Spot the difference: Suddenly Churchill is a non-smoker... how today's airbrushing...

Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 14th June 2010

[naturalman1975]

The face is instantly familiar, the two-fingered salute unmistakable.

But are these actually the same photograph of Sir Winston Churchill?

In the original photograph the war leader has his cigar gripped firmly in the corner of his mouth.

But in the other image - currently greeting visitors to a London museum - his favourite smoke has been digitally extinguished.

Uniform, victory salute and cigar: Winston Churchill in the 1940s and now without his trademark smoke

It seems the man who steered Britain through the most dangerous period of its recent history may have fallen victim to the modern curse of political correctness.

Last night the question of who removed the cigar and when was something of a mystery.

The Winston Churchill's Britain at War Experience, in South-East London, confessed to being astonished to discover that the image may have been doctored.

Which is a little embarrassing for the staff at the charitable trust, because the photograph features on a giant poster hanging above the museum's main door.

[naturalman1975]

I’m sure - but you take your teachable moments whereever you can get them :)

[Little Bill]

He also worked on the Northern Pacific in South Dakota, some interesting times.

[GreenStreak]

When the US Surgeon General announced that cigarette smoking may be harmful to health in the early 1960s people were shocked, it had NEVER occurred to most people that it might be dangerous (in the 1950s OVER 50% of American adults smoked and I imagine the number was about the same for the British and certainly for the French).

I remember as a kid hanging out at the gas station in the '50s, guys would come in and ask for a pack of 'coffin nails'. The dangers were not unknown.

[martin_fierro]

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[samtheman]

Who was that... the guy they air-brushed out of the Stalin photo?

[El Sordo]

One of these days we need to have a thread on smoking the cigar with the band vs. without the band.

[PilotDave]

Great list!!

[Ole Okie]

Poor old Winnie looks like he has just suffered a stroke. That’s a horrible misrepresentation of history.

Next I suppose MacArthur’s corncob pipe will go the way of all flesh.

[Redcloak]

    Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

[Jewbacca]

Kirov.

He was much more popular that Stalin and wanted a “third way” -— kinda socialism, instead of communism. No forced collectivism.

Stalin (probably) had him killed; material impediment to the Cult of Personality Obama, er, I mean Stalin was setting up.

[reagan_fanatic]

I don't know. Sometimes, airbrushing has its benefits...

[Mind-numbed Robot]

You can't do things like this. History is history, and you deliberately corrupt any of it, you will eventually corrupt all of it.

That is what the Left odes, rewrite history, and usually operating under the cover of darkness.

[Madame Dufarge]

Yes, my grandfather (who smoked) also called them coffin nails.

Of course, back then people were laboring under the misapprehension that their life was their own, not the state's.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

If a boy ever asked me about Churchill smoking, I’d simply point out that this was in an era when the dangers of smoking weren’t very well understood and when most men smoked.

Nor is it today and for the same reason - Leftist propaganda to incrementally control our lives. There were more studies published in the medical journals of the past which showed smoking to be good for you, are at the least not harmful, than the flawed statistical analysis which was adopted to say they were harmful. Cigarette paper has some potentially harmful chemicals but cigars and other forms of tobacco are fine.

[Carlucci]

Arthur C. Clarke predicted this! His (mostly forgettable) novel, “The Ghost from the Grand Banks” takes place in a future in which an entire industry is set up to remove all vestiges of cigarrette smoking from classic movies because the very idea of smoking is too disgusting for everyone to see.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

There’s nothing wrong with a good cigar from time to time.

Is that a Monica Lewinsky quote?

[mcmuffin]

Big sale going on here...

http://www.famous-smoke.com/

[maryz]

. . . and FDR could walk, too.

How many years is it now since they started airbrushing FDR's cigarettes (in cigarette holder) out of his photos? At least 10 I think!