Last update Feb 26, 2023
The following is a newly added section to the Culture War Encyclopedia. It will be expanded (please comment suggestions). Every term in bold will sooner or later link to an other entry in the Culture War Encyclopedia. Credit due to Styxhexenhammer666, who is quoted below, for calling to my attention the Stalinizaton of Roald Dahl.
C O N T E N T S
Memory Hole, A Definition
Memory Holing in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm
The Black Memory Hole of the A.I. Cultural Revolution
Modern Examples of Memory Holing
Baby It’s Cold Outside
Dr. Who
Captain Marvel
Bat Woman
The Little Mermaid
Mary Jane from Spiderman
Mrs. Butterworth
Aunt Jemima
Uncle Ben
Roald Dahl’s Classic Children’s Books
Vampire Lestat
Tolkien
Scooby Doo
Memory Hole, a Definition
(NOUN, VERB)
The term memory hole is derived from the prophetic dystopian story 1984 by George Orwell as we’ll see. In the culture war, to memory hole (verb) someone or something is to send them down the memory hole (noun) because they are politically incorrect or otherwise problematic. Sometimes memory holing involves replacing problematic facts with alternative facts. In some cases it is a matter of feelings over facts if those facts are triggering1. These problematic things/people are rectified, that is, they are changed, replaced or simply vaporized altogether and the memory hole is used to wipe away the memory. When people are memory holed, one might say they are unpersoned (verb), that is, rendered an unperson (noun).
Note, however, that the actual person’s physical form is not changed in real life when their appearance is changed in photos and film. If all records of their existence are sent down the memory hole they do not cease to exist or to have ever existed. But as far as '“history”, public record, libraries, museums, archives and so on are concerned, the person has been memory holed and the memory that they were memory holed is memory holed and so on.
Thus, it is as if they never existed. If reality is a collective hallucination as the antagonists in George Orwell’s 1984 and as critical theorists, cultural marxists, postmodernists and others insist, then they never existed indeed. They assert that if people agree that 2 + 2 = 5 then 2 + 2 = 5. But this does not change the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. If I were to hold up 2 fingers and hold up an additional 2 fingers, I would be holding up 4 fingers no matter what anyone thinks or says. In 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith is tortured into agreeing that his torturer is holding up 5 fingers when in fact he is holding up 4. But this is not enough. He is tortured until he hallucinates that there are 5 upright fingers where there are actually 4.
Those who disagree that reality is independent of what the collective believes it is are invited to go for a hike to a cliff and, when no one is there to witness it, to jump off. If they survive, they can, in their anguish, console themselves that their pain does not exist since it is not part of the collective. If that doesn’t make the pain go away, they can re-evaluate their views of reality.
One is reminded of the story of the Zen student who meditates on his nose until it seems to disappear. When he runs to his master and says that he has discovered that his nose is just an illusion, the master punches him in the nose. As the student cries in pain, the master asks him, “If your nose is not there, what hurts?”.
A male with testicles may insist that they are a woman and that to say that he is a male with testicles is to engage in the hate crime of biological essentialism. But if he accidentally gets hit in the nuts, as he doubles over in pain, one might ask him, “If you don’t have testicles, what hurts?”.
All traces of something or someone may be memory holed but their reality remains indominable, free.
Memory Holing in Orwell’s 1984 & Animal Farm
In George Orwell’s novel 1984 (written in 1948, published in 1949), a memory hole is where things such as books, works of art, newspaper articles, documents, photographs and other records on archive are sent to be destroyed in fire along with the paper trail that would show that they were destroyed.
With this fiction, Orwell was warning readers about these practices being carried out in fact. In his 1984, as in the USSR, Communist China and so on, media such as books, films, records, documents, photos and people were altered or eliminated and records of their existence were erased.
In Orwell’s earlier story, Animal Farm, published in 1945, the animals of a farm carry out a revolution and form a new government with publicly written rules painted broadside on a barn wall for all to see. After some time, some power hungry pigs had these rules altered in secret, under the cover of darkness. For example, “No animal shall drink alcohol” is secretly altered to, “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess”.
“No animal shall kill any other animal” is changed to, “No animal shall kill any other animal without just cause” and “All animals are equal” is changed to, “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”.
