The past, as they say, is another country, and as far as today’s Left is concerned, that will never do: it might give the lumpenproletariat the idea that there is some other way to think, some other way to live. As Rick Moran noted Saturday, if you buy a new edition of one of the works of the beloved children’s book author Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, you’re not going to get what Dahl actually wrote. Instead, you’re going to get a woke facsimile of Dahl, drastically written to bring thousands of little details into line with modern-day woke sensibilities. The implications of this are much larger than Dahl alone: the rewriting of Dahl is part of the Left’s larger effort not just to dominate contemporary society, but to close off all avenues of escape, and even the possibility that someone might think a non-woke thought.
The 1619 Project, the removal of statues of American heroes including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant, and the drastic recastings of Jefferson’s home Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier are other manifestations of the same effort. Left untouched, history and literature offer innumerable possibilities for enlightening introductions into worlds that are radically different from our own. The woke reader may be shocked to discover attitudes that he or she or xe would consider racist, sexist, homophobic, or Islamophobic enunciated as axiomatically true without a second thought by people who otherwise appear reasonable or even wise and humane.
This woke reader could even be shocked into reexamining his (yes, that’s a collective singular for people of both — as there are only two — sexes; you’ll be fine) own premises. That’s why the Left has undertaken the massive job of rewriting the past so that one who ventures into the study of history will find only racists, sexists, homophobes, and all the other bogeys of today’s Left, and now, as the Dahl rewriting indicates, even the rewriting of literature so that nothing in any great poem or work of fiction could possibly jar the reader loose from the Left’s hold on his mind.
Thus the notice that the woke publisher Puffin included in the new editions of Dahl was ironic to the point of mockery of the readers: “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvelous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” Yet what Puffin has done is designed to ensure that Dahl does not transport you to a different world but keeps you right here in this one, never questioning the Left’s mind-forged manacles.
And so, according to the Telegraph, “language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race has been cut and rewritten. Remember the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach? They are now the Cloud-People. The Small Foxes in Fantastic Mr Fox are now female. In Matilda, a mention of Rudyard Kipling has been cut and Jane Austen added. It’s Roald Dahl, but different.” Yeah. It’s Roald Dahl as if he were a twenty-first-century Leftist, as those who did this think that everyone should be.
As he did with so very many things about the rapid advance of totalitarianism in our age, George Orwell saw this coming in 1984. The government functionary Syme, doomed because he understands far too much about what the regime’s plans are, explains it all to the doubter and budding freethinker Winston Smith: “The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.”
Related: Beloved Children’s Books Hacked to Pieces By Woke Publisher
The destroyers of the literature of the past are not up to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron yet. They started with Roald Dahl, perhaps because no one will be too concerned about the works of an author of children’s books. But make no mistake: the bowdlerizers are by no means finished. Ironically, that word, bowdlerizers, comes from one Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who published an edition of Shakespeare with the bawdy parts removed, so as to preserve, Bowdler said, the sensibilities of women and children. Leftists have mocked Bowdler ever since he started his work, but now they have become him, eviscerating works of far greater minds to suit their own sensibilities.
The moral of the story: read your old books. Breathe in their world. And save them. Don’t count on being able to get reliable new editions. It may even become necessary to hide these books, as this savagery washes over us.
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