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The following article has been translated from German.
It concerns a more local topic that appeared in a Swiss newspaper, quoting its French agency.
It is, however, still of general interest as it highlights a worrisome tendency in governmental practices.

Basler Zeitung, 20. January 2011

 

Puffing Sartre allowed

 		  

"PARIS. Jean-Paul Sartre may continue to be shown in the French press smoking his pipe. An amendment to the severe anti-smoking laws has been passed by parliament yesterday. The law constitutes that the pipe of the philosopher. who died in 1980, need no longer be retouched from his portraits.
In the past, other artists and intellectuals also had their cigarettes erased from pictures.
The politicians termed this interpretation of the law as ridiculous. The amendment now allows exceptions for persons belonging to the elite of national culture."
OPA

The proceedings of the French government strongly reminds one of George Orwell's “Nineteen-Eighty-Four”. In this horror version of a totalitarian state too, people were made “unpersons”, their past changed and their records falsified to make them fit into the conceptions of dictatorship.
“Who owns the past owns the future.”

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