Because they are animals they are not sure if the rule had been different. Soon enough, any memories of any changes cease to exist. This was Orwell’s way of expressing how stupidly cattle-minded people are and how easily they forget the wrong-doings of authority unless they are reminded of it by people whom they try to memory hole for doing so (see Julian Assange, Alex Jones, Edward Snowden).
As Orwell tries to tell us in 1984, people’s minds are filled with trivial distractions like sports, sex and alcohol, leaving no room to question authority or to remember the blatant impeachable violations committed by the government. We all know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself and we all know why he was murdered and what sort of sick practices are thereby allowed to continue. Who was brought to justice for this? Who even mentions it on TV? Who marches into the halls of power to demand justice? Who even remembers it happened? In forgetting this, we are allowing children to go on being raped.
Who remembers what Trump actually said about the white supremacists at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville? Who ever knew anything other than what he seems to have said in the edited clips that were aired on TV relentlessly? The same applies to endless other things Trump said (see ivermectin, UV light).
Who remembers what happened at Wounded Knee? The Trail of Tears? Who ever knew about the incident at Oglala? The pre-meditated murders the government committed at Ruby Ridge? The White Water scandal? The Black Water scandal? What about Obama using drones to kill innocent people? Who even knows who Chris Dorner was, let alone what was done to him?
Who remembers COINTELPRO? Union Carbide? The Iran-Contra scandal? Who knows what really happened in the JFK assassination in the Jonestown Massacre, in the Waco massacre? Ben Ghazi? Was Pearl Harbor a false flag? What about 911?
Here are some excerpts from 1984, Section One, IV wherein the memory hole comes into play. The main character, Winston Smith, works in a cubicle at records department of at the Ministry of Truth which was, of course, a branch of government that existed to deceive and manipulate the public.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
…Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened…
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy…
Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain…
…in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away…Ampleforth…was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printingshops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary... Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means...
…Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC…
FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given…
…there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen…
…people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead…
…some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
On the website, Rare Historical Photos, in How Stalin’s propaganda machine erased people from photographs, 1922-1953, it is written,
Stalin didn’t have Photoshop, but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Using tools that now seem impossibly primitive, Soviet proto-Photoshoppers made “once-famous personalities vanish” and crafted photographs representing Stalin “as the only true friend, comrade, and successor to Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and founder of the USSR.”
One day a politician may have been in favor, the next he could be facing the firing squad as an enemy of the people. In the Soviet Union, people were literally written out of the history books by using photo manipulation techniques.
After he came to power in 1929, Stalin declared war on the Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him.
Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” Some 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.
During the purges, many of Stalin’s enemies simply vanished from their homes. Others were executed in public after show trials. And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too.
This quasi-artisanal work, one of the more enjoyable tasks for the art department of publishing houses during those times, demanded serious dexterity with the scalpel, glue, paint, and airbrush. In this manner, Stalin could order written out of history such comrades he ultimately deemed disloyal (and who usually wound up executed as).
Sometimes, photo doctoring meant going back to the past to change the historical record, as when Stalin ordered Leon Trotsky, who helped create Communism, eliminated from all photos.
After Trotsky was exiled by Stalin for mounting a failed opposition to his leadership, the revolutionary was snipped, airbrushed, and covered up in countless photographs.
Sometimes, Stalin inserted himself in photos at key moments in history or had photo technicians make him look taller or more handsome. Here in this article, we have compiled a photo collection with such examples.
The Black Memory Hole of the A.I. Cultural Revolution
Styxhexenhammer666 says in The Stalinization of Roald Dahl,
It’s only a matter of time before 1984, in the ultimate twist of irony, has it’s own go with this. Someone will stalinize it and release and edition of it in the future.
There’s a reason why Orwell warned us of these things. Referring to the memory holing and unpersoning carried out in the Stalinization of the U.S.S.R., Styxhexenhammer666 adds,
You think they can’t do it now? Control over speech is more absent now than before but it’s also more technologically possible because people have compacted so much of that speech into a handful of websites.
As I write this, the worlds largest internet archive has been shot through with memory holes2. It is inevitable that those in power will seek to wipe away mass amounts of the past out of ideological bigotry. Webpages come and go. Archives are supposed to be forever. The cultural revolution ruins everything it touches The alteration of archives is as final as the infernal memory hole in 1984.
