The Memory Holing Of Literature Is Happening

     In the George Orwell novel “1984”, the protagonist’s job is to identify doubleplusungood news and proclamations and have them rewritten to a more contemporary understanding of the truth while the old versions go away down the “memory hole”.

     Rewriting past publications and hiding the fact that they are re-writes, effectively “memory holing”, is going on now, and at the behest of the woke mob and “sensitivity readers”.   The stealth “correction” of Roald Dahl’s works caused quite a stir.

“Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa-Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.

“The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.

“The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today’, Puffin said.

“References to physical appearance have been heavily edited. The word ‘fat’ has been removed from every book – Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may still look like a ball of dough, but can now only be described as ‘enormous’.

“In the same story, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer ‘tiny’, ‘titchy’ or ‘no higher than my knee’ but merely small. And where once they were ‘small men’, they are now ‘small people’.

“Passages not written by Dahl have also been added. In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: ‘There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.’”

     Puffin was caught red handed and promised to undo this. They aren’t sorry for what they did… just that they got caught.

     And this is hardly an isolated incident: James Bond will be going politically correct, at least as far as they can get away with it:

“James Bond novels have been rewritten to remove a number of racial references from Ian Fleming’s work, The Telegraph can reveal.

“All of the author’s thrillers featuring 007 are set to be reissued in April to mark 70 years since Casino Royale, the first book in the series, was published.

“Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the literary rights to the author’s work, commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.

“The Telegraph understands that a disclaimer accompanying the reissued texts will read: ‘This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.

“‘A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.’

“The changes to Fleming’s books result in some depictions of black people being reworked or removed.

“Dated references to other ethnicities remain, such as Bond’s racial terms for east Asian people and the spy’s disparaging views of Oddjob, Goldfinger’s Korean henchman.

“References to the ‘sweet tang of rape’, ‘blithering women’ failing to do a ‘man’s work’, and homosexuality being a ‘stubborn disability’ also remain.

“In the sensitivity reader-approved version of Live and Let Die, Bond’s assessment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are ‘pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much’ becomes – ‘pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.’”

     You can bet that this is happening to other works of literature, and non-literature as well.   With electronic libraries you “borrow” that can be stealth deleted or changed secretly without notice, the only way to defend against this will be old physical copies.

Pictured: A Refuge from Wokeness.

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