Woke censors have destroyed the much-loved works of Roald Dahl.
‘Sensitivity readers’ at Puffin have painstakingly gone through his classic books removing the vivid, darkly funny writing that captivated so many of us as children, replacing it with bland, woke platitudes and outright propaganda.
If your response to this is blind rage, then congratulations, you are a healthy functioning human being.
There is something laughable about the fact that, with J.K. Rowling and now Roald Dahl, two of woke’s biggest targets are children’s authors. But then, the wokes clearly know the importance of indoctrinating the young as early as possible into their deranged and pernicious ideology.
Lenin allegedly said: “Give us the child for eight years and he will be a Bolshevik forever.” That could easily have been the motto behind this new vandalising of Roald Dahl’s oeuvre.
If you think that’s hyperbole, read some of these examples and tell me there is not evil afoot.
Some changes simply drain all character from the writing, so that Dahl’s original text:
In her right hand she carried a walking stick. She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on her sole of her left foot and walking was painful.
Becomes:
In her right hand she carried a walking stick. Not because she needed help walking.
Others are absurdly woke. One change recruits Dahl into the cause of increasing the number of women in STEM careers. The original: “Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” becomes “Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business”.
At times, the language is so sanitised as to completely alter the original meaning. “It nearly killed Ashton as well. Half the skin came away from his scalp” becomes “It didn’t do Ashton much good”.
Naturally, all humour is removed, as in this example from Matilda, where the original:
Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt this term, has no hearing-organs at all.
Becomes the anodyne and garbled:
Judging by what your daughter Vanessa has learnt this term, this fact alone is more interesting than anything I have taught in the classroom
Other passages are simply deleted entirely, such as:
She wore heavy make-up and had one of those unfortunate bulging figures where the flesh appears to be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out
Naughty colonial authors are not even allowed to be named, so “Dickens or Kipling” becomes “Dickens or Austen”.
There is nothing too mild to escape the woke censors, as phrases like “Shut up, you nut!” become “Ssshh! Not yet!”, and extreme racial paranoia means that “Turning white” becomes “Turning quite pale”.
There are many, many more pathetic examples cited in the Telegraph if you have the stomach for it.
We are now entering a world where one will have to obtain secret, coverless original copies of The Enormous Crocodile under the counter.
Incredibly, I am not even exaggerating, as several phrases from that book have been changed, with “fat juicy little child” becoming “juicy little child”, and “We eat little boys and girls” becoming “We eat little children” (the existence of biological sex being the offensive part, rather than the eating).
“Mother” becomes “parents” and “Even the man who was working the roundabout jumped off it” becomes “Even the person who was working the roundabout jumped off it”. Because women can work on roundabouts too, bigot.
It is a reminder that nothing is too petty to escape the woke revolution. They will not stop until they have destroyed everything of value, from our great universities to The Enormous Crocodile (which I’m surprised has not been renamed The Body Positive Crocodile).
Every single thing you love must be erased.
The defacing of Roald Dahl is the final straw for me. We must obliterate the moronic, anti-human aberration that is wokeness once and for all.
Or, as a Puffin sensitivity reader might put it: “We should stop wokeness.”
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I was going to say “This is almost beyond belief” but unfortunately it isn’t in these insane times. Has whoever is in charge of Dahl’s estate had any say in this? Or are they ultra-woke too and go along with it?
In any case, selling these books as being “By Roald Dahl” is now simply a lie.
According to the Telegraph article, the rights were sold to Netflix in 2021.
That explains everything.
Can this be challenged, because publishing rights should not encompass the ability to re-write someone else’s creation? This is not unlike the New York Times trying to re-imagine Harry Potter without J. K. Rowling.
It might still be possible to challenge on moral rights grounds yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
It seems like nothing is beyond belief these days.
Have they got around to Richmal Crompton yet? My personality, vile as it is, is based upon her foundation.
Funny – I never saw you as Elizabeth Bott!
OK, there’s a quantity of Molesworth mixed in.
What I read to my kid was greek myths, about Chronos devouring his children. It seemed to make him more affectionate.
Greek miths make kids tuough. as any fule gno. Fotherington-Thomas mum never tell him Chronos story. That why he sae “Hello trees, hello flowers”ect.
Medea comes to mind.
I suppose it’s nothing new, in that our school edition of My Family and Other Animals had dropped the line “that bloody boy’s filled the sodding bath full of bleeding snakes,” and edited out the Good Ship Bootle-Bumtrinket altogether. But there is a difference between a mild editorial hand for kiddies and a complete Bowdler job.