It will soon go beyond this. In 1984, there is the potential of individuals retaining printed books, photographs and other material that were memory holed. With the advent of A.I. designed by small-minded and biased authoritarians3, we can expect them to carry out a digital Inquisition to hunt down and memory hole people and things on a scale that will rival the cultural revolution in red China.
This is why we need paperback physical copies of books, this is why we need to store things digitally, remotely from any interference by others using removable storage, otherwise it can be stalinized just as easy, remotely, by a tech firm, by a government group that’s connected with the tech firm, potentially, etc., etc., etc.
Modern Examples of Memory Holing
The term is also applied to classical or traditional things, timeless classics, holiday films and songs that are removed/replaced to appease political correctness. We’ll look at some. Please leave a comment to call to our attention to cases we have thus far failed to include.
Baby It’s Cold Outside
The song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is a much beloved Christmas classic and it went away from some Christmas song rotations recent years or deconstructed to be more politically correct. See “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in the Culture War Encyclopedia for the full story.
Dr. Who
For example, just when it would be most obvious that they were doing it out of a sense of feminist protest against the patriarchy, they made Dr. Who a woman but also said that the doctor could take on the form of a woman at any time so why should we assume it was a feminist protest against the patriarchy?
Captain Marvel
A similar thing happened with Captain Marvel as with Dr. Who. He was a man but just in time to try to cash in on wokeness (seemingly unaware of ‘go woke, go broke’), they changed the character to a woman. As with Dr. Who, they said that the character could be male or female. As with Dr. Who, this is an insincere excuse. Sure, Dr. Who and Captain Marvel could be a man or a woman, but the timing is suspect since they were always men in the public’s mind.
The Washington Post reported that in 1977 (which was during second wave feminism) a character in the Captain Marvel comic book series named Carol Danvers (see below)
became Ms. Marvel. The Washington Post writes,
The hero was meant to be explicitly feminist. Her name — Ms. instead of Miss — was a tribute to Gloria Steinem and “Ms.” magazine.
Gerry Conway, Ms. Marvel’s creator and first writer, also said they wanted to reach out to female readers with the superheroine. “There were definite attempts to create this kind of feminist role model,” Conway said in an interview with Polygon.
Later, Carol Danvers, the female character within the male Captain Marvel story line who later was promoted to Ms. Marvel, replaced the male Captain Marvel to become the female Captain Marvel in the much hated film and so on. Also, the related character Mar-Vell has been changed from male to female.
Batwoman
The Washington Post reported on March 7, 2019
The modern Batwoman is a lesbian, one of the highest-profile gay superheroes currently around…
Her planned TV series will be the first live-action superhero show with an LGBTQ lead.
Little Mermaid
Hans Christian Anderson’s described his Little Mermaid (1836) as having skin
as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea
Aderson also wrote,
Her skin was delicately fair…
Also,
Then her sisters came up on the waves, and gazed at her mournfully, wringing their white hands. She beckoned to them, and smiled, and wanted to tell them how happy and well off she was; but the cabin-boy approached, and when her sisters dived down he thought it was only the foam of the sea which he saw.
She also had
long flowing hair round her head
and her eyes were deep blue. Disney, of course gave the Little Mermaid, Ariel, red hair. The retained the blue eyes. So we can’t say that they changed her appearance since we don’t know what her original hair color was.
I know from lucky daily experience that green eyes go better with red hair, for, you see, my lovely wife Tabby has eyes that burn green like priceless emeralds in clear water gleaming in the sunshine.
Then they redid Ariel. In 2022, The Guardian reports,
The Little Mermaid will star black actor and singer Halle Bailey as Ariel…
This week it emerged that the film’s trailer had received a million and a half dislikes from outraged film fans spluttering with rage that the character is no longer a sexy aquatic caucasian redhead. One Twitter user was recently suspended for celebrating an AI artist having “fixed” Bailey’s image to that of a white woman. “It’s over for wokecels”, he wrote triumphantly, just before the hammer came down.
The article contains the image of the Ariel included below. I saw that and thought, “That’s not Halle Bailey.” But apparently they used AI CGI to make her look so different that I have to wonder why. She can act, yes, and that’s important, and apparently she can sing for the role, but there’s no reason to alter her face so. I think she’s far more beautiful than what they turned her into. I understand they wanted to make her young, but why an eitrely different face?
