I'm pretty sure everybody agrees that Disney's The Little Mermaid or Aladdin (or Willy Wonka) are not faithful representations of the original source material. Editing the book after Roald Dahl is dead and titling it "Mathilda, by Roald Dahl" is something completely different.
Those are intensely poor examples, for a handful of a reasons
- Language translations are extremely culturally dependent, and is a known quantity. Modern translations frequently have many translator's notes explaining the decision or edits made.
- Modern translations are transparent about their editorializing, there's a marked difference between "accurate" and "lay person" translations.
- The source materials were written and translated in times when we, frankly, had lower standards.
Where does the "woke mob" come into this? As far as I can tell there hasn't been a public campaign to censor the books. Rather, these changes came from the Dahl Story Company and Penguin Random House, so this is good old fashion capitalism through-and-through. No one asked for a reason to repurchase novels that were already 50+ years old besides the people who own the rights to these books.
The only group lurid enough to vandalize the story are the woke zombie cry-bullies. Their campaign is to burn down western culture and replace it with something that closely resembles intellectual gonorrhea.
Please, try to be civil. It’s really hard for anyone with different views to seriously engage with you when you’re making such an abrasive presentation.
Civil discussion is traditionally a value of the western culture you prize so much.
Civil like burning down and looting businesses that don't fly a particular flag? ...or pulling the fire alarms at venues when a speaker is presenting something you disagree with? Or civil like destroying timeless stories with emotional garbage and inserting woke ideology into things that have nothing to do with the zealotry?
On the contrary, I'm being perfectly civil. Colorful descriptions that profess my disdain for the left's new mind-diarrhea is not even close to incivility. If you don't like my descriptions, then the proper course is to ask yourself why people might take issue with cry-bullies.
I mean, you’re really not being civil by any description of it I’d recognize. Accusing me of being okay with arson? ‘Mind-diarrhea’?
Are you at all open to discussion?
I’m projecting my own views a lot here, but I am pretty sure you’re not going to be swaying anyone even remotely left of center (most of whom would never engage in the acts you’re listing - and many of whom _are_ uneasy about many of the changes to Dahl’s works that sparked this discussion) in your direction by projecting such an angry, abrasive demeanor.
I really worry about the state of online discourse. I’d be willing to bet that if we were to sit down and discuss this over a beverage in real life this isn’t how the discussion would go.
I read to my 6yo Grimm stories almost like originals ones. I think life is made of both good and bad things, hiding latter won't benefit child growth, you have to explain and give the kid the tools to manage both.
But I honestly don't know how would I tell my kid that the Sleeping Beauty was a minor raped by a stranger who tripled her age. Nor I think it could provide any "life lesson" to a six year old.
Both of these examples are collections of folk tales. Arabian Nights in particular has no authoritative original at all, and there are many variations of the collection in many languages, many of which which are still available today from a variety of publishers. The Brothers Grimm similarly collected and adapted folk tales (and bowdlerized _their own work_ in subsequent editions), but reprints of most of these editions are still available, and versions of tales or collections that were not written by the Grimms are not published under their name. By contrast Dahl stories are original IP with an authoritative source who is now dead and can't revise his own work.
Pretty much every single fable and tale out there have been rewritten to suit modern tastes.
The Sleeping Beauty is raped in her sleep, Little Red Hood fills up the wolf with stones after it has been cut in half to rescue her grandmother, and Cinderella has a confusing relationship with incest.
This is just a historical example of someone editing a childrens book and doing so poorly as to ruin the art of the work. Many pieces of art were vandalized in a similar manner, I haven't found a single case in antiquity where modern people, in western countries at least, are in favor of the censorship of the past.
On the other hand, it's actually physically nauseating to have The Spectator pass any comment on integrity, cultural vandalism, RightThink etc. They've led the charge promoting fake news and alternative "facts" from Brexit to Covid.
I'm not familiar with them but things make a lot more sense now. The writing seemed pretty off with lots of odd signals about how to think, how to fall in line, and spell out what our outrage should be. The talking points seemed a little too clean-cut and less about a discussion.
It's sad because (despite being mostly on the left) I used to read the Spectator, in a "hear the other side, challenge your own point if view" way. And it was good. Decent pragmatic right leaning people. Then in the run up to Brexit it just sort of fell apart. Out was anyone with facts or reasons. In were pre-canned talking points, appeals to emotion and bare faced lies.
This one is very hard for me. I think about how we look at the things that used to be normal in the past. How the R word was a medical condition, how the N word was a normal thing to call somebody, how a gay man was called the F word. Nobody would bat an eye at these words back then. And yet - we look back on those times with disdain. I can't imagine giving a book to a child that contains those words; and yet maybe back then that was normal?
Will people look back on our times with disdain and think how horrible we were for calling each other crazy, mad, fat and ugly? How we made such a big deal about gendering things?
Maybe we are "the old men shouting at clouds" (ahem... I mean "old people shouting at clouds" xd)? Maybe we should get with the times? Or is this really all "cancel-culture" and everybody else except us is wrong?
Unfortunately, I only have questions and no answers hahah
If you set aside which particular words, my hopeful/naive answer to the question "will people think how horrible we were for insulting each other so frequently" would be "yes."
It would be wonderful if everyone was more civil and less vicious.
Anyone here who was bullied in high school, say, and enjoyed it? I sure didn't.
I don't think it will happen, but for words that become increasingly only employed as insults, I understand the desire to push back against those insults.
>Anyone here who was bullied in high school, say, and enjoyed it? I sure didn't...
And therein lies the rub.
People like you, who couldn't find a coping mechanism to deal with childhood bullying [all children are vicious wee thugs, until they learn otherwise] think that you can somehow control what people "feel inside" by controlling what words they can use to express themselves. Ditto the people who think you can somehow stop anyone having racist or homopobic attitudes by banning completely innocuous words [see Montenegro comment above] as people might see them as racist or hompophobic.
Kids will always bully other kids, racists will always hate other races and homophobic people will always hate gays. If you ban one word, they'll come up with another. If you ban that, they'll come up with another... rinse and repeat. As I've said before, if you follow that path to its conclusion, you end up with Newspeak [0]
It's certainly a valid option to decide that the books are no longer appropriate, and stop reprinting them. Or to print a warning and let the market decide.
The problem is when you change the book, effectively making a new one, but with the same name as the old one - which is not authentic.
I don’t think kids care about authentic. They would rather have something over just not having the books at all.
That said, I struggle to see how these edits will ever be essential. Phrases like “brothers and sisters” is hopefully never as offensive as racial slurs.
I don’t think it should be that difficult to deal with this. If you no longer find it appropriate for children, fine. Don’t give it to your kids then. But books ought to be preserved as written imo, not modified to meet todays arbitrary moral criteria.
