Erasing the Past : Lynch schools

On Wednesday, the Centennial School Board in Oregon voted to remove 'Lynch' from the names of three elementary schools
Lynch Meadows and Lynch Wood Elementary schools will now become Meadows and Wood Elementary schools
Lynch View Elementary will be changed to Patrick Lynch Elementary, after the man who donated the land to the district in the late 1800s
School officials say they have been getting complaints about the names in recent years over the connotation with lynching
While the Lynch family had no ties to the racist mobs, they decided to change the name so as not to offend any students

In recent years, school officials say they have received complaints from people who are concerned about the name's connotation with lynching.'There were an increasing amount of questions and some complaints from families of color around the name,' Centennial School District Superintendent Paul Coakley, who is black, told the Oregonian.  'Our diversity is increasing every year, with families coming in from Northeast Portland and out of state, so [the names] needed to be looked at,' he added. 

'I don't think any of you have ever seen a picture where one of your decedents was hanging from a tree,' one black man said to the board. 

He probably hasn't either - at least I certainly hope not. Of course, being written by the semi-literates at Daily Mail I felt I had to check the other links to see if actually said either "decedents" or "descendants" or if he didn't misspeak and actually said "ancestors." He quite clearly says "descendants." What a travesty that no one recognized the mistake.

I do wonder if it a bit of rhetoric or if he actually has an ancestor who had been lynched. Of course, white people were lynched too.

A young student added: 'I know the majority of you guys are white and it's hard to know how that word could have an effect but it does. If a simple name change could make students feel safe, then why are we holding back?'
 

Remember, you have to be sensitive towards people. Unless they were born with the name "Lynch" in their family history in which case you can go ahead and smear them and their name with a brutal crime they had nothing to do with. 

Erasing the Past : Yale sculpture

Via the Yale Alumni Magazine :

If you were especially observant during your years on campus, you may have noticed a stone carving by the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library that depict a hostile encounter: a Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American (top). When the library decided to reopen the long-disused entrance as the front door of the new Center for Teaching and Learning, says head librarian Susan Gibbons, she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces decided the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” The Puritan’s musket was covered over with a layer of stone (bottom) that Gibbons says can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving.

 The obvious point seems to be that "Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American" seems inaccurate. They are both looking in the same direction and one would expect the puritan to be looking towards the indian if the intent was to aim at the indian.

They do get one point of credit for making the censorship of the past both largely unobtrusive and reversible.

The only quote of the head librarian Susan Gibbons is "presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate" Unfortunately there isn't any explanation of why it is inappropriate although one might assume that the "Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American" canard might be why.

I'll note that the Committee on Art in Public Spaces self description is "The committee will hear from members of the community about art and other symbolic representations related to diversity and consider ways Yale might better reflect our campus and our history."

Erasing the Past : North Korean TV News

From the documentary movie "The Propaganda Game"

Narrator : "When we went to the North Korean  TV to get  archive footage, they told us they needed to erase the traitor Jang Song-thaek first."

Erasing the past : Ian McKellen

from a Details Magazine interview with the actor Ian McKelllen :

Details: Is it true that when you stay at hotels you tear out the Bible page that condemns homosexuality?
Ian McKellen: I do, absolutely. I'm not proudly defacing the book, but it's a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible. And I'm not really the first: I got delivered a package of 40 of those pages -- Leviticus 18:22 -- that had been torn out by a married couple I know. They put them on a bit of string so that I could hang it up in the bathroom.

I'm not sure exactly what this petty censorship accomplishes.  Although he says "I'm not proudly defacing the book" it kind of sounds like that is exactly what he's doing.  Both he and the married couple aren't keeping it a secret but bragging about it. It isn't as if he was replacing them with bibles with the offending passage edited out : people will notice a page missing; especially one torn out by an angry censor.

Totalitarianism one page at a time.

Erasing the Past : Who murdered the monks of Monasterio Montserrat

from the documentary Sagrada : Mystery of Creation (2012)

It isn't a terrible movie but it has some intrusive artistic pretensions and it uses the church as a background to tell the history of the church when I would have preferred the church and its idiosyncrasies be the subject with the history as a background.