Anyway, of course, it’s racist to want them to not memory hole the Little Mermaid. Also, it’s racist to try to pull that which was to be ractified out of the fire of the memory hole to save it from being memory holed. The New York Post reported in ‘Racist’ AI scientist blasted for ‘fixing’ black Ariel in ‘The Little Mermaid’ (September 15, 2022),
Twitter decided two users could not be part of their world after an artificial intelligence scientist “whitewashed” actress Halle Bailey in “The Little Mermaid” trailer.
In addition to suspending their respective accounts, the AI guy has been blased by other users on the site for digitally replacing Bailey — who is black — with a fake white actress.
The viral tweet circulated days after the new Disney film’s trailer reportedly received over 1.5 million dislikes on YouTube from “racist” viewers who are upset that the previously white-skinned, red-headed Ariel is now a black woman.
Twitter user @TenGazillioinIQ took that to the next level and “fixed” the clip by using AI to make the live-action fish woman white.
“Credits to our member Artificial Intelligence scientist @TenGazillioinIQ,” the tweet — made by another user, @vandalibm, read, according to screenshots taken by DailyMail before the account was suspended.
Another user saw the tweet early, too, and screenshotted it to promote the artist’s controversial work.
“He fixed The Little Mermaid and turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl,” the promoter said in their own tweet. “He says he can fix the whole move comes out with 4x A6000 in 24 hours. It’s over for wokecels.”
They include an image and a short video in a tweet that somehow survived the Inquisition. See below.
The Post reports,
“I’m not racist, I just ‘fixed’ a kid’s movie by changing the main character’s race. Totally not racist,” one person mocked the users.
I have to wonder if they were really that hypocritical or if they were mocking wokeness. By the way,
Walt Disney Studios posted the trailer to its YouTube channel on Friday and it quickly racked up millions of views, but the company was forced to disable the dislike button after receiving 1.5 million thumbs-downs in just two days.
See…
Racists Are Worried About the Historical Accuracy of Mermaids by Rolling Stone (September 14, 2022)
‘Racist’ AI scientist blasted for ‘fixing’ black Ariel in ‘The Little Mermaid’ by the New York Post (September 15, 2022)
We are all losers in the ‘woke v racist’ Little Mermaid culture war by the Guardian (September 15, 2022)
Analysis: A definitive rebuttal to every racist ‘Little Mermaid’ argument by CNN (September 17, 2022)
Mary Jane from Spiderman
Another iconic redheaded white girl has been memory holed; Mary Jane Watson, Spiderman’s love interest. I would not say the actress, Zendaya, is black, nor, as Mary Jane, did they give her red hair. She simply doesn’t pass for the iconic character.
It may be that black Spiderman in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was an attempt to replace the white Spiderman with a black one. Such changes would not matter as much were it not so intentionally iconoclastic.
Mrs. Butterworth
Also in 2020, CNN published Uncle Ben’s and Mrs. Butterworth’s follow Aunt Jemima phasing out racial stereotypes in logos.
Aunt Jemima
Aunt Jemima is an other example.
Uncle Ben
In 2020, NPR published, Uncle Ben's Changing Name To Ben's Original After Criticism Of Racial Stereotyping.
Roald Dahl’s Classic Children’s Books
The much beloved children’s books of the late Roald Dahl who wrote deliberately irreverent stories and who was hostile to editorial softening of his characteristic edginess has been stalinized, cut to pieces, shot through with memory holes.
Again, as Styxhexenhammer666 rightly states in The Stalinization of Roald Dahl, this is a part of a valid slippery slope.
The Telegraph reported in Across his beloved children’s books, hundreds of the author’s words have been changed or entirely removed in a bid for ‘relevancy’ (February 17, 2023),
“Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”
Put simply: these may not be the words Dahl wrote. The publishers have given themselves licence to edit the writer as they see fit, chopping, altering and adding where necessary to bring his books in line with contemporary sensibilities. By comparing the latest editions with earlier versions of the texts, The Telegraph has found hundreds of changes to Dahl’s stories.