The whole point of Roald Dahl's children's books is to be enjoyed by children, not middle aged (small c) conservatives. These aren't works of Great Western Art(tm), but works of fun and whimsy meant to entertain and delight. I want a world where as many children as possible can continue read and fall in love with and be inspired by Dahl's stories and ideas. Losing that would be far worse than any imagined loss these minor changed might bring.
I think the blowback is because the publisher hired some sort of diversity consultancy called Inclusive Minds. I’m personally not convinced that group is a better choice for children’s literature than Roald Dahl.
> Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974,[17] also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"
> Mentally disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly used insults. The medical diagnosis was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into a pejorative against those with mental disabilities. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although the word "special" has begun to crop up as a schoolyard insult.[
Is the implication supposed to be that we should just have stuck with the N word and the F word because whatever we replaced them with would eventually come to be used the same way as the original words?
There are people trying to call out Montenegro for its name, and there are people that use "get help"/"you need therapy" as an insult. The treadmill never ends and it's trying to eat everything
I don't think there's an implication per se. It's just a description of fact. This has happened before, and likely will happen again. It's helpful to be aware that we're in a cycle rather than a one-time process.
The implication is that people will use whatever tools are available to be shit to one another - someone that cannot be altered by updated terminology.
That's some bubble you live in, even in the US there's certain regions and industries where some of those words are almost encouraged (so much for "literally anywhere"), let alone the "Western world".
Whatever microcosm you may be in, it's on a very extreme end of the western world and it would be useful to realize this.
Banning words is a very US thing, not "western world". In most countries it's normal to use the words we want to talk about, the words themselves are not "cursed" like Voldemort. Honestly the "x-word" thing is really childish.
There's a difference in using the words as a way to illustrate and using them as insults or bad words. Context matters.
It's not about the actual impact of the words or anything like that. It's mostly tribal signaling - the current victors of the culture war desecrate their enemies cultural milieu. Rewording books, tearing down statues, demonizing past heroes, etc.
People will come up with other justifications (it causes harm, it's wrong, it's not inclusive) for why they're doing the above, but as all morals are ultimately relative (and thus their reasons are relative), it's just a means to an end.
> "the old men shouting at clouds" (ahem... I mean "old people shouting at clouds" xd)?
Unless there was an earlier reference, this was from The Simpsons, where Grandpa Simpson was the subject. In this case "old man" would be correct and doesn't need to be de-gendered.
To the more general point, society and culture changes and (hopefully) progresses and improves. While this is uncomfortable for those of us who learned our societal norms a generation or two ago, and need to change our habits, I think it is an inherent feature of a healthy society. Thus it will be an ongoing issue, and is perhaps made even more prominent by today's faster and wider communications channels.
Thus while on a specific issue (Dahl's books in this case), there is no absolute right or wrong, there is moral relativity where everyone's starting point is different. Society as a whole, hopefully made up of reasonable voices, will work out the answer. Which of course, can change again over time.
> How the R word was a medical condition, how the N word was a normal thing to call somebody, how a gay man was called the F word. Nobody would bat an eye at these words back then. And yet - we look back on those times with disdain.
I think that you are conflating two different things, and somewhat mixing cause and effect. We do not look back at those times with disdain because they used those words. Rather, we look at those words with disdain because of the attitudes with which they were used in the past.
Furthermore, those three words fall into somewhat different categories. While the [acronym of ginger] and the [en_GB cigarette] words were overwhelming used from the outset to target and attack people with no moral justification (under our modern sensibilities), that is not the same as the term retard which was a legitimate medical term to describe an individual with mental retardation. The fact that we now reject the use of that word is precisely because it became a convenient pejorative to insult somebody's mental capacity, hence it being the perfect example of the euphemism treadmill—in fact, retard itself arose as a euphemism for slow.
Will the euphemism treadmill catch up on the other two examples? Will "gay" or "lesbian", or "black" or "African American" become taboo? I bet they won't, for the simple reason that as a society we have (mostly) moved past the idea that there's anything wrong with being sexually attracted to people of one's own gender, or descending from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Regarding people in the future, if they do look at us with disdain for using the words fat, ugly, mad, etc, my bet is that it will only be for the euphemism treadmill effect, as there is something inherently negative about being overweight, unattractive, or mentally unhealthy. I find it hard to believe that any future euphemism for any of these three words could ever become immune to becoming an insult.
> How many of us chortled at fat Augustus Gloop getting stuck in that pipe, or winced at the idea of witches posing as cashiers, or smiled deviantly at the vision of a ‘tremendously flabby’ old lady? And we turned out fine. We weren’t wounded, we didn’t become hateful.
I guess that you can say that "laughing about these specific fictional fat people" doesn't directly cause one to behave in hurtful ways towards fat real people. To me it still seems bizarre that the author decided to basically ask "Remember how we laughed at fat people and how good that was?" right before stating as fact that noone was hurt in consequence of any of the stuff in the book.
Is it an act of cultural vandalism to stage a modernized production of Shakespeare so that the audience can empathize with the plot & characters better?
Be angry at copyright, not at the decision to attempt to modernize a work of art; without copyright, both versions could be circulated concurrently (and of course this is why you see both traditional & modernized Shakespeare productions, unlike Broadway where every tour is authorized and a replica (some exceptions for school versions and such)). Art is a product of its times, and imo it's completely reasonable to want to update a version to what makes sense in the modern day and what children can now empathize with, and see themselves reflected in.
It's one thing to advertise something as a modernized version and another to advertise it as the original work of the authors. Isn't it worth preserving how things were in the past? If not how will we understand where we came from? How will we know how to learn from mistakes if they're just erased?
That's an interesting point. I would agree that the attribution should clearly state "Revised in 2023 by Puffin" or something along these lines.
As for:
> Isn't it worth preserving how things were in the past?
Oh, yes, absolutely, and this is why archivists and librarians have such an important profession; and also why copyright law sucks so much. Do be angry at copyright law, don't be angry at the decision to modernize the texts.
"Why do we lie to children in the places and times we do" is its own fascinating topic, but are we expecting anyone encountering Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for the first time to be reading it through a lens of "how things were in the past" lens?
I'm not sure. Bright children might indeed notice some things and ask questions about them. My childrens' first encounter with Matilda was via me reading it to them, at the ready for any questions they might have had, and also (great nerd that I am) probably trying to provoke questions and answer ones that were never asked.
Why not just come up with a new story? It's definitely not Shakespeare's intended story any longer. Call it something new, perhaps with attribution to being inspired by the original story. There's no reason for that, other than it's too hard and therefore not profitable. Hence the bastardization of the past marches on.