But one thing struck me as eliding reality.

partial transcript (clip starts at about 32:30 into the film) :

Daughter of Antonio Gaudi's assistant : He [Antonio Gaudi's assistant] went there every day until July 18, 1936. Then the chaos of the civil war arrived. All the churches in Barcelona were burnt. [including the incomplete Sagrada Familia]
…
Narrator : The construction work on Sagrada Familia was abandoned. The Civil War raged on until, in the beginning of 1939, Barcelona fell, followed by Madrid shortly after.  General Franco subsequently ruled Spain with an iron hand. Speaking Catalan was prohibited. In the Monastery of Montserrat, where sermons were still held in Catalan, 21 monks were murdered. 

This suggests that Spain fell to Generalissimo Franco (true), he ruled with an iron hand (true), speaking Catalan was prohibited (sort of true) and then the monks were murdered; perhaps because they held sermons in Catalan. The problem I have is that the monks were murdered not by Franco's Nationalists but by the Republican side (more specifically, I'd guess POUM or the CNT) and they were murdered before the end of the War. Barcelona wasn't even controlled by Franco until the surrender in 1939.

Additionally, "All the churches in Barcelona were burnt." is, I think, incorrect. I could be wrong but I believe in was an anti-catholic pogrom and other churches were not targeted (as Barcelona was overwhelmingly Catholic then Protestant churches were less significant). Again, this was done not by Franco's Nationalists but by the Republican side in territory not controlled by Franco.

Anti-clerical violence started before the Spanish Civil War.  On May 10, 1931 (5 years before the start of the Spanish Civil War and less than a month after King Alfonso XIII fled) Spain saw convents set alight in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante and 2 dozen churches attacked.

As an aside,  I've been told that the ban on Catalan was done with typical Spanish efficiency. Schools were ordered to teach in Castilian Spanish and so they "officially" complied. The school inspector would call ahead and let them know when an inspection was coming and on that day the students would put away their Catalan books and get out their Castilian books and class would be in Castilian as required. After the inspector left the Castilian books would go back in the closet and they continued in Catalan while the inspector could file a report that he is doing a great job and everything is how it is supposed to be.

Erasing the Past - Mohammed Statue

(Erasing the past is a continuing series; see previously part 1 and part 2)

Sculpture of Mohammed in turban with curved sword in hand atop the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, First Department in Manhattan  Courthouse c 1903

from the nonsearchable, crookedly scanned PDF from NYCourts.gov

When the Courthouse opened [it opened in 1900 and with the statues in 1901], a statue of Mohammed (580-632AD, representing Islamic Law, by Charles Albert Lopez, stood on the westernmost point of the roof facing 25th Street, where Zoroster is now positioned. In 1955, ;at the request of the governments of Egypt Pakistan, and Indonesia, the statue of Mohammed was removed and destroyed, since images of him are prohibited under Muslim Law. The statues that previously had stood to his left were each moved over one place, leaving an empty pedestal on the easternmost point.

The statue was destroyed! What a terrible waste of taxpayer dollars. 

 New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, First Department in Manhattan after the removal and destruction.

 New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, First Department in Manhattan before the removal circa 1903 (image from the Library of Congress).

Added : the muslim's objection is generally iconoclastic, that depictions of gods leads to the worshiping of the idols rather than the deity, so one has to wonder if people were worshiping the statue from the sidewalk? 

Erasing the Past part 2

(This post is continued from Erasing the Past part 1)

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Michelangelo's Last Judgement and Il Braghettone (the breeches maker) (1564)

drawing by Il Braghettone after Michelangelo (on left) and a detail of Michelangelo's Last Judgement with the clothed version of the figure (on right).

Daniele Ricciarelli (c. 1509 – April 4, 1566), better known as Daniele da Volterra, was an Italian mannerist painter and sculptor who, after Michelangelo's death, was was hired to cover the genitals in Michelangelo's Last Judgment with vestments and loincloths. This earned him the nickname "Il Braghettone" ("the breeches maker")

During restoration between 1980 and 1994, some of Il Braghettone's censorship/coverings were removed.

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A fig leaf for copy of Michelangelo's David (1857)

A plaster cast of Michelangelo's David was given to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). Supposedly, Queen Victoria was shocked by the nakedness of the figure so a fig leaf was commissioned to be affixed to the statue during Royal visits. Interestingly, while the museum has other nude statues, it seems only David had received a fig leaf.

The statue of David is larger than life size at 17 feet tall (5.17m) and the fig leaf is equally large at 30cm x 40cm x 17cm and stored on the back of David's plinth.

a fig leaf for David

Here is a photo of the statue of David with the fig leaf attached circa 1858. So, the answer is yes, you can bowdlerize a statue.