Language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race has been cut and rewritten. Remember the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach? They are now the Cloud-People. The Small Foxes in Fantastic Mr Fox are now female. In Matilda, a mention of Rudyard Kipling has been cut and Jane Austen added. It’s Roald Dahl, but different.
Dahl, who died in 1990, is one of the most successful children’s authors of all time.
…
More than 250 million copies of his books, which include novels such as The Witches, The Twits and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as his memoirs Boy and Going Solo, have been sold worldwide. His stories are characterised by dark humour and unexpected twists.
…
In recent years Dahl has been criticised for anti-Semitism, misogyny and racism.
The modern editor of Dahl faces a dilemma: how to retain Dahl’s compelling spikiness, which has enthralled generations of readers, while bringing it in line with the hair-trigger sensitivities of children’s publishing.
Puffin’s overhaul is the result. While there have been tweaks before, there has never been an alteration on this scale. Take The Witches, for example, Dahl’s memorably unpleasant 1983 novel about a young boy growing up in a world ruled by a coven of secretive witches.
…
Unsurprisingly given The Witches’ subject matter, many of the edits are to do with depictions of women. “Chambermaid” becomes “cleaner”. “Great flock of ladies” becomes “great group of ladies”. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind!” “The old hag” becomes “the old crow”.
“A witch is always a woman”, went the 2001 version of the book. “I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women. There is no such thing as a male witch.” That became, simply, “A witch is always a woman. There is no such thing as a male witch.”
These edits mute the original sense. Elsewhere, changes give a new meaning, like the below:
The Witches doing their bit for women in STEM.
Other alterations are about weight. “Fat little brown mouse” becomes “little brown mouse”. “‘Here’s your little boy,’ she said. ‘He needs to go on a diet’”, becomes “Here’s your little boy.”
In the earlier version, the narrator exclaims: “‘But what about the rest of the world?’ I cried. ‘What about ‘America and France and Holland and Germany? And what about Norway?’”. Now the sentence about America and France and Holland and Germany has been cut. The ‘rest of the world’ is evidently bigger now than it was.
This is only a sample of 59 changes found in The Witches, and it’s only one of Dahl’s books. Across the new editions, there are hundreds of edits, some bigger than others.
In Matilda, a passage where the heroine is learning about the escapist power of literature has changed:
Elsewhere, Miss Trunchbull’s “great horsey face” becomes simply her “face”. “Eight nutty little idiots” become “eight nutty little boys”.
Rather than “turning white,” a character turns “quite pale”, and in another example:
In James and the Giant Peach, the Cloud-Men have become Cloud-People, Miss Sponge is no longer “the fat one”, Miss Spider’s head is no longer “black” and the Earthworm no longer has “lovely pink” skin but “lovely smooth skin”. In The Twits, a “weird African language” is no longer weird, while Mrs Twit is no longer ugly and beastly but simply beastly. In the new version of George’s Marvellous Medicine, George’s exclamation changes to:
In Fantastic Mr Fox a description of tractors, saying that “the machines were both black”, has been cut. In the new Dahl world, it seems, neither machines nor animals can be described with a colour. Nor can anything be fat. “Bunce, the little pot-bellied dwarf”, is now plain old Bunce. The Small Foxes, previously sons, are now daughters, while Badger’s son has become a “little one”.
Even the harmless Esio Trot has not escaped. Tortoises no longer come “mostly from North Africa” but from “many different countries”. Perhaps more egregiously, given the story’s punning title: “Tortoises are very backward creatures. Therefore they can only understand words that are written backwards” has become simply: “They can only understand words that are written backwards”.
And so on. Hundreds of changes to some of the best-loved children’s books ever written. Even Quentin Blake’s illustrations do not make it through the sensitivity reading unscathed. Earlier editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory include three sketches of Mike Teavee with 18 toy pistols “hanging from belts around his body”, but the guns have been scrubbed out by 2022, as well as a related sentence.
…
The rewriting of Dahl is part of a general trend for “sensitivity readings”, where books are screened before publication for material that might be upsetting. The practice began in children’s books, where it remains most pronounced. Anthony Horowitz, the bestselling author, recently talked about falling foul of the censor over a Native American character attacking someone with a scalpel.