Yes---while it's tempting to think of a particularly popular and beloved work of art or literature as part of some shared communal heritage, the reality of our legal system is that such works are private property unless they pass into the public domain.
In real property, there is the idea of legally declaring property as a historical site as a way to limit the private owner's rights when there is a strong community interest in the property. No such concept exists in copyright law.
Yep. I read a blog post once about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe ought to be the shared collective "mythology" of American society the way ancient Greek myths (Zeus, Hera, etc) existed. But, it can't be, it never can be, it never will be, because of copyright. No one gets to publish their own stories about Iron Man and Captain America.
Regardless of your opinions about the MCU and whether you actually feel this is part of your culture or whether you'd like it to be, I think this point is very salient. We're deprived of a collective mythos because of IP law.
We can just create a different collective mythos around characters not protected by copyright law. Like "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters".
> No one gets to publish their own stories about Iron Man and Captain America
Here are 49400 stories people have published set in the MCU [1]. 15600 include Captain America and 21400 include Iron Man. There's even 1300 where Captain America and Iron Man are in a romantic relationship with each other. This excludes stories that are crossovers between MCU and something else.
Here's another 397000 stories in the MCU (although there is probaby some overlap with the ones above) [2]. That list I've filtered down to stories that are in English and complete. 124000 include Captain America and 121000 include Iron Man. 67000 include them both. 24500 of them have those two in a romantic relationship
People seem to be doing fine at building a shared collective MCU mythology, and even taking it in some directions the Marvel would probably not approve of.
This is a good point. While fan fiction authors generally don't have a legal right to make derivative works, the copyright owner isn't obligated to sue them, either. This article is a good overview of the copyright issues around fan fiction: https://blog.jipel.law.nyu.edu/2021/04/is-fanfiction-legal/. It notes
"While on their face, these fanfiction communities may seem like harmless outlets for fans, existing copyright doctrine actually renders much of these works as infringements of copyright. The problem is that most fanfiction could be characterized as derivative works of other already existing original works, as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101."
Marvel clearly tolerates online fan fiction to an extent, but I imagine if someone tried to publish an illustrated anthology of Marvel fan fiction and sell it on Amazon, or make and release a film based on it, they would probably find the limit of that tolerance.
>Is it an act of cultural vandalism to stage a modernized production of Shakespeare so that the audience can empathize with the plot & characters better?
I'm a bit lost here - my experience with Shakespeare productions is that (whether they're staged in modern times or not) they generally don't change the language. Things like the Reduced Shakespeare Company notwithstanding, of course.
The irony here is that it's a redacted Shakespeare that gives us the root of "bowdlerization".
Ah, the language no. To me, that's enough to completely re-imagine the play though. I mean, they'll use guns instead of swords, talk to each other on cell phones, everyone is wearing suits, sometimes they're talking to a gaggle of reporters when giving the news to each other...it's a radically different experience if you see a modernized & traditional production of the same play.
I've seen many--and even performed in!--versions of Shakespearian works that did, in fact, change the language. (Hell: we had an R2 unit playing Polonius in our production of Hamlet on the Moon, so he was just out there beeping and blooping all of his ridiculously verbose advice.)
Is it an act of cultural vandalism to stage a modernized production of Shakespeare so that the audience can empathize with the plot & characters better
Yes, if "the audience" is a tiny population niche (but massively overrepresented in cultural and artistic power) of white, middle-class liberals (because it normally is) being offended on behalf of people they seem to feel need taking care of for whatever condescending and other psychological motivations that drive them.
It seems different to me to stage a revised version of a play for which one can still easily find an un-revised text. The same way one can cover a song in a unique style and not erase the original.
One way to prevent this from happening would be to close the copyright loophole associated with these actions. Estates of dead authors get to "update" works and can cash in a brand new copyright.
>This is the doublespeak of modern-day censorship. 'Sensitivity’ is the garb moral censure now wears
It's pretty funny that you never see these complaints when European folklore is butchered because it's deemed to be "unsafe for children", entire scenes are cut out of Leon or even Harry Potter is being attacked for promoting "witchcraft".
Sure rewriting Dahl is silly but it is funny to me to pretend this is a modern invention in Anglosphere culture. The puritan moral panic has a long history
> It's pretty funny that you never see these complaints
Have you missed the 2000's on the internet? All the people mocking "fundamental Christian" outrages against things like Harry Potter, Pokemon (evolution lol) and even the utterance of the word "Magic"? A group that was so wide and loud, that EA organized a false-flag protest against itself on the release of Dante's Inferno--just to get publicity and support via that group?
The reason that you "never" see those complaints is that they have won, and any mention of magic or violence being harmful in fiction is instantly ridiculed. They became invisible by actually being the norm
Our current intellectual property law makes no distinction between these two cases.
We should fix copyright rather than stoke useless culture wars. The publisher and Dahl’s estate are laughing all the way to the bank on this controversy.
Right? The new works should be accredited to new authors with perhaps a "with thanks to" attribution. It is only because of copyright that this is not done
> you can force all libraries to buy the new edition
I'm sorry, what now?
My local library here in Western Australia has a second edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1860, 3000 copies).
There's been no pressure that I'm aware of to acquire the first, third, fourth, fifth or sixth editions or the numerous translations that I'm aware of - many of these are carried by other libraries.
Who is going around libraries forcing them to get more recent editions?
That's not different from other rewriting copy right owners do. Disney has written an rewritten Mickey Mouse 10K times. We don't know if the original author would have approved all of those versions. It's up to them to manage the work.
Personally I think the problem is excessive copyright. Without ownership, anyone could rewrite Dahl however they like. And if someone prefers the original version, that's fine too.
Speaking of Disney we learned this week that two of the stories of Don Rosa will no longer be reprinted - putting the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck into an incomplete state.
Arguably a death is more tasteful than a rewrite but either has room for regret.
Mickey Mouse has changed several times over since the death of Walt Disney. Books and plays are adapted to film, often without the input of the author, and a film adaptations almost always require significant changes. Sometimes the changes aren’t even necessary— they’re purely stylistic in order to modernize the story.
In fact, most of Walt Disney’s films were books adapted and changed and “modernized” without the consent of the original author. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is disgustingly racist and imperialist. Disney modernized the story significantly by removing many of those themes (although adding a few “modern” racist tropes of their own).
No one calls those adaptations “cultural vandalism” though.
There's a big difference. Adaptations are new works based on the original. The original work is still available to enjoy or critique in its original form.
However, these new editions are effectively replacing the old ones. I don't so much mind them rewriting the books so long as the originals continue to be published. However, I don't expect that will be the case. Eventually, anyone going to a bookshop to buy one of Dahl's books will struggle to find the original version. That's a real shame, I think.
