AH Vignette: How Cigarettes Won The Cold War

TOBACCO AND THE TORCH OF FREEDOM

THERE are few Twentieth Century images more iconic than that of Malcolm Rifkind and Anthony Wedgwood-Benn smoking cigars beneath Big Ben in February 1991. Two men from opposite sides of the 53rd Parallel, ending a separation that had divided Britain for their adult lives. The cigars smoked by Benn and Rifkind might be a small part of Martin Marsden’s photograph, but they played a much larger part in the end of the Cold War than you might think.

For four decades, tobacco was verboten from Wales to Warchau. The Hitlerian obsession with healthy living, combined with the Warchau Pact’s drive towards continental self-sufficiency, ensured the official death of the cigarette in Europe. While smoking was only officially banned in Germany in 1959, and in the English State from 1962 onwards, rationing, high tariffs, social censure, and the slow closure of the Pact’s borders with tobacco-producing nations like America, Turkey, and Italy meant that cigarettes had been a scarce sight in South British shops for nearly two decades.

Margaret Roberts, a Grantham pensioner who ran one of the last tobacconists in South Britain, remembers the day the State shut down her establishment. “There is a certain nostalgia amongst people of my generation for the State. Work, order, security. The only price - a little freedom? Surely not such a great cost.” she says, before her voice turns to iron. “Let me be absolutely clear. There was nothing orderly, nothing peaceful, nothing British, about the State. When Mosley’s thugs came for me, they came with torches and axes, just as they came for the Jews, and the Slavs, and the Welsh.”

The Saxon Youth who smashed her store were teenagers raised on a steady diet of Leni Riefenstahl movies and Walter Strauss cartoons that depicted smoking as a vice enjoyed only by Slavic terrorists, Italian degenerates, and American gangsters. They would later take up the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, that destructive spasm of late 1960s fascism that destroyed so much of European history and art.

Of course, there is no surer way to make something desired than to render it forbidden. Whatever the Fuhrer said in public, the European elite were not about to live without their Cuban cigars. Maxwell Mosley himself was a notorious chain smoker, regularly seen behind the wheel of his Mercedes with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Tobacco smuggling rapidly became the cornerstone of the European black market – more addictive than cocaine, and more lucrative than heroin.

But tobacco presented more than just an opportunity for the criminal underground. The OSS, KGB and SOE saw the tobacco ban as a crack in Fortress Europe that could be forced open into a flood. Even better – it was an operation that would pay for itself. Gathering in the heart of tobacco country in Richmond, Virginia, senior intelligence officers from across UNTO developed a plan. “Freedom Cigarettes”, grown in Virginia and packaged in Aberdeen or Archangelsk, would be smuggled across the 53rd parallel, the North Sea, or the Ukrainian border and sold at cost into the Warchau Pact.

“Without Freedom Cigarettes, there would have been no resistance, and no end to the Separation.” Jeremiah Corbyn would know. At 68, the former resistance leader is still an impressive speaker, no less the man who stood in Trafalgar Square and dared Richard Marsh’s tanks to run him down than he was thirty years ago. “Freedom Cigarettes filled the coffers of the British Resistance. Freedom Cigarettes built networks across the country. Freedom Cigarettes put coal workers and clerks together, and helped them organise for change.”

The State authorities did not stand idly by and let tobacco flow freely into the country. Penalties grew harsher – fines became imprisonment became a one-way trip to the East. Many of Corbyn’s colleagues perished in political camps for the crime of lighting up. In Nationalist France, with the regime always eager to prove that it could be harsher than the Germans themselves, cigarette smugglers were burned alive on national television. Even as the State loosened its grip under Marsh, the Man We Could Do Business With, tobacco smuggling was punishable by summary execution by the Stapol.

Yet Europe’s nicotine addiction could not be slaked, even at gunpoint. Yellow-stained fingers and teeth became a symbol of resistance. In cellars and church basements, citizens gathered to discuss politics and smoke cigarettes in their hundreds and then in their thousands. Smuggled lighters would prove to be as effective at lighting Molotov cocktails hurled at tanks as they were lighting Cavendish Slims. Tobacco, which had once brought Europeans to the New World, now brought freedom to the Old World.