“I made the changes, but I will confess they hurt,” Horowitz wrote in The Spectator. “It just feels wrong to be told what to write by an outside party, no matter how well-meaning.” Addressing the Hay Festival last year, Horowitz commented “children’s book publishers are more scared [of cancel culture] than anybody”.
Dahl has long been controversial. This is not the first time his books have changed to reflect contemporary mores, or around Hollywood interest. In the first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), the Oompa-Loompas were black pygmies, enslaved by Willy Wonka from “the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle” and paid in cocoa beans. Dahl rewrote the characters in the late 1960s to “de-Negro” them, in his words. For Mel Stuart’s 1971 film starring Gene Wilder, the Oompas became green-haired, orange-skinned figures. By a 1973 edition of the book, they had become “little fantasy creatures”.
But in recent years Dahl has become an increasingly divisive figure – not only accused of racism and misogyny, but anti-Semitism too. The latter was so apparent in his writing and private life that in 2020, the Dahl family issued an apology.
“The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements. Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.”
The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works. These are the first new editions since the deal, but the review began before the sale.
“The current review began in 2020, before Dahl was acquired by Netflix,” said a spokesperson for the Roald Dahl Story Company. “It was led by Puffin and Roald Dahl Story Company together.” (When approached for comment, Netflix directed The Telegraph back to Puffin.)
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the latest changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”. Organisations such as Inclusive Minds have sprung up to help publishers navigate these newly choppy waters.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, says they “aim to ensure authentic representation, by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity”. To do this, they call on a team of “Inclusion Ambassadors” with a variety of “lived experience”. She says they mostly work with authors writing now, but are sometimes asked to work on older texts.
“Occasionally, publishers approach us to consult Inclusion Ambassadors when looking to reprint older titles
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those with lived experience can provide valuable input when it comes to reviewing language to help ensure that the stories can continue to be enjoyed by all children, so on occasions we work with publishers on classic texts.”
Some teachers argue it’s the children’s tastes that are changing. Scott Evans has been a primary school teacher for eight years and works at a school in South Wales, near Cardiff, where Dahl grew up. He runs a website, The Reader Teacher, and has worked as a sensitivity reader. “I understand the arguments some say about censorship and diminishing the author’s voice,” he says. “However, after recently re-reading some children’s books by Dahl, some language stood out as offensive while other terms have become outdated over time. Here, sensitivity readers can make suggested adaptations to make them more accessible to children.
“When you ask children and adults why they are drawn to Dahl’s books, it’s often the sense of rebellion within them that they mention,” he adds. “While maintaining this spirit in children’s books is essential and suppressing it entirely is not the answer either, it’s about making sure that the characters and content are mischievous, and not malicious, in their nature.”
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“Some of the descriptions [in the books] are a bit problematic with some of the characters,” she acknowledges. Nevertheless, “people have said that about characters in the Harry Potter novels”, and there is a way of contextualising Dahl’s work.
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“The process of editing often focused on individual words or particular expressions, as Dahl kept faith with some of the interwar slang of his childhood, and aspects of his vocabulary up to his death continued to recall the enthusiasms of English prep schoolboys. This was both natural to him and deliberate, and he resisted interference.
“His relationships with his editors included marked fractiousness on Dahl’s part,” he adds. “Overruling proposed word changes made by the American editor of The Witches, Stephen Roxburgh, Dahl wrote, ‘I don’t approve of some of your Americanisms. This is an English book with an English flavour and so it should remain.’”
When it came to children’s books, Dennison says Dahl didn’t care what adults thought as long as his target readers were happy. “‘I don’t give a b----r what grown-ups think,’ was a characteristic statement,” Dennison says. “And I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children, and this always inspired derision, if not contempt, in Dahl.
“He never, for example, had any truck with librarians who criticised his books as too frightening, lacking moral role models, negative in their portrayal of women, etc,” he continues. “Dahl wrote stories intended to kindle in children a lifelong love of reading and to remind them of the childhood wonderlands of magic and enchantment, aims in which he succeeded triumphantly. Adult anxieties about political niceties didn’t register in this outlook. This said, although Dahl could be unabashed in offending adults, he took pains never to alienate or make unhappy his child readers.”