Yeah to me there's something sinister about the notion there will be a time when someone just assumes that's what Dahl wrote. It's sad. Did anyone even ask for this? I can't imagine there was any backlash to Dahl sufficiently meaningful that it couldn't have dealt with simply by ignoring it.
You don't have to imagine, you can read in Dahl's autobiography that's nonsense. Pressure from NAACP jeopardised the production of the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, which turned into the first plank of his international legacy. Dahl was glad to change the book so the movie would get made.
Changes Dahl was around to agree to rank differently in my mind than posthumous edits. Ethical and artistic questions aside, at a certain point we get to a Ship of Theseus conundrum, which opens all kinds of additional questions.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) objected to the original film version on the grounds that the book was racist ... they were adament that the title of the movie also had to change because they did not want it to promote the book.
Roald agreed to "de-negro" the Oompa-Loompas in both book and movie ... The movies title was altered to "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".
What is your argument then? That every edit by anyone demanding changes should be done? That's not a good game to play.
I can see how slaves might be offensive to people and be changed by the author but for example no one was offended by the word "screeching" and if they were I don't think we should let those people choose which words a book uses.
But shouldn't we allow the rights holders to change things that they consider haven't aged well to allow broader appeal? Should they be required to publish the same version that they disagree with in perpetuity?
When a work is old enough to have aged poorly, it should be in the public domain, and then everyone could publish and read the version they prefer. Some of those might be more interesting and popular than the original.
Copyright that persists long after the death of the author makes no sense to society at large. It’s just another form of rent-seeking capitalism.
You think that's in any way equivalent to turning the works over wholesale to a bunch of unhinged "sensitivity readers" who see fit to remove the word black when describing the BFG's cloak or Danny's father's tractor?
Is that seriously what the hullabaloo is about? The colour of the BFG's cloak?
So you're saying that in this story about giants that eat children, and a smaller giant that brings them joyous dreams via some sort of trumpet, dreams he catches with a butterfly net and then mixes himself, in a story about mobilising the British army to get rid of the aforementioned giants by means of giving the queen a nightmare, in a story about a young girl kidnapped in her pyjamas from an orphanage, there is a cloak? Moreover, a cloak whose original colour is somehow hurtful to some folks, while changing it is apparently cause for grave concern amongst some folks?
The changes I can’t understand most involve calling people fat. Obesity is a fact and it should not be normalized. Any obese person put on a desert island and fed water and a limited caloric diet would lose weight, a scientific fact. Any attempt at normalizing obesity is the same as normalizing smoking cigarettes or alcoholism - harmful to all of humanity.
I think this is put rather bluntly, and I've still got a bit to go probably to where I would call myself my ideal weight, so I say this with a certain empathy... but I really agree that obesity falls into a different category than most of what might be called "woke".
What I perceive as a general normalization of obesity feels... very corporate, or certainly too convenient for corporate interests. Americans fail to consider many aspects of their lives regarding their health because they're trained to trust brands, and that doubly/triply extends to ignorance around diet and nutrition.
Food, sex, alcohol. All vices that Americans glorify and demonize in nearly exactly the least effective ways.
IDK, I don't want to preach but my body now, compared to with an extra 80-100lbs on it? It's hard to put into words how many aspects of my life are markedly better.
You'll be surprised by the rhetoric going on in the "Fat Studies" department in academia. Medical prognosis of obesity is just another "narrative" to "oppress" people who are obese. Just imagine if more of such rhetoric goes mainstream.
Perhaps the share of fat consumers who do not want to hear that they are fat has reached the level at which the private sector starts being sycophantic to them.
The real act of cultural vandalism is the copyright regime that keeps these trust fund descendants of the Dahl estate in cash for something they did not do, for however many more decades that all his works will be locked up.
"Updating" these works is gross, but only because it's nothing but a cash-grab for them, selling and re-selling this material to new audiences just by tweaking a few words here and there.
i feel like there's a difference between the author themselves doing the rewriting (which i'm fine with, because you're essentially just publishing a new edition of your book), and someone else who just happens to own the IP doing the rewriting (which i'm a bit uncomfortable with, regardless of what exactly is being changed).
it's like if a painter adds something to an already-completed artwork that they had painted and then describes the result as a refined version of the painting (fine), vs when someone who just happens to have bought the painting adds something and then argues that the resulting painting is now the "official" version of the painting, while still naming the original painter as the creator (not fine).
The Disney Channel has a short warning that appears before some Muppet Show episodes.
I was surprised, but I liked the approach. Disney gets to say that someone might be upset, but we the viewers are empowered to see the content and make our own decision.
Then I give the books away when I'm finished. Want to read a book I had? I often edited and sometimes marked it up. That book is a living thing, used and passed around by people.
Or sometimes I throw them away to save everyone else the bother.
Disney's retellings of classics often no longer resemble the original story much anyway. Then they became dated bad retellings.
Disney gives us content that is often two or three generations of "thoughtful people who would never expose children to that" over and over. That was Walt's idea of "acculturating America."
Is it cultural vandalism? Absolutely, although hilarious, like vandalism certainly can be.
“Your mother sews socks that smell…”
“I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday through Friday plane!”
“This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!”
"Pardon my French, but you're an AARDVARK!"
"Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother."
A modern re-adaptation of a dead author's work I have no issue with; we do that with Shakespeare as others have pointed out. But that's not the same thing as publishing a re-written work under the author's own name, which I do take exception with.
One of the funniest onf these "Beat it to death with the PC stick" re-writes was when the Enid Blyton Famous Five books were dragged into the 21st century with "Famous 5 on the case" [0] featuring the children of the original Famous Five.
This featured such mind-boggling concepts as:
>Jo Misra (short for Jyothi, a Hindi word meaning light.) She is a 12-year-old daughter of George Kirrin, and like her mother before her is a tomboy...
Given that everyone who ever read the Famous five realised in later life that "George[ina]" Kirrin was obviously going to grow up er... "not that interested in men", shall we say?... the fact she had a mixed-race daughter with an Indian bloke, is quite a surprise.
Ironically, the original books have now leap-frogged the excerable rewrite in PC box-ticking, as the original George character can now be viewed as being a very early positvely portrayed "trans" character:
----
“I say! Are you Georgina?”
The child in the opposite bed sat up and looked across at Anne. She had very short curly hair, almost as short as a boy’s. Her face was burnt a dark-brown with the sun, and her very blue eyes looked as bright as forget-me-nots in her face. But her mouth was rather sulky, and she had a frown like her father’s.
“No,” she said. “I’m not Georgina.”
“Oh!” said Anne, in surprise. “Then who are you?”
“I’m George,” said the girl. “I shall only answer if you call me George. I hate being a girl. I won’t be. I don’t like doing the things that girls do. I like doing the things that boys do. I can climb better than any boy, and swim faster too. I can sail a boat as well as any fisher-boy on this coast. You’re to call me George. Then I’ll speak to you. But I shan’t if you don’t.”
