Fandango has chosen a very provocative question this week. At least it is for me because I feel strongly about it. If you haven’t already it might be a good idea to nip over to read Fandango’s introduction where he describes a project to rewrite several Roald Dahl books to make them less offensive.

https://fivedotoh.com/2023/03/08/fandangos-provocative-question-204/

I haven’t read the books myself. I have heard of them of course. I disagree strongly with the idea of editing the books in this way. Surely by changing the language you would take the edge out of the stories and isn’t that what made them popular with children?

I really dislike it when this sort of thing happens. It does feel like censorship to me. I don’t think it is right to change someone’s words without their permission. Of course, I understand that a lot of books and films that were created a long time ago may be shocking to some people, but I don’t think that it is either right or necessary to sanitise everything. It reminds me of “1984” by George Orwell, where, Winston Smith, the protagonist, worked for the Ministry of Truth, where he revised history and changed news articles to match the government’s version of the truth.

We should not pretend that things that we don’t like didn’t happen and that’s what this kind of editing does. People should be free to read what they want to read in its original form. If something offends you, then just don’t read it.

I do have a conscience and I think about things that happened in the past that I know to be wrong. I have been told that I am “woke” which is a term I don’t really like. However, that doesn’t mean that I want to see books and movies from those times changed beyond recognition. I can still enjoy them as stories despite the content. Going back to Roald Dahl for a moment here are some of the changes that are being made to his stories.

Gone are references to people being “fat,” “ugly,” “bald,” and “crazy.” Scary tractors are no longer “black.” Boys and girls are referred to as the more gender-neutral “children.”

Seriously, these are not terrible words. I didn’t even know that it was offensive to call someone bald. What are you allowed to call a person with no hair these days? Some people actually choose to be bald. As for the black tractors, isn’t that just the colour they are? How is there anything racist about that? I honestly don’t get it.

This has been a hard post for me to write. I know how I feel but I struggled to put it in to words. Perhaps it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. All I know is that to me this feels like political correctness gone mad.