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Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev and A.B. Khalatov disappear (1920s)

Trotsky (saluting while in military cap to the right of Lenin), L.B. Kamenev (who was in glasses and beard to the left of Lenin), Artashes Khalatov (the bearded man who was standing in front of the child and Trotsky) an unknown man between Lenin and Trotsky.

Original from the 1920s with Lenin at the center

If the USSR had lasted longer eventually Lenin probably would have been the only person left in the picture. 

Besides being airbrushed from photos, there were other consequences to a totalitarian society. Lev Borisovich (L.B.) Kamenev was kicked out of the Communist Party several times, was readmitted after a public displays of contriteness and in 1936 he, along with 15 other Old Bolsheviks, was interrogated, told that he and his life and his son's life would be spared if he confessed, he was subject to a show trial and (contrary to the previous promises) executed.

Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, deported from the Soviet Union in 1929 (deported doesn't seem like the right word for getting kicked out your own country – exiled might be better), and killed by a Soviet NKVD agent with an ice ax to the head in 1940.

A.B. Khalatov, the man in charge of the Soviet state publishing house Goszidat, was executed in 1938.

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Lenin and Gorky and others (1920)

before includes Vladimir Lenin (center), Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin), Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan (far left in hat & beard), Karl Radek (with cigarette), Nikolai Bukharin (cigarette in hand), Mikhail Lashevich (in uniform), Maxim Peshkov (behind pillar), Sergei Zorin (hat), Zinoviev (white tie), M.N. Roy (black tie & jacket), Maria Ulyanova (Lenin's sister) and Abram Belenky (foreground in sunhat) 

detail of above photo to better contrast to the edited photo below

Everyone except Lenin and Gorky have either been cropped or airbrushed away. 

Note that some of the posts supporting the porch fence have been repaired by the retoucher but have been poorly drawn making them appear unevenly spaced.

Scans from The Commissar Vanishes p74-75. The top photo is from an album given to foreign delegates to the Second Congress of the Communist International July 19, 1920 taken at the Uritsky Palace. 

What happened to the people in the photo?

- Vladimir Lenin (center - died 1924 of stroke)

- Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin - died in 1936, possibly killed by the NKVD)

What happened to those disappeared from the photo : 

- Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan (far left in hat & beard - arrested and executed in 1937)

- Karl Radek (with cigarette - arrested and killed by the NKVD while in a labor camp in 1939)

- Nikolai Bukharin (cigarette in hand - arrested and executed in 1938)

- Mikhail Lashevich (in uniform - expelled from the Central Committee in 1926, expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, died in 1928 from, it is said, either a car accident or suicide, and had his grave marker removed in the 1930s)

- Maxim Peshkov (behind pillar - Gorky's son, died 1934)

- Sergei Zorin (hat - fate unknown)

- Zinoviev (white tie - arrested and executed in 1936)

- M.N. Roy (black tie & jacket - returned to India)

- Maria Ulyanova (Lenin's sister - died 1937) 

- Abram Belenky (foreground in sunhat - arrested and executed in 1939) 

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Grigorii Petrovsky is squeezed out (1922)

Participants at the 11th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, April 1922. Left to right : Emilian Yaroslavsky (alternatively spelled Yemelyan), Mikhail Kalinin, Josef Stalin, Grigorii Petrovsky (alternatively spelled Grigory), and Sergo Ordjonikidze.

Grigorii Petrovsky disappears and Sergo Ordjonikidze slides over to stand next to Stalin.

From the book on Soviet and specifically Stalin's censorship The Commissar Vanishes by David King page 83. The retoucher seems to have been unsure of where Grigorii Petrovsky's arm ends and Sergo Ordjonikidze's arm begins. Another version of this photo exists cropped so that only Stalin is visible.

Grigorii Petrovsky was the Head of the Ukrainian Central Committee, an organizer of the Ukrainian famine and in 1939 he was criticized for condoning "enemies of the people" and removed from all posts. He survived Stalin and died in 1958.

Of those remaining in the photo : Officially, Grigory "Sergo" Ordjonikidze died of a heart attack but Nikita Khrushchev claimed he committed suicide due to his conflicts with Stalin.

Mikhail Kalinin survived the purges, retired in 1946 and died that same year. His wife, however, had been arrested in 1938, tortured until she confessed to counter-revolutionary activities and sent to a labor camp.