Hm. To me, it seems that the article could have been quite a bit more differentiated.
I agree that it's ridiculous to avoid using the word/color "black". On the other hand I don't see a problem with for example using "children" instead of "boys and girls" as a generic term for, well, children.
One thing that the article gets wrong though is why changes like these are made. As I read it, the author seems confident that the (only) reason is to avoid offending children. I'd be surprised if that was ever the reason for anyone to advocate for using other phrasings.
Instead, I'd argue, the idea is to stop reinforcing/introducing shitty (read: harmful to some degree) ideas. "Boys and girls" implies that those are the only two options. Using "fat" as something that only evil characters are and as something that should be laughed at implies that fat people are bad and that it's okay to ridicule them for being fat. And so on.
Now, the question about whether it's good and worth it to make these adjustments is one that imho can and should be discussed and that reasonable minds can differ on. But as is, the article seems to be written with either a lack of good understanding or good faith.
I think very few people can claim to an absolute principle against any kind of editing of books for children, since this has been happening for as long as books and children existed, including in the past century -- does anybody buy a "Grimm's Fairy Tales" book expecting to find "The Jew Among Thorns" included?
There is also not a free speech issue at play here other than that already imposed by the copyright system. The Dahl estate is not being forced to make these changes, and indeed nobody can compel them to authorize publishing an unaltered version of the books (under current law).
But once you've set those grander questions aside, you can evaluate this specific case. Do you agree with the purpose of the edits? Do you think they're appropriate in degree and scope? I would say that I am somewhat sympathetic to the intention of some of the edits. Dahl fielded objections to his work during his lifetime, and pushed back strongly against the suggestion that his books were unsuitable for children for moral reasons [1], but he also changed (or permitted his publisher to change) the Oompa-Loompas from an African tribe to something more fantastical. These kinds of spot changes can be seen as analogous to a parent or teacher reading aloud and skimming past occasional material [2] that they don't find suitable for their audience.
It's the scope and degree of the changes here that I find inappropriate. This is not a scalpel removing a small blemish, it's a complete makeover. It's replacing Dahl's world (and his worldview) with a different one. Many of the changes feel arbitrary (Matilda can't read Conrad and Kipling? But Austen and Steinbeck are fine?) and others mutilate the humor or the meaning of the work. And there's no indication that unedited [3] versions of the work will be kept in print. For those reasons I think this is a terrible decision that should be reconsidered. If schools want reading material more compatible with modern mores there are many authors writing today. Or they can work to help kids get context on where Dahl was coming from. Authors don't need to be presented as moral exemplars.
[1]: https://www.hbook.com/story/charlie-chocolate-factory-reply
[2]: I recall a schoolteacher skimming past a scene in a book where a teenage boy was drawing a picture of his girl friend -- later, reading the book, I realized there was a brief reference to him "flushing at the swelling of her breast" or something along those lines.
[3]: Many books are edited with the author's permission after release, so what "unedited" means is complex (and makes some of the "you lose copyright if you bowdlerize your book" solutions I've seen to this difficult).
This is a difficult subject and my instinct is that there are no right answers, only opinions (so let's be civil and acknowledge that there are multiple valid points of view here).
This is the thing that I agree most with:
> The patrician urge of the sensitivity police to protect ethnic-minority children from certain words is infinitely more insulting to them than Dahl’s tales could ever be.
You'll find me generally on the side of preserving history as-is, and I'm against the loss of the original intent of the author, almost always. Mein Kampf should be available just as it was written, not so that the ideas may be passed on as valid and correct, but so that we remember and acknowledge that powerful people have put about these ideas in the past, and to give us some insight into why they might have done so. And let's not forget the consequences please.
However, I also have friends that I respect, who I think might be OK-with, or generally for this type of censorship (there's that pejorative language, not on purpose I promise). I still like them and I still respect them. I wish we could all just chill out a little. I would still say there are bigger fish to fry than this one right now anyway.
No, I'm not a minority child or even a fat old man, but this is still the opinion that I have.
I don't think it's uncivil though to say that there are in fact right and wrong answers and that some people's points of view are only valid insomuch as any point of view is, but they are still wrong. It's wrong to censor a black tractor, or change boys and girls to children or a supermarket cashier to a top scientist to further a social engineering agenda, just flat out wrong.
> Mein Kampf should be available just as it was written
In France (and probably a lot of other countries), Mein Kampf is freely available with annotations. I think it's a good compromise to distribute the book as it was written, but with inline analysis explaining historical context, fallacies and everything worth noting about the text.
If an old book is problematic or contains problematic language, it should be explained, not banned or censored.
Well, nobody’s rounding them up to be burned, so in bookshelves, libraries and archives. The copyright owners might do well to print more copies of the original, too, as the demand has risen with this stunt. If they’re very shrewd, maybe that was the intent all along?
Project this into the future and all text written past and new will be converted into a bland gray blob catering to any imagined sensitivities, including those still to be invented.
"Updated for a modern audience" as they say, where "modern audience" is 0.01% chronically online unhinged activists.
So be it. Guess which tool is really awesome at spitting out such bland texts? Checkmate, "writers".
Amazing how such avowed free market capitalists have a meltdown against free market capitalism the moment it leads to an outcome they don’t like.
I don’t like this decision by Dahl’s estate, but I wasn’t the one pushing for massively long copyright protections. It was all the people who pretend to be free market capitalists did.
If you want to designate something as “culture” and then yet insist that it must be owned by a single private entity which is the only one that has the right to do anything with it, such things will be the inevitable consequence.
The only cultural vandalism is the one that does not allow anyone but a private entity to reprint this apparent cultural treasures.
And this wasn’t a result of woke-ism. It was a result of free market forces.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] thread- Language translations are extremely culturally dependent, and is a known quantity. Modern translations frequently have many translator's notes explaining the decision or edits made.
- Modern translations are transparent about their editorializing, there's a marked difference between "accurate" and "lay person" translations.
- The source materials were written and translated in times when we, frankly, had lower standards.
Civil discussion is traditionally a value of the western culture you prize so much.
On the contrary, I'm being perfectly civil. Colorful descriptions that profess my disdain for the left's new mind-diarrhea is not even close to incivility. If you don't like my descriptions, then the proper course is to ask yourself why people might take issue with cry-bullies.
Are you at all open to discussion?
I’m projecting my own views a lot here, but I am pretty sure you’re not going to be swaying anyone even remotely left of center (most of whom would never engage in the acts you’re listing - and many of whom _are_ uneasy about many of the changes to Dahl’s works that sparked this discussion) in your direction by projecting such an angry, abrasive demeanor.
