Swithin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2023, 9:09 amHere's a brief excerpt from the long article.TikiSoo wrote: ↑February 20th, 2023, 8:20 amI agree, unbelievable.
Doesn't art give us a window to what life was like before our times? You CAN'T eradicate the past, why does anyone think it can be changed?
For some reason I survived the idea of young Peter Rabbit being attacked by a giant human with a iron tool. Distasteful? Yes. Scary? Yes, but you survive. Stories, especially children's stories are supposed to open your mind & teach lessons.
Some stories illustrate inhumanity and exploitation. Watching old movies I sometimes marvel at how far we've come (child labor/slavery) and other times wonder why we haven't evolved farther by this time.
The vandals have come for Roald Dahl. His books for children are to be cleansed of their ‘offensive’ content. Sensitivity readers – what we used to call censors – have been employed to pore over his works and expurgate any word or passage that might hurt a kid’s feelings. If you weren’t worried about cancel culture before, surely this egregious assault on some of the best-known children’s books of the modern era, this posthumous purging of an author’s output, will change your mind.
What right do blue-pencil-wielding sensitivity readers have to drive the juggernaut of correct thought through Dahl’s imaginary landscape?
They can doll it up in the language of ‘sensitivity’ and ‘inclusion’ as much as they like, but to the rest of us it still smacks of a Stalinist correction of wrongspeak.
The problem with this argument is that the changes to Dahl's works are driven by the profit motive.
It is not "sensitivity readers" who clamored for the re-writes, but those who hold the rights to Dahl's works ---the Roald Dahl Story Company (headed by Dahl's grandson Luke Kelly) ---- who want to clean up Dahl's stories to make them marketable to today's audience.
Vandalism it is not.
No alterations are being made that aren't sanctioned by owners of the properties.
Stalinism it is not.
It is, in fact, pure capitalism.