Emilian Yaroslavsky had long been an active supporter of Stalin and had written a book titled "On Comrade Stalin" where Stalin is described as "leader of the people" and he repeatedly emphasizes the "ruthlessness of Stalin's enemies." IT seems his sycophancy paid off and he survived the 1930s and didn't die until 1943.

The altered photo's implication is that Russians can't make evenly spaced wallpaper.

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The New Yorker and New York Times change who bombed the "Napalm Girl" (1972)

noted by W. Joseph Campbell

"Napalm Girl"

From the New Yorker in 2012 : " …shots of screaming schoolkids fleeing down a lonely road disturbingly presage the iconic news image of Vietnamese children escaping from American napalm attacks"

From the New York Times (May 12, 2012) : "…the aftermath of one of the thousands of bombings in the countryside by American planes: a group of terror-stricken children fleeing the scene, a girl in the middle of the group screaming and naked, her clothes incinerated by burning napalm." (since corrected)

On June 8, 1972, napalm was dropped near the village Trang Bang in Vietnam not by Americans but by the South Vietnamese Air Force. Campbell contacted the Times and the initial response by the NYTimes was “You are correct that the bombing in question was conducted by the South Vietnamese Air Force. However, the obituary referred only to ‘American planes,’ and there does not seem to be any doubt that this plane was American –- a Douglas A-1 Skyraider, to be precise.”

Hypothetically, if Canadian contractors had built 50.1% of the plane would the Times really refer to them as "Canadian planes?"

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Dr. David Abraham's The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (1981)

Princeton professor Dr. David Abraham's book The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis was found by Yale's Dr. Henry A. Turner and UC Berkeley's Gerald Feldman to contain quotations that could not be supported by his cited works.  From the New York Times Dec 23, 1984 :

For example, on page 320 of Dr. Abraham's work, an exchange is quoted between two powerful German executives - Hjalmar Schacht, a former president of the Reichsbank, and Paul Reusch, head of a heavy-industry empire based in Oberhausen. Dr. Abraham presents the exchange after saying that Germany's leading industrialists had concluded by early 1932 ''that Nazi participation in or control of the government would provide the best way out of the political crisis while providing auspicious possibilities for a profitable economic recovery.''

Dr. Abraham wrote, ''The following exhange between Schacht and Reusch was characteristic:

The Nazis are not to be circumvented. More than that, they are the positive force. We should contribute to them and their efforts and assist them in altering some of the utopian aspects of their economic policies. (Schacht) After a productive two-hour talk with Hitler yesterday, I fully and completely agree with your suggestions . . . I find myself in complete sympathy with the National Socialists, though they are a bit tactless. (Reusch) (I have begun) a collection for the purpose of supporting them and enlightening them on economic issues. (Schacht)''

The original letters are quite different. [some differences bolded above] Mr. Schacht nowhere in his first letter calls the Nazis ''the positive force.'' Nor does he say, ''We should contribute to them and their efforts.'' He instead proposes to Reusch that they help finance some economists to persuade the Nazis to abandon the ''nonsense'' in their economic ideas.

Mr. Reusch, in his actual response, does not call his talk with Hitler ''productive,'' and he is agreeing to another proposal than the one implied. Mr. Reusch does not say, ''I find myself in complete sympathy with the National Socialists, though they are a bit tactless.''

And Mr. Schacht's later statement that he has begun a collection for the purpose of ''supporting them'' does not appear in the original.
…
He conceded that quotations on pages 236, 237, 254, 268, 272, 316 and elsewhere were ''inadequate,'' ''compressed'' or ''wrong.'' He also granted, after a reporter examined two of his notecards, that he had made errors in transcribing his notes into his text, as well as in notetaking.

Although David Abraham protested that his were innocent mistakes made by carelessness and not out of malice or an intention to deceive but it is difficult to understand how some of the errors were made.

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University of Wisconsin Madison photoshopping diversity (2000)

At the University of Wisconsin Madison, Diallo Shabazz was photoshopped onto the cover of the UW admission application's cover (among other material).

University of Wisconsin Madison application photoshopped to show Diallo Shabazz at a football game he never attended 

This is the original photo that was deemed to contain an insufficient number of black guys 

Diallo did attend the University of Wisconsin Madison but if they wanted to show him at the football game then they should have invited him. While other ads do photoshop elements in or out, most ad photos are created to be illustrations while this was put forward as reality.