I really worry about the state of online discourse. I’d be willing to bet that if we were to sit down and discuss this over a beverage in real life this isn’t how the discussion would go.
How do you explain the horrific violence depicted in many of the Grimm's fairy tales to a kid? And what is the expected benefit of it?
I loved that stuff when I was a kid. "Then they made the evil queen put on red-hot iron boots and dance until she died."
Kids are a lot more resilient than people like to think.
But I honestly don't know how would I tell my kid that the Sleeping Beauty was a minor raped by a stranger who tripled her age. Nor I think it could provide any "life lesson" to a six year old.
The Sleeping Beauty is raped in her sleep, Little Red Hood fills up the wolf with stones after it has been cut in half to rescue her grandmother, and Cinderella has a confusing relationship with incest.
The author of this article doesn't seem aware of, or just leaves out, the previous slaves-from-Africa origin of oompa loompas.
I wonder if he wants to roll that one back too.
People didn't see the censorship in the same way as that "fish don't have a word for water" bit.
On the other hand, it's actually physically nauseating to have The Spectator pass any comment on integrity, cultural vandalism, RightThink etc. They've led the charge promoting fake news and alternative "facts" from Brexit to Covid.
Not much to see here. Time to move on.
It's sad because (despite being mostly on the left) I used to read the Spectator, in a "hear the other side, challenge your own point if view" way. And it was good. Decent pragmatic right leaning people. Then in the run up to Brexit it just sort of fell apart. Out was anyone with facts or reasons. In were pre-canned talking points, appeals to emotion and bare faced lies.
Will people look back on our times with disdain and think how horrible we were for calling each other crazy, mad, fat and ugly? How we made such a big deal about gendering things?
Maybe we are "the old men shouting at clouds" (ahem... I mean "old people shouting at clouds" xd)? Maybe we should get with the times? Or is this really all "cancel-culture" and everybody else except us is wrong?
Unfortunately, I only have questions and no answers hahah
It would be wonderful if everyone was more civil and less vicious.
Anyone here who was bullied in high school, say, and enjoyed it? I sure didn't.
I don't think it will happen, but for words that become increasingly only employed as insults, I understand the desire to push back against those insults.
People like you, who couldn't find a coping mechanism to deal with childhood bullying [all children are vicious wee thugs, until they learn otherwise] think that you can somehow control what people "feel inside" by controlling what words they can use to express themselves. Ditto the people who think you can somehow stop anyone having racist or homopobic attitudes by banning completely innocuous words [see Montenegro comment above] as people might see them as racist or hompophobic.
Kids will always bully other kids, racists will always hate other races and homophobic people will always hate gays. If you ban one word, they'll come up with another. If you ban that, they'll come up with another... rinse and repeat. As I've said before, if you follow that path to its conclusion, you end up with Newspeak [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
The problem is when you change the book, effectively making a new one, but with the same name as the old one - which is not authentic.
That said, I struggle to see how these edits will ever be essential. Phrases like “brothers and sisters” is hopefully never as offensive as racial slurs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism
> Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974,[17] also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"
> Mentally disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly used insults. The medical diagnosis was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into a pejorative against those with mental disabilities. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although the word "special" has begun to crop up as a schoolyard insult.[
Because it's the reality of calling people crazy, mad, fat, or ugly that people find offensive, not the current vocabulary.
Sometimes it's really a wonder to imagine the world some people here seem to want to live in.
Whatever microcosm you may be in, it's on a very extreme end of the western world and it would be useful to realize this.
Banning words is a very US thing, not "western world". In most countries it's normal to use the words we want to talk about, the words themselves are not "cursed" like Voldemort. Honestly the "x-word" thing is really childish.
There's a difference in using the words as a way to illustrate and using them as insults or bad words. Context matters.
People will come up with other justifications (it causes harm, it's wrong, it's not inclusive) for why they're doing the above, but as all morals are ultimately relative (and thus their reasons are relative), it's just a means to an end.
Unless there was an earlier reference, this was from The Simpsons, where Grandpa Simpson was the subject. In this case "old man" would be correct and doesn't need to be de-gendered.
To the more general point, society and culture changes and (hopefully) progresses and improves. While this is uncomfortable for those of us who learned our societal norms a generation or two ago, and need to change our habits, I think it is an inherent feature of a healthy society. Thus it will be an ongoing issue, and is perhaps made even more prominent by today's faster and wider communications channels.
Thus while on a specific issue (Dahl's books in this case), there is no absolute right or wrong, there is moral relativity where everyone's starting point is different. Society as a whole, hopefully made up of reasonable voices, will work out the answer. Which of course, can change again over time.
I think that you are conflating two different things, and somewhat mixing cause and effect. We do not look back at those times with disdain because they used those words. Rather, we look at those words with disdain because of the attitudes with which they were used in the past.
Furthermore, those three words fall into somewhat different categories. While the [acronym of ginger] and the [en_GB cigarette] words were overwhelming used from the outset to target and attack people with no moral justification (under our modern sensibilities), that is not the same as the term retard which was a legitimate medical term to describe an individual with mental retardation. The fact that we now reject the use of that word is precisely because it became a convenient pejorative to insult somebody's mental capacity, hence it being the perfect example of the euphemism treadmill—in fact, retard itself arose as a euphemism for slow.
Will the euphemism treadmill catch up on the other two examples? Will "gay" or "lesbian", or "black" or "African American" become taboo? I bet they won't, for the simple reason that as a society we have (mostly) moved past the idea that there's anything wrong with being sexually attracted to people of one's own gender, or descending from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Regarding people in the future, if they do look at us with disdain for using the words fat, ugly, mad, etc, my bet is that it will only be for the euphemism treadmill effect, as there is something inherently negative about being overweight, unattractive, or mentally unhealthy. I find it hard to believe that any future euphemism for any of these three words could ever become immune to becoming an insult.
> How many of us chortled at fat Augustus Gloop getting stuck in that pipe, or winced at the idea of witches posing as cashiers, or smiled deviantly at the vision of a ‘tremendously flabby’ old lady? And we turned out fine. We weren’t wounded, we didn’t become hateful.
I guess that you can say that "laughing about these specific fictional fat people" doesn't directly cause one to behave in hurtful ways towards fat real people. To me it still seems bizarre that the author decided to basically ask "Remember how we laughed at fat people and how good that was?" right before stating as fact that noone was hurt in consequence of any of the stuff in the book.
Be angry at copyright, not at the decision to attempt to modernize a work of art; without copyright, both versions could be circulated concurrently (and of course this is why you see both traditional & modernized Shakespeare productions, unlike Broadway where every tour is authorized and a replica (some exceptions for school versions and such)). Art is a product of its times, and imo it's completely reasonable to want to update a version to what makes sense in the modern day and what children can now empathize with, and see themselves reflected in.
