It seems a covert operative of the PC police, or perhaps just a mischievous photoshopper, has infiltrated London’s Britain at War Museum, unceremoniously airbrushing Winston Churchill’s cigar from one of his most famous wartime candids on display there, to the chagrin of the museum’s curators. This doesn’t make Churchill the first figure in history to have his smoke censored, but we might well ask the censors: While you’re at it, why not airbrush Winston to appear taller and thinner as well?
For a more detailed account of the metaphysical issues at stake here, take a look back at Michael P. Foley’s piece, “Tobacco and the Soul” in the pages of First Things’ April 1997 issue.
June 16th, 2010 | 3:33 pm
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
– George Orwell
I’m absolutely against smoking. Second hand smoke takes smoking out of the realm of personal choices. But this is extremely dangerous. Once we try pretending history is different than it actually was, we make even legitimate history unreliable. And if history is unreliable, all we have is the fickle voices of the moment. The loudest voice wins, rather than the common time-proven voice of generations.
But I’m not at all surprised. Hollywood has been recasting people in the past as having modern morality (especially sexual morality) for decades. Anyone who says that things were different back then is laughed at as being naive. Anyone who says that they had virtues we lack is laughed at and vices of a subset (e.g. slavery) are thrown back as a refutation.
Revisionism must be fought wherever it’s found.
June 16th, 2010 | 3:57 pm
It’s done over here too. In CA, textbooks edit the cigarette out of this well-known FDR photo, http://www.alamo.edu/pac/faculty/pmyers/hist1302/FDR.jpg
Smoking used to be a vice. Now it’s a war crime. Abortion used to be a serious moral evil. Now it’s just a personal choice.
June 17th, 2010 | 8:37 am
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
attributed to Sigmund Freud
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