‘The Ministry of Inclusion has decreed that these books must be excluded’

Mar 25, 2023 by Jill

by Matthew J Franck, MercatorNet:

Inclusion is the virtue of our time and all literature making the path to inclusion a bumpy one must be bulldozed.

In the last month, three news stories out of Britain have seized the attention of book lovers. First, with the approval of the Roald Dahl Story Company, holder of the rights to the late author’s works, the publisher Puffin Books (a Penguin Random House imprint) announced that Dahl’s celebrated children’s books would henceforth be published in revised editions reflecting the changes recommended by “sensitivity readers.”

The result would be to eliminate references “to fatness, craziness, ugliness, whiteness (even of bedsheets), blackness (even of tractors) and the great Rudyard Kipling,” among other changes, as Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Christopher Scalia added in the Washington Examiner that “this compulsion not to offend is especially strange regarding Dahl, whose work is distinctively unsettling. His publishers were once proud of that.”

Subsequent reports informed us that purchasers of ebook copies of Dahl’s children’s stories would see these changes made in the copies they had previously bought but that were stored on vendors’ servers—yet another reason to own paper copies of books. Puffin later announced that “classic” editions of Dahl’s books—with unchanged texts—would continue to be available for future purchase. But the bowdlerized editions have not been withdrawn, as they should be.

The second story, which did not get much attention in the United States, was that a similar “sensitivity revision” has been performed on the James Bond books of the late Ian Fleming. The sexism of Agent 007, and his retrograde racial views, were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, with the approval of Ian Fleming Publications. Henceforth James Bond, of all people, will try hard not to disturb the prejudices of a typical humanities professor of 2023. It’s a wonder he’s still licensed to kill.

The third story, which I did not see any US media outlet notice, was that the Research Information and Communications Unit, part of Prevent, itself an arm of the UK’s Home Office charged with enforcing the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, had identified certain books, films, and television shows that were on favored “reading lists” of right-wing terror groups the unit was keeping tabs on.

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