Publishers are now engaged in the greatest assault on the shared intellectual history of the West since Hitler’s book burning bonfires. American publishers, and more broadly publishers throughout the West, have begun to desecrate our literature in the name of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”.
The collected works of Ian Fleming, particularly his James Bond-007 novels, are being rewritten so as not to offend today’s sensibilities. Indeed, our latter day Ministries of Truth are offering us a James Bond who is abstemious where seduction, smoking, drinking, and mid-20th Century perspectives are concerned.
God-forbid that any young person might admire Bond’s courage, resourcefulness, and joie de vivre. He is, in their newspeak, a problematically toxic white supremacist. Puritanical publishers to the rescue! A neutered milquetoast metrosexual will now re-educate Doctor No, out-virtue signal Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in order to cancel SPECTRE.
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are also being rewritten for the modern age of political correctness. “Charlie & the Chocolate Factory”, “Matilda”, and “James and the Giant Peach” will be purged of all tainted content that express creative originality in a fashion authentic to the culture in which the author wrote. Only approved thoughts will be retained.
This is one of the most evil things being done in our times. It is right up there with the genocide of the Uighurs by the Chinese Communist Party. It is the attempted murder of our shared culture through the lobotomization of our cultural memories.
What a brittle fanaticism today’s “woke” mandarins must have, to fear the echoes of past times and divergent values?! How fragile their confidence must be in the “Brave New World” they are building for us that they must “Memory Hole” authentic voices from the past.
Their destruction of our society’s history is not merely being attempted by the excision of “problematic” artifacts. What is being done is far worse. These self-appointed saviors are taking our art, literature, myths, and memories away from our successors and are returning them broken.
It would be far better for the world to lose and forget a seminal work of culture than to have it re-edited every few years in order to comply with the ideological dictates of the Party in power. Better for no one to be able to find a James Bond novel than to possess a fraudulent story of the neutered eunuch that today’s Torquemadas have wrought in his place.
Under woke oppression, circumstantial authenticity becomes ideological conformity. We are robbed of the stories of who “we” are. We are also stripped of any understanding of just how far our society has come from where we once were. The critical story of social progress in the West becomes meaningless when we cannot show a “before” picture to contrast with today’s “after”.
Stalin would be proud!