One can't help but wonder why other groups were not photoshopped into the photo. The implication is that a Pacific Islander or an Asian or a Native American or any number of potential groups were left out because while they wanted to show one black face they also wanted to show no groups other than blacks & whites. Or perhaps because they thought one person would serve as a token for minorities in general.

Most likely, photoshopping one face was an attempt at being sneaky while photoshopping in a representative for an ever growing list of groups would become a farce.

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Historical fabrication in Arming America : The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000)

In 2000, Emory University Professor Michael Bellesiles’s book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was published to initial acclaim and won the Bancroft Prize in 2001. The prize was rescinded after it was shown that Bellesiles appeared to have fabricated evidence for his claims multiple times. An investigation by Emory University led to his resigning his tenured position at Emory.

An example (image from "Why Footnotes Matter : Checking Arming America's Claims" by Clayton Cramer)

Bellesiles claimed to quote the Militia Act of 1792 as saying : "every citizen so enrolled, shall… be constantly provided with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints" 

But the law actually says [bold added to highlight the difference from the Bellesiles quote] : "every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints…" 

Bellesiles tried to explain that he inadvertently cited the 1792 act instead of the 1803 Militia Act but while the latter includes the phrase "constantly provided" it doesn't match his quotation either.  (the 1803 Militia Act  [bold added to highlight the difference from the Bellesiles quote] : "That every citizen duly enrolled in the militia, shall be constantly provided with arms, accoutrements, and ammunition."

comparing a scan of Arming America and a scan of inconvenient source material.

An example from the Emory University report :
"The most egregious misrepresentation has to do with his handling of the more than 900 cases reported by Alice Hanson Jones. When critics pointed out that Jones’ data disagreed with his, Bellesiles responded by explaining that he did NOT include Jones’s data in his computations because her inventories, taken during the build-up to the American revolution, showed a disproportionately high number of guns! Here is a clear admission of misrepresentation, since the label on column one in Table One clearly says "1765-1790." If Professor Bellesiles silently excluded data from the years 1774-1776, as he asserts, precisely because they failed to show low numbers of guns, he has willingly misrepresented the evidence. "

Additionally, Bellesiles supposedly counted guns listed in San Francisco County probate inventories on microfilm at a Georgia archive, changed his story when the Georgia archive didn't have the microfilm, then he claimed to have read them at the San Francisco library but that the library he cited says they were destroyed in 1906, he claimed to have read probate records in courthouses that hadn't housed those records in years, falsely claimed travel narratives didn't mention guns when they did, misrepresented sources, misrepresented militia records and miscounted guns listed in probate records. Many problems with Arming America are listed by Cramer, the Emory report and by Jim Lindgren's review of Bellesiles's errors. 

As a postscript, in 2010, Bellesiles's new publisher tried to rewrite history to present Bellesiles as a victim of  "an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign by the National Rifle Association" and not as the Emory investigation found (Emory p18) that "Professor Bellesiles contravened these professional norms, both as expressed in the Committee charge and in the American Historical Association’s definition of scholarly “integrity”…"

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Maureen Dowd's Dowdification in the New York Times (2003)

Dowdification as described by Best of the Web

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote :

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore."

The use of ellipses in quoted material is entirely legitimate, but not when it changes the meaning. Many a blogger noted that Dowd did just that, and did so quite egregiously. Here's what Bush actually said, according to the official White House transcript, with the portion Dowd omitted in bold:

Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore.

Dowd's bowdlerization of the quote changed the antecedent of they, making it appear as if Bush had said al Qaeda as a whole was "not a problem anymore"--something no one claims--rather than that its dead and captured members are no longer a problem, something no one can deny. Spinsanity.com notes that many liberal commentators, in print and on television, picked up Dowd's misleading quote.

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Sandy Berger steals and destroys documents from the National Archives (2004)

Former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, pilfered 5 classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed 3 of them.

Berger's associates admit he took five copies of an after-action report detailing the 2000 millennium terror plot from the Archives. The aides say Berger returned to his office, discovered that three of the copies appeared to be duplicates and cut them up with scissors.
…
The revelations were a dramatic change from Berger's claim last year that he had made an "honest mistake" and either misplaced or unintentionally threw the documents away.

Berger was fined $50,000 but surprisingly received not even a single day of jail time.