The interesting question is Will there, at some point in time, be firemen tasked with burning old books? Eg, I have a somewhat lengthy German history of battles of the first world war at home whose content is nowadays at least borderline illegal in Germany and Austria (and in Austria, not so borderline). For instance, one of them expresses the wish that the Germans (both those living in Austria and those living in so-called Germany) will hopefully unite in future to become invincible in war. That’s the kind of stuff people can go to jail for in the Austria of today.
While I think it’s important to keep such literature, isn’t there a big difference? The thoughts expressed by the German National Socialists were put into practice, whereas Roald Dahl fought the Nazis and he does not write as an ideologue. We seem to be in a situation where the unprecedented peace that has followed WW2 has made quite a few people unable to work out what is friend or foe, because they have no first hand experience. All previous generations for all of human history experienced plague, war and starvation. The recent generations are, in the majority, the first to have no experience of any of the primary challenges that their ancestors faced.
Why do you immediately come up with Nazis once something is mentioned which was the perfectly normal state of affairs (Austria being a part of Germany, originally a part of the duchy of Bavaria which got separated out for dynastic reasons) since about 936 until – again for dynastic reasons – this ceased to be the case in 1871. This useless split would have ended in 1918/19 if the right of the self-detrmination of peoples had been meant to apply to – well – peoples and not just Serbs and Czechs.
Better start training firemen if you want your lies (Nazi thoughts !!37) to prevail.
They really put the “Reich” back into Osterreich!
Ok, I’m going to be controversial here.
I’m saying:
Good.
I read all of Dahl’s books as a kid and enjoyed them all, I think. Years later as a parent I read them all again as bedtime stories. I found them to be xenophobic, misogynistic, chauvinistic, jingoistic and, worse than all that, mean-spirited, elitist and just not very good. This is one occasion when I’m happy to let the thought police do their work.
Why did you read them all again if you hated them?
Do you think everything you hate should be destroyed? If you do, you’re a barbarian. A civilised person would want to leave the books intact but put warning reviews for other PC foreigners on Amazon.
Because I enjoyed them as a kid, I think I said that. I don’t want them destroyed, I just don’t care that they’re being edited. And I stand by what I said, I think Dahl was not a particularly nice person and doesn’t deserve to be the national treasure we’re supposed to think he was. Just because the woke cultural revolution is abhorrent and stupid, it doesn’t make the aforementioned isms right for children’s books.
That’s a pretty complicated way of stating that they were written in the middle of the last century before all these really abhorrent isms of today were invented. For even more horrors for the modernistic mind, try Grimm’s fairy tales. They’re even burning evil witches in there. And – now the absolutely incomprehensible – the woke spiritus rectores read all of this stuff in their childhoods. Clearly, without the completely -istic(!) Roald Dahl, they’d never have turned into the man-hating monsters they are!
If you think that’s not what your children should be reading, then, don’t buy them these books. But that doesn’t mean you’re authorized to destroy them so that other people also cannot read them anymore.
You failed to mention the glaringly obvious fact that the woke/trans extremists hate women too ( think that traitorous Sturgeon creature ) and want to erase our sex, rights, identity and role in society. Just the fact certain imbeciles cannot even define what a woman is should be a fairly big clue about what they think of us. The two defined sexes are to be obliterated and replaced with non-binary, gender-fluid other-worldly beings apparently. And I thought men wearing make-up in the early 80s were pushing the envelope!
…I am of course referring to the music industry back then. Many singers/artists had bigger hair and more slap then women but they definitely were not all “batting for the other side” or trans, in my opinion.
Back then, male rockstars were doing it to prove they were soooooo masculine that they could get away with it without having their masculinity questioned. Or something.
I don’t want to destroy or ban them (or any other work). I don’t care when they were written – misogyny and xenophobia are unpleasant things to read to children. He very clearly didn’t think much of foreigners or women. So I’m not sorry that his works are now being edited by morons, I don’t see them as treasures I see them as derivative children’s books with nasty undertones.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – just because we live in the age of woke, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge discrimination. Those isms were not invented by millennials 5 years ago.
The future is what happens from now on. Because of this, it can be influenced in some way someone believes to be beneficial. The past cannot. And cries that it must be censored because people saw things differently back then than other people see certain things today are always wrong.
By editing them like that, they are being destroyed.
Blasphemy!
