about a Jewish WWI veteran who becomes mistaken for a dictatorial country's leader, and it ends with a speech extolling the virtues of tolerance and democracy. The text of the full speech can be found on imdb.com here, but I might as well embed the YouTube video, so here:
There are two sections from that speech that I find particularly meaningful.

"The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost."

These words are just as applicable as they were in 1940.

"You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise."

I find this one interesting because of the "election denialism" that has become more popular since the 2016 election. "Despite the lack of evidence, and the judgments of election officials from both parties and judges appointed by presidents from both parties, election denialism has become not only a thing, but a movement. And when critics call this an attack on democracy, some election deniers respond by saying the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic." [Source]

As The Atlantic put it, "It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous." [Source] Disingenuous, because this line of reasoning is merely a justification for rule by the shrinking Republican electorate.

It used to be that Republicans used demovracy to justify the war in Iraq. As George W. Bush explained, " It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy." [Source]

It would very strange if the country that sponsored the growth of so much democracy in the world was not actually one itself.