 (This is extra dickish because his denial that he took the documents, if it had been believed, would lead to the blame falling on an innocent National Archives employee.)

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Erasing the Past

The latin phrase "damnatio memoriae" means the "condemnation of memory". It is to erase someone from history (and therefore from the future) as a form of punishment. If effectively done the future won't know it was done. After the physical records of someone's existence are destroyed then once those with memory of how it really was die the verbal history can be reduced from fact to mere rumor and innuendo. The impossibility of perfect central control makes it difficult to implement completely.

Below are some of the Orwellian examples of trying to erase the past and change history.  This is not an exhaustive list. Notice how the reasons for the purging of history have changed. Instead of being imposed by rulers as a means of showing power and consolidating power, it is now often done at the behest of neo-puritian busybodies, but that totalitarian instinct remains.

Personally, with the modern censors, I don't understand the logic in ignoring the stubborn reality and trying to create the illusion that the world appears the way they long for it to be.

(Here is Erasing the Past part 2)

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Hatshepsut (c. 1458 BC)

Hatshepsut's (c. 1479–1458 BC) figure was chiseled off the wall (click to embiggen to see it more clearly.)  probably ordered by the Pharaohs who ruled after her. 

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Publius Septimius Geta (c. AD 211)

Publius Septimius Geta (lower left) was removed from this portrait of Septimius Severus' family at the order of his brother Caracalla (lower right). Geta and Caracall had been co-emperors and once Geta was dead Caracall was the sole Roman Emperor.

Roman inscription from c. AD 193-211 with Geta and his wife Plautilla's names removed.

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Marino Faliero (1355)

Marino Faliero was the 55th Doge of Venice. He attempted a coup d'etat which failed and he was executed and his portrait removed and replaced with a painting of a black cloak bearing the inscription "Hic est locus Marini Faletro decapitati pro criminibus ("This is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes")

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Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Artemy Khalatov & a 4th person

Taken Nov 7, 1919

Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Artemy Khalatov, and a 4th person have disappeared.

Leon Trotsky was exiled and later killed with an ice ax to the head in 1940.
Lev Kamenev was arrested and executed in 1936. His two sons and his wife were also executed.
A.B. Khalatov was arrested and executed in 1938.

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Hitler edits Josef Stalin (c. 1939)

"After the forging of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Hitler prohibited the publication of photographs of Stalin with a cigarette, reasoning, according to his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, that among the German population such images would threaten the respectable status of the statesman with whom the Führer had struck a deal" 

– from The Stalin Cult : A Study in the Alchemy of Power by Jan Plamper

(Sorry, I haven't seen an example)

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Nikolai Yezhov (c. 1940)

From left to right : some guys, Josef Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov of the NKVD aka the Vanishing Commisar.

more Soviet era photo manipulation at englishrussia.com. Nikolai Yezhov, who had been the bloodthirsty Commissar of the NKVD, was removed from all positions, arrested, confessed under torture, was tried and executed in 1940. His execution remained a secret until 1948.

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Mussolini (1942)

Mussolini asks what stable boy?

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Lavrentiy Beria et al in and out of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1953)

In 1953, after Lavrentiy Beria's downfall from power in the USSR, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia mailed subscribers replacement pages (including University of California at Berkeley) and instructed them to cut out and destroy the 3 page article on Beria and paste in pages omitting Beria and expanding the adjacent articles (F. W. Bergholz –an 18th-century courtier–, the Bering Sea, and Bishop Berkeley)

Beria wasn't the only one. Nikolai Bukharin and others were also subject to the political winds revising what had been. More on censorship in the USSR at wiki.

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Carlos Franqui (1968)

Carlos Franqui (center) in the background as Fidel Castro broadcasts

Carlos Franqui disappears

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Gang of Four (1976)

The Gang of Four were airbrushed out of this photo of a memorial ceremony for Mao Tse-Tung

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coral damage

from Photojournalism An Ethical Approach :

"When the Tokyo newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, sent a photographer to document the environmental problems with a coral reef, he carved his initials in the reef for the picture when he could not find enough damage."

(unlike many examples of editing the image of the past, this example is the creation of a fact and in doing so the destruction of the old reality)

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The Beatles I Want To Hold Your Hand reissue (1984)

Paul (far left) has a cigarette

On the 1984 reissue, Paul does not have a cigarette.