As for:
> Isn't it worth preserving how things were in the past?
Oh, yes, absolutely, and this is why archivists and librarians have such an important profession; and also why copyright law sucks so much. Do be angry at copyright law, don't be angry at the decision to modernize the texts.
This is a difficult topic. It's complicated.
Given that, I agree with you about publishing houses and copyrighted literature.
Yes---while it's tempting to think of a particularly popular and beloved work of art or literature as part of some shared communal heritage, the reality of our legal system is that such works are private property unless they pass into the public domain.
In real property, there is the idea of legally declaring property as a historical site as a way to limit the private owner's rights when there is a strong community interest in the property. No such concept exists in copyright law.
Regardless of your opinions about the MCU and whether you actually feel this is part of your culture or whether you'd like it to be, I think this point is very salient. We're deprived of a collective mythos because of IP law.
Might be well and good to make open source characters? Licensed as public domains and able to be used by anyone?
Here are 49400 stories people have published set in the MCU [1]. 15600 include Captain America and 21400 include Iron Man. There's even 1300 where Captain America and Iron Man are in a romantic relationship with each other. This excludes stories that are crossovers between MCU and something else.
Here's another 397000 stories in the MCU (although there is probaby some overlap with the ones above) [2]. That list I've filtered down to stories that are in English and complete. 124000 include Captain America and 121000 include Iron Man. 67000 include them both. 24500 of them have those two in a romantic relationship
People seem to be doing fine at building a shared collective MCU mythology, and even taking it in some directions the Marvel would probably not approve of.
[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Avengers/?&srt=1&r=10
[2] https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search%5Bsort_column%...
"While on their face, these fanfiction communities may seem like harmless outlets for fans, existing copyright doctrine actually renders much of these works as infringements of copyright. The problem is that most fanfiction could be characterized as derivative works of other already existing original works, as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101."
Marvel clearly tolerates online fan fiction to an extent, but I imagine if someone tried to publish an illustrated anthology of Marvel fan fiction and sell it on Amazon, or make and release a film based on it, they would probably find the limit of that tolerance.
I'm a bit lost here - my experience with Shakespeare productions is that (whether they're staged in modern times or not) they generally don't change the language. Things like the Reduced Shakespeare Company notwithstanding, of course.
The irony here is that it's a redacted Shakespeare that gives us the root of "bowdlerization".
But this isn't about copyright, they're changing it to appease to the woke authoritarian cult.
Yes, if "the audience" is a tiny population niche (but massively overrepresented in cultural and artistic power) of white, middle-class liberals (because it normally is) being offended on behalf of people they seem to feel need taking care of for whatever condescending and other psychological motivations that drive them.
It's pretty funny that you never see these complaints when European folklore is butchered because it's deemed to be "unsafe for children", entire scenes are cut out of Leon or even Harry Potter is being attacked for promoting "witchcraft".
Sure rewriting Dahl is silly but it is funny to me to pretend this is a modern invention in Anglosphere culture. The puritan moral panic has a long history
Have you missed the 2000's on the internet? All the people mocking "fundamental Christian" outrages against things like Harry Potter, Pokemon (evolution lol) and even the utterance of the word "Magic"? A group that was so wide and loud, that EA organized a false-flag protest against itself on the release of Dante's Inferno--just to get publicity and support via that group?
The reason that you "never" see those complaints is that they have won, and any mention of magic or violence being harmful in fiction is instantly ridiculed. They became invisible by actually being the norm
This is where Dahl bowed to early 70s wokery and erased the oompa-loompas' true identity as African slaves who would dribble for cocoa beans.
Film adaptations have struggled with the fact that oompa-loompas are, however you dress them up, slaves.
From this article which is much more interesting:
https://theconversation.com/from-pygmies-to-puppets-what-to-...
We should fix copyright rather than stoke useless culture wars. The publisher and Dahl’s estate are laughing all the way to the bank on this controversy.
I'm sorry, what now?
My local library here in Western Australia has a second edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1860, 3000 copies).
There's been no pressure that I'm aware of to acquire the first, third, fourth, fifth or sixth editions or the numerous translations that I'm aware of - many of these are carried by other libraries.
Who is going around libraries forcing them to get more recent editions?
I also think that revising a dead author’s work as was done here is tasteless.
Personally I think the problem is excessive copyright. Without ownership, anyone could rewrite Dahl however they like. And if someone prefers the original version, that's fine too.
Arguably a death is more tasteful than a rewrite but either has room for regret.
In fact, most of Walt Disney’s films were books adapted and changed and “modernized” without the consent of the original author. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is disgustingly racist and imperialist. Disney modernized the story significantly by removing many of those themes (although adding a few “modern” racist tropes of their own).
No one calls those adaptations “cultural vandalism” though.
However, these new editions are effectively replacing the old ones. I don't so much mind them rewriting the books so long as the originals continue to be published. However, I don't expect that will be the case. Eventually, anyone going to a bookshop to buy one of Dahl's books will struggle to find the original version. That's a real shame, I think.
Paraphrasing from Dahl's 2010 biography but worth reading in full https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Storyteller/fit6PwGW...
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) objected to the original film version on the grounds that the book was racist ... they were adament that the title of the movie also had to change because they did not want it to promote the book.
Roald agreed to "de-negro" the Oompa-Loompas in both book and movie ... The movies title was altered to "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".
I can see how slaves might be offensive to people and be changed by the author but for example no one was offended by the word "screeching" and if they were I don't think we should let those people choose which words a book uses.
Copyright that persists long after the death of the author makes no sense to society at large. It’s just another form of rent-seeking capitalism.
So you're saying that in this story about giants that eat children, and a smaller giant that brings them joyous dreams via some sort of trumpet, dreams he catches with a butterfly net and then mixes himself, in a story about mobilising the British army to get rid of the aforementioned giants by means of giving the queen a nightmare, in a story about a young girl kidnapped in her pyjamas from an orphanage, there is a cloak? Moreover, a cloak whose original colour is somehow hurtful to some folks, while changing it is apparently cause for grave concern amongst some folks?
To that I say: huh.
(/Mal from Firefly)
What I perceive as a general normalization of obesity feels... very corporate, or certainly too convenient for corporate interests. Americans fail to consider many aspects of their lives regarding their health because they're trained to trust brands, and that doubly/triply extends to ignorance around diet and nutrition.
Food, sex, alcohol. All vices that Americans glorify and demonize in nearly exactly the least effective ways.
IDK, I don't want to preach but my body now, compared to with an extra 80-100lbs on it? It's hard to put into words how many aspects of my life are markedly better.
