Ceci est une pipe (5)
By:
June 19, 2010
One in an irregular, ongoing, and self-explanatory series of posts.
I recently noted that Orson Welles was an anti-fascist pipe smoker. Here are two French anti-fascist philosophers who smoked pipes, plus an anti-fascist pipe-smoking guerrilla.
As a cigarette smoker and photo industry stooge I can’t help but link to a picture of Anton Drexler smoking a pipe: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3396926/Hulton-Archive
I held back on a George Lincoln Rockwell because he’s smoking a corncob pipe and that just can’t count but this object Goering has protruding from his face is too quintessentially Goering to ignore: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/78950781/Popperfoto
Apparently you haven’t read Martin Heidegger’s report for Joseph Goebbels on the “semiotics of pipe-smoking.” In it, H. urges G. to have Goering pose with a novelty pipe like the one Drexler used to mock pipe-smokers. This was but one salvo in Nazi Germany’s campaign against pipe-smoking. See typical poster here: http://aftermathnews.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/nazi_anti-smoking-campaign.jpg, for example.
I almost mentioned something about how Heideggerian Drexler looks so I’m glad it went without saying.
I was dubious at first but then this picture convinced me that yer right, they are simply trying to undermine pipisme in a desperate bid to shore up the Eastern Front: http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/.a/6a00e5523026f58834010535be71a2970c-800wi (a screenshot from this merciless affair: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coziSpt16BA)
It’s true that Stalin smoked a pipe. Or did he? I must say that in every Stalin portrait featuring a pipe, the pipe looks like it was pasted in. Also, pipe aficionados (I’m not one, by the way; just interested in what they mean) claim that Stalin never cleaned his pipe, and used cigarette tobacco in them. In other words, he was a fraud.
It is only required that the Nazis (not us) believed he was a pipe smoker to ignite (heh) their campaign of ridicule.