A sad irony is that the Nazi ban on tobacco was ultimately vindicated by medical science. Even today, more than a quarter-century after the end of National Socialism, lung cancer rates in North Britain and America are orders of magnitude higher than that of the impoverished German republics. While tobacco’s long association with liberty has made smoking restrictions politically unpalatable, there is now a movement in the West against nicotine. In 2015, the US Congress passed a series of restrictions on the advertising of tobacco products, leading to the end of the popular Joe Camel animated series. The smoke filling New York nightclubs and Edinburgh pubs is now more thin haze than pea soup.

Not everyone changes with the times. For Margaret Roberts, who now enjoys a packet of Marlboro Lights with her morning coffee every day, there will be no turning against tobacco. What does she taste when she lights up?

“Freedom, of course. There is no substitute.”

Ellen Goldfarb, Grantham, United Kingdom, for TIME Magazine
 
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General Anton denkin’s great grandson took charge 2 years ago as first minister, with the approval of regent Gregor II.
 
This was very enjoyable, it's always good when vignettes take an original angle and this is certainly that. Of course smoking has been associated with liberation IOTL, "Torches of Freedom" etc, and it's intriguing to see this link taken to such an extreme extent.
 
What are Russia, China, and India like ITTL?

Let's first acknowledge that plausibility is being unreasonably stretched in any timeline with a Nazi invasion of Britain that is somehow halted at the 53rd Parallel.

There's a few hints as to Russia's fate in the text - note that "the OSS, SOE and KGB" are all working together to distribute Freedom Cigarettes, and that there is still a Ukrainian border with the Warchau Pact, although it's not clear exactly which side Ukraine is on.

China and India aren't mentioned. I might write a few more vignettes in this universe (an early draft list of English State leaders is here). Let's just say that the European Cultural Revolution involves some weird ideas about the link between Hinduism, Germanic paganism and the Aryan race... and note that Fortress Europe doesn't totally lack allies outside Germany's control.
 
So TTL was the links between tobacco and lung cancer confirmed in the early 50s successfully suppressed for much longer as "anti-freedom?" After all, the German anti-tobacco movement had issues due to the legacy of the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.

What would a Joe Camel animated series even be like? I think it would be something like the Simpsons (or Family Guy/South Park/etc.) which is officially targetted toward adults (and of course has a large audience of teenagers and children), since Joe Camel was there for crossover appeal to teenagers.

Quite dystopic TL overall, nice job.
 
I see a sort of anti popeye as well. In crisis the protagonist is handed tobacco. What if to go all the way, Ayn Rand’s acolytes get in on the act? Objectivits reguard smoke as sacred.
 

Garrison

Donor
So TTL was the links between tobacco and lung cancer confirmed in the early 50s successfully suppressed for much longer as "anti-freedom?" After all, the German anti-tobacco movement had issues due to the legacy of the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.

What would a Joe Camel animated series even be like? I think it would be something like the Simpsons (or Family Guy/South Park/etc.) which is officially targetted toward adults (and of course has a large audience of teenagers and children), since Joe Camel was there for crossover appeal to teenagers.

Quite dystopic TL overall, nice job.

Obviously it would be GI Joe Camel. :)
 

That's just a commercial, though. Remember that when those were airing, the Flintstones were basically the early 60s version of the Simpsons and thus not necessarily aimed at children (unlike later Flintstones seasons which were more aimed at kids and had less of an adult audience). Yes, it's hilarious to see the Flintstones promoting cigarettes, but it isn't like Fred and Barney were advertising Winston in the middle of the show. We can do better than that for a Joe Camel cartoon.
 

marathag

Banned
That's just a commercial, though. Remember that when those were airing, the Flintstones were basically the early 60s version of the Simpsons and thus not necessarily aimed at children (unlike later Flintstones seasons which were more aimed at kids and had less of an adult audience). Yes, it's hilarious to see the Flintstones promoting cigarettes, but it isn't like Fred and Barney were advertising Winston in the middle of the show. We can do better than that for a Joe Camel cartoon.

Since they had Winston as the main sponsor, were there in the Open and the Close, too
This has all three.

Growing up then as a kid, it seemed normal that adults would all smoke like chimneys, with the you kids having these
Candy2.jpg

until you would start smoking real ones in High School
 
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