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Sonny Crockett's pistol (1985)

also from Photojournalism An Ethical Approach :

"The gun and shoulder holster were removed from "Miami Vice" actor Don Johnson (for a Rolling Stone cover) because editor Jan Wenner is an ardent foe of handguns."

Rolling Stone cover (Issue #444, March 28, 1985), Don Johnson had been wearing a gun in a shoulder holster until it was removed digitally. Tubbs is lucky to have made the cover; he could have been edited out if Wenner objected to men wearing jewelry or an aversion to pink pants.

Sorry, I'm not aware of where the unedited image could be found.

I can imagine Wenner's emotional reason to want to censor guns because he sees them as a representation of potential violence but imagine if they edited all the potentially dangerous things like the guns, knives, cocaine, explosions, alligators, fast cars (potentially driven dangerously), and potentially loose women out of Miami Vice.  It would have been a quick show.

For reference of what was edited out, here is a pic of Sonny Crocket wearing a holster and appears to be wearing the same clothes as the Rolling Stone photo

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Robert Johnson postage stamp (1994)

after editing (left) on a 1994 USPS stamp and before editing (right) is a cropped version of one of a handful of known photos (only 2 last I heard) of Robert Johnson. Interestingly, the other photo has him in a hat & suit and no cigarette but the photo above is better known.

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James Dean postage stamp (1995)

James Dean walking with a cigarette photographed by Roy Schatt

The illustration to the right of the stamps is James Dean walking without a cigarette.

The illustrator Michael J Deas says :

"In a supplementary drawing I did to accompany my James Dean postage stamp of 1995, I was indeed asked to remove a cigarette dangling from Dean's mouth, and the resulting picture definitely lacked some of Dean's inimitable cool" 

Eventually, someone will suggest replacing the cars lining the street with bicycles or rickshaws.

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Jackson Pollock postage stamp (1999)

Jackson Pollock painting with a cigarette hanging from his lips

In 1999, the US Postal Service stamp showing Jackson Pollock painting without the cigarette hanging from his lips.

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Audrey Hepburn German postage stamp (2001)

In 2001 a German Audrey Hepburn stamp was proposed but her son objected to the cigarette holder in her mouth, refused to consent to the stamps production and so the print run was destroyed. The movie Breakfast at Tiffany's still retains tobacco use.

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ET the movie re-release (2002)

In the extended version of ET the element of danger of men with guns trying to catch ET was replaced with the element of potentially being poked by a walkie-talkie antenna or squelched at their general direction. 

I do wonder if they edited out the kid calling his brother(?) an unkind name. 

Steven Spielberg has since said :

"For myself, I tried [changing a film] once and lived to regret it. Not because of fan outrage, but because I was disappointed in myself. I got overly sensitive to [some of the reaction] to E.T., and I thought if technology evolved, [I might go in and change some things]…it was OK for a while, but I realized what I had done was I had robbed people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T. [...] If I put just one cut of E.T. on Blu-ray and it was the 1982, would anyone object to that? [The crowd yells "NO!" in unison.] OK, so be it."

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Clement Hurd book jacket photo (2005)

Clement Hurd with and without cigarette.

The children's book Goodnight Moon's illustrator Clement Hurd had a cigarette photoshopped out of his hand in 2005 (17 years after his death) for a reprint edition. He now appears to be holding an invisible cup of beer.

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The Beatles Capitol Albums Vol. 2 (2006)

the origin image

note a cigarette for Paul, Ringo and John.

All 3 cigarettes have been edited away. Apparently, any cigarette held by the fab 4 have been edited out throughout the boxed set.

Poor Ringo has lost not only his cigarette but part of 2 of his fingers.

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Tom and Jerry cartoons (2006)

Texas Tom - Tom, with Jerry's unwilling assistance, rolls a cigarette and smokes it in one drag.

After a single complaint charged theTom and Jerry cartoons “Texas Tom” (1950) and “Tennis Chumps”(1949)  “were not appropriate in a cartoon aimed at children” due to the presence of tobacco use Turner, owners of the Hanna-Barbera library, proposed to the British Office of Communications to edit "any scenes or references in the series where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorized or where it might encourage imitation."

Tennis Chumps - Butch, Tom's tennis opponent smokes a cigar

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Burt Reynolds DirectTV ad (2007)

Burt Reynolds in Cosmo from 1972 with cigarette, ashtray and little else.

