In February 1945 the Second World War was approaching its conclusion on the European scene. Americans and British were opening step in France and Italy went up, and that General Zhukov, east, up to forty miles from Berlin. At Yalta met the three Allied leaders, Franklin Delano Roosevelt , Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin . The three were smokers: smoked cigarettes Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin smoked cigars he smoked in his pipe.
The question may seem anecdotal, even banal. But it began to be curious when you discover that the two leaders in the process of being defeated Nazi, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, were in exchange for non-smokers, in fact, authentic anti-smoking zealots.
World War II was fought by tens of millions of highly motivated people, willing to give his life for a cause. This strong ideal content is not easy to find, those who hesitate to ask how that turned out to the Americans in Vietnam, Somalia or Iraq. What was the motivation of the allied fighters? The freedom and democracy, two things are designed in a very real sense. For freedom means the right to dispose of its existence, to assert their identity in the political, social and cultural. But also the right to choose or invent your own lifestyle, without state interference. Democracy was the logical complement of that freedom: if we have the right to be different if we can not be governed as part of a uniqueness facesimo organic. Our form of government has to be a "clearing house" of diversity.
What motivated Nazi fighters? The principles almost symmetrical opposites. Individuality in being loose collective of high status to the single subject of life and history, embodied in the person of the Führer. Politics, society and culture reduced to the universal attributes of this unique subject. Totalitarianism as an institutional form, which considers any criminal diversity.
lifestyle was one of the main areas of this battle between irreconcilable principles. For the Nazis the way of life was to be only one, advocated by the State: "Our body belongs to the nation, our body belongs to the Führer, we have a duty to be healthy" (Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer , ch. 5). This principle justified the large number of abuses and crimes: the mass imprisonment and murder of Jews, which the regime had transformed into a paradigm of diversity, gypsies, homosexuals, socialists and communists, and hundreds of other unwanted minorities. Others, like the mentally ill, alcoholics and chronic considered carriers of hereditary evil, were sterilized.
Nazism began its campaign against smoking in 1933, when he had got the power (and thirty years before the current U.S. campaign). The first stage was theoretical and propaganda, through research commissioned by the terrifying regime and advertising, many of which bound the smoking habit with the condition of jew. He came to the practical stage in 1939, with partial bans on smoking in public places like government offices, hospitals and places of work, plus the creation of different areas in restaurants and the prohibition of smoking in uniform for the police and SS. In 1940, special coaches were established for non-smokers the railroad. Only in 1943 was the introduction of the smoking ban for children under 18 years, and in 1944 was banned smoking on buses and Metro. But that same year the country lost power, the war was going badly, and to support the morale of the soldiers were sent rations of cigarettes and alcohol to the front, in clear contradiction with the theory of the virtues combative air healthy. The war was lost, and the war ended with the militant antitabachismo. They won the Jews, blacks, smokers and other persecuted
... The fact is that this was the first anti-tobacco campaign of prohibition in the world. The pseudo-scientists largely preceded the Nazis to their heirs of the 50 Americans, the organizers and advertisers Nazis anticipated almost all of the issues and procedures of the prohibitionists in recent years, including "passive smoking" or "second hand" ( Passivrauchen, term invented by the Nazi doctor Fritz Lickint).
Obra Citade: Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, Princeton U. Press, 1999.
