Airbrushing History

A museum has doctored an image of Winston Churchill to make it more palatable to a contemporary audience. The original image, in which Churchill makes a V for victory sign with his hand while a half-smoked cigar pokes out of the corner of his mouth, has been airbrushed to remove the cigar entirely. The doctored image hangs over the main entrance to The Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Experience in London.

The museum claims “not to have noticed the cigar was missing”. Manager John Welsh declined to reveal who was responsible for creating the artwork for the display. “We’ve got all sorts of images in the museum, some with cigars and some without. We’ve even got wartime adverts for cigarettes, so we wouldn’t have asked for there to be no cigar.”

The Chap is thoroughly opposed to the rewriting of history and the sanitisation of truths regarded as unpalatable regarding heroes of the past. Some may be uncomfortable with the fact that Churchill was a heavy smoker and drinker, but those who were alive when he saved Britain from the Boche probably didn’t mind too much. The worst part of this story is that visitors to the museum probably didn’t care one way or the other; it was simply some goody-two-shoes jobsworth that took the moral decision for them, and decided that Churchill without his cigar was much more in keeping with the times. So prepare for further museums to be adorned with images of Hitler without his moustache, Che Guevara sin Cohiba, and Harold Wilson idly twiddling his thumbs instead of smoking his pipe.

Voltaire said that “History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead”. In this case of revisionism the trick is upon the living. Airbrushing out his cigar is a vulgar act of cowardice perpetrated by those who seek to pander to modern political correctness to create a 'corrected' truth of the past.

George Orwell foresaw this fetish for a sanitized historical truth in his seminal work 1984.

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."