[0a]https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFo... [0b]https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/foods-typically-purchased-supp... [1]https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/explore-our-work/... [2]https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-closer-look-...
It is, IMHO, very visible in lingerie marketing.
"Updating" these works is gross, but only because it's nothing but a cash-grab for them, selling and re-selling this material to new audiences just by tweaking a few words here and there.
Roald Dahl also changed his own books so they would stay current.
it's like if a painter adds something to an already-completed artwork that they had painted and then describes the result as a refined version of the painting (fine), vs when someone who just happens to have bought the painting adds something and then argues that the resulting painting is now the "official" version of the painting, while still naming the original painter as the creator (not fine).
Yes, and they are now generally mocked by today's critics for doing so.
I was surprised, but I liked the approach. Disney gets to say that someone might be upset, but we the viewers are empowered to see the content and make our own decision.
Tear the page out if you like.
If there was a page with a warning in your book, you can do that. Then you have the book you wanted.
https://youtu.be/8x0COtH4Vrw
As long as the original is there and a publisher add some silly warning page I really don’t care.
Especially readers' club notes. Even Oprah's.
Then I give the books away when I'm finished. Want to read a book I had? I often edited and sometimes marked it up. That book is a living thing, used and passed around by people.
Or sometimes I throw them away to save everyone else the bother.
Disney gives us content that is often two or three generations of "thoughtful people who would never expose children to that" over and over. That was Walt's idea of "acculturating America."
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/septemberoctober/iq/walt...
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/disney-accused-of-whitew...
https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/general/original-disney-s...
To me this is a case of "capital over all things" our censor is not the vandal, but us.
Is it cultural vandalism? Absolutely, although hilarious, like vandalism certainly can be.
“Your mother sews socks that smell…” “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday through Friday plane!” “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!” "Pardon my French, but you're an AARDVARK!" "Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother."
This featured such mind-boggling concepts as:
Given that everyone who ever read the Famous five realised in later life that "George[ina]" Kirrin was obviously going to grow up er... "not that interested in men", shall we say?... the fact she had a mixed-race daughter with an Indian bloke, is quite a surprise.Ironically, the original books have now leap-frogged the excerable rewrite in PC box-ticking, as the original George character can now be viewed as being a very early positvely portrayed "trans" character:
----
----[From "Five on a Treasure Island"]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_5:_On_the_Case
One thing that the article gets wrong though is why changes like these are made. As I read it, the author seems confident that the (only) reason is to avoid offending children. I'd be surprised if that was ever the reason for anyone to advocate for using other phrasings. Instead, I'd argue, the idea is to stop reinforcing/introducing shitty (read: harmful to some degree) ideas. "Boys and girls" implies that those are the only two options. Using "fat" as something that only evil characters are and as something that should be laughed at implies that fat people are bad and that it's okay to ridicule them for being fat. And so on.
Now, the question about whether it's good and worth it to make these adjustments is one that imho can and should be discussed and that reasonable minds can differ on. But as is, the article seems to be written with either a lack of good understanding or good faith.
There is also not a free speech issue at play here other than that already imposed by the copyright system. The Dahl estate is not being forced to make these changes, and indeed nobody can compel them to authorize publishing an unaltered version of the books (under current law).
But once you've set those grander questions aside, you can evaluate this specific case. Do you agree with the purpose of the edits? Do you think they're appropriate in degree and scope? I would say that I am somewhat sympathetic to the intention of some of the edits. Dahl fielded objections to his work during his lifetime, and pushed back strongly against the suggestion that his books were unsuitable for children for moral reasons [1], but he also changed (or permitted his publisher to change) the Oompa-Loompas from an African tribe to something more fantastical. These kinds of spot changes can be seen as analogous to a parent or teacher reading aloud and skimming past occasional material [2] that they don't find suitable for their audience.
It's the scope and degree of the changes here that I find inappropriate. This is not a scalpel removing a small blemish, it's a complete makeover. It's replacing Dahl's world (and his worldview) with a different one. Many of the changes feel arbitrary (Matilda can't read Conrad and Kipling? But Austen and Steinbeck are fine?) and others mutilate the humor or the meaning of the work. And there's no indication that unedited [3] versions of the work will be kept in print. For those reasons I think this is a terrible decision that should be reconsidered. If schools want reading material more compatible with modern mores there are many authors writing today. Or they can work to help kids get context on where Dahl was coming from. Authors don't need to be presented as moral exemplars.
[1]: https://www.hbook.com/story/charlie-chocolate-factory-reply [2]: I recall a schoolteacher skimming past a scene in a book where a teenage boy was drawing a picture of his girl friend -- later, reading the book, I realized there was a brief reference to him "flushing at the swelling of her breast" or something along those lines. [3]: Many books are edited with the author's permission after release, so what "unedited" means is complex (and makes some of the "you lose copyright if you bowdlerize your book" solutions I've seen to this difficult).
This is the thing that I agree most with:
> The patrician urge of the sensitivity police to protect ethnic-minority children from certain words is infinitely more insulting to them than Dahl’s tales could ever be.
You'll find me generally on the side of preserving history as-is, and I'm against the loss of the original intent of the author, almost always. Mein Kampf should be available just as it was written, not so that the ideas may be passed on as valid and correct, but so that we remember and acknowledge that powerful people have put about these ideas in the past, and to give us some insight into why they might have done so. And let's not forget the consequences please.
However, I also have friends that I respect, who I think might be OK-with, or generally for this type of censorship (there's that pejorative language, not on purpose I promise). I still like them and I still respect them. I wish we could all just chill out a little. I would still say there are bigger fish to fry than this one right now anyway.
No, I'm not a minority child or even a fat old man, but this is still the opinion that I have.
In France (and probably a lot of other countries), Mein Kampf is freely available with annotations. I think it's a good compromise to distribute the book as it was written, but with inline analysis explaining historical context, fallacies and everything worth noting about the text.
If an old book is problematic or contains problematic language, it should be explained, not banned or censored.
…yet
"Updated for a modern audience" as they say, where "modern audience" is 0.01% chronically online unhinged activists.
So be it. Guess which tool is really awesome at spitting out such bland texts? Checkmate, "writers".
Idiots with a column discover they can make more money by stoking culture war outrage.
It's like a perpetual profit machine. Thanks for participating.
I don’t like this decision by Dahl’s estate, but I wasn’t the one pushing for massively long copyright protections. It was all the people who pretend to be free market capitalists did.
If you want to designate something as “culture” and then yet insist that it must be owned by a single private entity which is the only one that has the right to do anything with it, such things will be the inevitable consequence.
The only cultural vandalism is the one that does not allow anyone but a private entity to reprint this apparent cultural treasures.
And this wasn’t a result of woke-ism. It was a result of free market forces.