Burt Reynolds reprinted from Cosmo for a DirectTV ad without cigarette or ashtray

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Shouldn't the movie On The Beach (1959) be edited to assure the viewer that the war was fought with cream pies and cupcakes instead of nuclear weapons and so everybody is fine (or at least give Anthony Perkins' supposedly Australian character an Australian accent)?

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 Bette Davis postage stamp (2008)

above is a still from the fine film All About Eve (which could reasonably be renamed to Bitches in Theatre)

The painter of the stamp says his source photograph did not have a cigarette and so he did not edit it out but that her mink coat was considered unacceptable so it was replace with a red velvet one. His source was almost certainly a promotional shot from the fine film All About Eve (1950).  If so, then the minks in question (if they were in fact mink and not fake fur) had been dead for at least 58 years before the stamp was released.

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Shouldn’t they put sandals on greek nudes sculptures… think of the health risk of tetanus.

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 Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo's self portrait (2009)

"The Artist and the Model," 1940 by Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo with cigarette (the original)

"The Artist and the Model," 1940 by Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo without cigarette (as edited by the Manley Council)

One of the most despicable and destructive edits on this list as the painter made conscious decisions of what to include and what to leave out of his piece of work.

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This growing tendency towards bowdlerization must explain why the otherwise inquisitive media can't seem to find any photos of the admitted smoker Barack Obama smoking.

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Winston Churchill (2010)

Winston Churchill with cigar

Winston Churchill edited to be without his cigar for a banner outside the Britain at War Museum. The museum authorities claimed they didn't know who did the editing or why it was edited. I don't believe them.

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 Shouldn't Buster Keaton movies be altered so he is at a safe distance from dangerous events?

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Jean-Paul Sartre (2005)

Jean-Paul Sartre with cigarette

Jean-Paul Sartre without cigarette between his fingers (as censored by the French National Library aka Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Sartre didn't just smoke; he also wrote about smoking. If they are ok with removing the cigarette then why not photoshop his lazy eye or remove his glasses to suggest he had perfect vision? Why not make him less troll-like in appearance?

Sartre on smoking : "…the act of destructively appropriating the tobacco was the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world."
Asked "What is the most important thing in your life at present?", Sartre responded : "I don't know. Everything. Living. Smoking." (note that smoking didn't just make third place but arguably it is included in his first place answer too)

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 Movies like The French Connection and Bullitt wouldn’t be too different if everyone was shown driving the speed limit and obeying the proper rules of the road. 

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Jacques Tati (2009)

Jacques Tati on his bicycle with his iconic pipe from the movie Mon Oncle.

Jacques Tati with his pipe covered with a pinwheel graphic from a poster advertising a Tati retrospective.

Sartre and Tati lost their iconic tobacco products due to a french regulation regarding the direct or indirect promotion of smoking.

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Bathurst 1000 footage (2012)

Peter Brock's Bathurst car (unedited)

Peter Brock's Bathurst car (edited)

vintage footage of the race is also being censored

It seems, while showing a history of the Bathurst 1000 auto race Australia's Channel 7 has edited it to hide the sponsorship from tobacco companies. Even vintage footage of old races, from at a time when tobacco sponsorship was not banned, have been edited with a crude blur. 

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Socrates drank... grape juice from a juice box wasn't it?

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Han shot first. (2004)

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update Oct 25, 2012 : 

A Visit from St Nicholas (aka 'Twas the Night Before Christmas) (2012)

A Canadian publisher, Grafton and Scratch, decided to remove 2 lines from the 189 year old, public domain poem by Clement C. Moore because they reference Santa Claus smoking.  Additionally, she has ensured that the accompanying illustrations do not show Saint Nick smoking. The publisher, Pamela McColl, is an anti-smoking activist who spends a lot of space on the book's website talking about smoking. She says "I have come to realize the way that children look at Santa and the need for him to be a good example for all children"

The 2 lines omitted : "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, / And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath"

I suspect the number of pipe smoking children has probably been on the decrease since before this books publication. 

The LATimes observes that the book includes : a note from Santa on the back flap that says his fur is fake and he has “decided to leave all of that old tired business of smoking well behind us.” 

However, Santa is still portrayed as obese and includes the lines "He had a broad face and a little round belly / That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly" and treats animals in a manner some would disapprove of but her response to Santa's weight is that "He doesn't eat in the story. That's not my issue." 

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(go to Erasing the Past part 2)