Better to Burn the BooksThe editing of Roald Dahl shows us what comes after civilization.
Micah Meadowcroft
Feb 22, 2023
Roald Dahl believed in physiognomy. This was not some phrenological gobbledygook that said the temper of a man is determined by the curve of his brow ridge. Rather, like most human beings throughout human history, Dahl (who died in 1990) believed our physical realities reflect our spiritual realities, that spiritual realities shape and illuminate the physical world, for they are a unity. And so, as he wrote in The Twits (1980):
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
Read those paragraphs again. It is all more subtle than society today allows.
And much too complex for Puffin Books. As the Telegraph reported last week, the children’s literature giant has assumed the authority to “regularly review the language” of Dahl’s stories “to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” This is a self-congratulatory way of saying they partnered with diversity, equity, and inclusion grifters (an outfit called “Inclusive Minds”) to edit his beloved books for a 2022 reprinting. There are too many examples to choose from.
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I would call the Puffin edits of Dahl barbaric but that would hardly be fair to barbarians. Indeed, it would be better had the evident cretins at Inclusive Minds just told the yellow-bellied cowards at Puffin it was time to burn the books. Dahl has had more than his fair share of controversy; if we must make clear our devotion to the new religion of global homogenization let us have a proper bonfire. Even Socrates, as Plato presents him in The Republic, only advises expelling the poets from his beautiful regime—this while he is in the very act of composing a competing work of poetry, the city-in-speech itself.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/better-to-burn-the-books/
