"It Never Existed" According to the MGCM5WAVCBQUJVC?xml=/news/2005/03/10/wsmoke10.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/03/1 0/ixworld.html...
"It Never Existed"
According to the Telegraph, French authorities have airbrushed the cigarette out of John Paul Sarte's photograph.
France's
National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre's trademark cigarette out of
a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an
anti-tobacco law. ...
The library's president, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, confirmed that the cigarette
had been discreetly smudged to comply with the 1991 loi Evin - a law banning
tobacco advertising - but also so as not to frighten away potential sponsors
from the exhibition, which opened yesterday.
The practice of historical revisionism, which was a central theme to George Orwell's 1984, was extensively practiced by Joseph Stalin. The target="_blank">NewsMuseum
documents the "before and after" photographs of Lenin with Leon Trotsky, among others, redacted from the image. But what if -- hypothetically now -- the NewsMuseum were in fact the forgery; what if Trotsky was digitally inserted into the picture. How would I know?
target="_blank">Asymmetrical
Information has a fascinating link to a book called the target="_blank">Motel
of the Mysteries, a book constructed in the best archaeological literary style, describing a hypothetically complete misunderstanding of an entire civilization.
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried
under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985.
Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at
best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation
site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom
of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an
archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber.
Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of
then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of
communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in
the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that
extraordinary civilization.
The elevation of a motel toilet to the central cult object of a vanished civilization is one possible consequence of unintended historical misunderstanding. But so powerful a technique as historical revisionism would tempt others to purposeful use, not only for the relatively harmless purpose of eliminating cigarettes from the likeness of Jean Paul Sarte, but for political gain. Certainly the machinery was in place to do this. An
899733" target="_blank">Oxblog
link to target="_blank">Wikipedia
reminds us that the BBC's annual budget of $10 billion "rivals that of NASA. It is greater than the gross domestic product of more than half the world's nations and ranks behind the budgets of only the twelve governments of the wealthiest nations on the planet."
Who controls the past
Controls the future.
Who controls the present
Controls the past.
Has the Internet changed things all that much? Perhaps for most people born after today it will be a truism that Jean Paul Sarte didn't smoke; that Jean Paul Sarte never smoked.
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