Actually I think if you read pretty much anything from previous centuries by our big name authors you could say the same thing. Even things written by well-known female authors, and this is because it’s a reflection of the era and the social norms and attitudes therein. For instance, to find something written by Dickens, C.S Lewis or even Shakespeare offensive nowadays is just plain daft and ironically is offensive as well. Our literary greats should be left the chuff alone, otherwise it’s a slippery slope and all authors from years gone by are fair game.
Ha ha! I know, I can tell from all the down thumbs! I don’t want to ban or censor any book and parents should read to their children whatever they think is right. I’m just saying that when re-reading Dahl’s books to my kids, I found them unpleasant. They felt misanthropic, classist, and yes – misogynistic. This was before the woke thing happened. There are plenty of his contemporaries whose works are not guilty of such things; I don’t think he liked people.
Incidentally, David Walliams, his wannabe supposed successor, is in a good position to take the mantle, because he’s also misanthropic and classist
The romance (politely put) between Lydia Bennet and George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice can pretty much be regarded as blueprint for liberating modern relationships — woman wants sex-life and therefore, joins up with man who wants one as well. The characterisation of both as morally inferior beings who end up sort-of salvated by a proper marriage ought to count as misogynistic for the standards of today.
Buy up original Roald Dahl books. But keep examples these new versions and perhaps put names against this vandalism.
“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
I’m so glad that we’ve got all of Dahl’s best books upstairs, unadulterated and much loved. I’m waiting for the wokester nutjobs to start on our beloved fairy tales and literary icons like Hardy and the Brontes. I’m sure Enid Blyton would get a ‘good’ doing over too!
This insanity should be against the law, surely?!
The only art, literature, sculpture, music and architecture that would be acceptable to the woke would be both moronic and ugly.
Probably that “modern art” crap that looks like a blind-folded chimp was let loose with a tin of paint. I like art that actually demonstrates skill, and charging thousands for a splodge and a squiggle isn’t it. A prerequisite for exhibiting at an art gallery should be to answer “no” to the question: Does it look like a toddler created it?
As Andy Warhol famously said, “art is what you can get away with”, lol.
I don’t think characters from the comics I read as a child would be spared from all this nonsense. How would Billy Bunter (The Fat Owl), Desperate Dan (a huge cow pie eater) or Keyhole Kate ( a nosey parker) be altered – or allowed?
I’m quite happy being a Boomer.
Well they’d have a field day with The Viz!
The Fat Slags were a personal favourite of mine…
Is Viz still any good? Mr Logic?, Black Bob’s binliner, and everything? Must renew my subscription.
Haha yeah, those two and Sid the Sexist, Big Vern and the letters page.
Used to get the annual – every year funnily enough – but haven’t for a while now. Not that I’ve grown up at all…
“Lenin allegedly said: “Give us the child for eight years and he will be a Bolshevik forever.” That could easily have been the motto behind this new vandalising of Roald Dahl’s oeuvre.”
St. Ignatius of Loyola would agree, as he said something quite similar as well.
That’s the real meaning of, “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
Did Lenin copy Aristotle’s phrase of “give me the child until he is 7 and I will will give you the man”?
Woke = sleepwalking into tyranny
Maybe soon Dahl himself will be edited out and another person named as author?
The Woke censors think they are infallible, can never be wrong and have the ‘Truth’.
Like zealots they want to destroy and censor other ideologies and want only their ideology to be worshipped.
Finding it funny that under an article about censorship 8 comments have been censored! LOL Still shows ”35 comments”… curious..
So in the warped world of woke a woman is only worthy is she is a top scientist or running a business.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
These people have no souls, except when it, he, she, them begins with “R”
Woke is the culmination of a trend long in the making. I have a satirical book from several decades ago called “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories”, which is a collection of fairy tales rewritten in exaggerated PC lingo of the time. Interestingly, titles it featured such as “Snow White and the Seven Vertically Challenged Men”, would themselves not even get today’s woke stamp of approval and would have to be re-titled “Snow Caucasian and the Seven Vertically Challenged Sperm-Givers”!
In any case, the book was intended, and understood, as a satirical JOKE (Remember those?), forewarning of the kind of sanitizing of language that we see trending today in our linguistic milieu, edited as it were by the woke missionaries.
Nobody actually has to do this – there is no legislation providing that publishers must edit all meaning and humour out of their material. Leave literary material as the authors intended and you’ll probably make much better sales too! “Go woke, go broke” applies to Puffin as well.
Puffin? The Twits…
What happened to copyright laws? Imagine if I were to change a few notes and passages in a Beethoven Sonata. it would no longer be a Beethoven piece would it? Why is it any different here?
I dare these Stasi idiots to redact Mein Kampf! LOL