Dahl is only a prominent example of a growing trend in children’s publishing for content that nobody can find offensive. The latest editing sets Roald Dahl the brand, the property for which Netflix paid handsomely and which generates millions of pounds in revenue for Penguin Random House, Puffin’s parent company, against the words Roald Dahl put on the page. A cynic might say it is a way of protecting the golden goose. Words matter, especially on the bottom line.
When does harmless tweaking become over-meddling? How long before The Twits becomes The Twits of Theseus, unrecognisable from its original form? Which other children’s authors are in line for the big green pencil? The way publishing is going, the rewriting of Roald Dahl may only be the beginning.
They give many examples of the alterations were made in 2022. We will look at a few. From his stories in general, references to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, boys, girls, women and men have been neutered. Many, but not all, reference to guns or even toy guns have been removed from his books. Terms like “old”, “hag”, “geezer”, “thin”, “fat”, “fatty”, “flabby”, double chin”, “ugly”, “midget”, “dwarf”, “slave”, “prisoner”, “pimply”, “maniac”, “mad”, “nut”, “nutty”, “crazy”, “screwy”, “batty”, “dotty”, “wacky”, “sane”, “idiots”, “frumptious freaks” have been removed and “queer” has changed to “strange”, no doubt because the term “queer” later became a term for “homosexual”. Also, references to people’s height, sex, weight, sanity, skin color and so on have been replaced or removed from these books.
From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, “it’s not ladylike” has been altered to, “it’s undignified”, “Orders” has been replaced with “instructions” and many other terms or passages have been removed and replaced. References to people wearing animal skins has been removed as well along with many other terms and entire passages.
In James and the Giant Peach, the many changes include mentions of white skin, pink skin, going pale and blushing being removed. Also, “Policemen” has been changed to “police”, “firemen” has been changed to “firefighters” and so on.
From Matilda, mentions of Rudyard Kipling have been removed. One imagines this has to do with his writings been seen as racist by today’s standards. Characters who turned white or red in the face now turn pale and become “hot under the collar” while characters with pale skin are no longer pale. Many other changes have been made.
In The Twits, the many alterations include the biological essentialist and binary phrase “ladies and gentlemen” being changed to the more inclusive term “folks” and the word “weird” being removed from “weird African language”. “Frumpet” has been changed to “frump” and perhaps Brits can explain to we yanks why that is, since we are unfamiliar with both of these.
From his story, The Witches, “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens” was changed to, “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that”.
“Bald-headed” were removed as were, “I was crazy”, “strong-men”, “He needs to go on a diet”, “There was something indecent about a bald woman”, “I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely”, “Rather pretty young lady”, “He needs to go on a diet” and much more.
In BFG, among many other changes, references to characters being “brown”, “black”, “reddish-brown” and so on have removed or replaced. “Esquimo” has been changed to “inuit”.
In Esio Trot, an “attractive middle-aged lady” is now a, “kind middle-aged lady”
In Fantastic Mr. Fox, “hopping about like a dervish” has been altered to, “hopping about like a frog”.
More examples were tweeted by @incunabula…
Vampire Lestat
More coming here.
Tolkien
See They Are Rebooting Lord Of The Rings For A Modern Audience! by TheQuartering (February 24, 2023)
More coming here.
Scooby Doo
More coming here.
Also see
How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge by History.com (April 20, 2018, updated April 8, 2020)
How Stalin’s propaganda machine erased people from photographs, 1922-1953 by Rare Historical Photos (no original date, updated December 7, 2021)
Also see book burning, cancel culture, financial unpersoning, gate keeping, Orwell, Orwellian, Orwellianism, vaporize
I will explore this some more at a later date. Please share and make sure you’re subscribed.
Thanks,
Justin Trouble
Laughter my Shield ∴ Knowledge my Steed
Wit I may Wield ∴ but Question my Rede
Liberty my Right ∴ Truth my Sword
Love my Life ∴ Honor my Reward
F O O T N O T E S
See the sections on A.I. and ChatGPT and see Leftist AI (ChatGPT) Admits that Gender = Sex by Justin Trouble (upcoming)
See
Internet Archive adds fact checks to explain web page takedowns by Endgadget (November 1, 2020)
How to Remove Your Website From The Internet Archive (2020) by Medium (no date, archived, January 19, 2022)
Guide: How to Delete Your Site from the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine / Archive.org) by Joshua Lowcock (2022)
See footnote 1.