First Roald Dahl, Now Ian Fleming...

The woke totalitarians come for Bond, James Bond.

The UK Telegraph recently reported that the books of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl were being “updated” in a new edition by Puffin Books to soften Dahl’s politically incorrect language for an easily triggered modern audience warped by the intellectual and moral idiocy of wokeness. Puffin subsequently decided to cool the outrage that erupted over this by releasing both woke and original editions. I wrote about that controversy recently here, concluding that

the hundreds of changes to Dahl’s books are not “harmless tweaking,” nor are they the work of, as Anthony Horowitz generously but naively put it, “well-meaning” people who are just trying to encourage “inclusivity.” They constitute politically-driven desecration and indoctrination, and it won’t end with Roald Dahl and other children’s authors. If publishers have no qualms about policing and rewriting children’s literature, why would they draw the line at literature for adults?

And indeed, they haven’t. Now, barely more than a week later, comes another Telegraph report, “James Bond books edited to remove racist references,” which notes that the woke totalitarians are coming for the novels of 007 creator Ian Fleming, who died too young in 1964:

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.”

Those “updates” include some depictions of black people being revised or removed entirely. In the sensitivity reader-approved version of Live and Let Die, for example, 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” has been changed to “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”

“Another altered scene,” the report continues,

features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated.

The original passage read: “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.”

The revised section replaces the pigs reference with: “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”

Besides this revision completely stripping the passage of any literary character and imagination, have we really reached the point where we must be more sensitive about offending pigs?

Instances in which Fleming used the “n-word” have reportedly been replaced in most cases by “black person” or “black man.” But the Telegraph notes that “racial descriptors are entirely dropped in some instances”:

In one example, some criminals escaping from Bond in Dr No become simply “gangsters”. In the same novel, the race of a doctor and an immigration officer now go unmentioned, as does that of a henchman shot by Bond.

The ethnicity of a barman in Thunderball is similarly omitted in new editions. In Quantum of Solace, a butler’s race now also goes unmentioned.

Detail is also removed from Goldfinger, where the race of the drivers in the Second World War logistics unit, the Red Ball Express – which had many black servicemen – is not mentioned, instead referring only to “ex-drivers.”

Presumably these changes were considered necessary because it is intolerable to modern sensibilities for minorities to be depicted as criminals or tending bar, just as the female cashiers and secretaries in Dahl’s books were promoted to top scientists and CEOs in the woke edition.

(Interestingly, “[d]ated 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.” Could this be because Asians are not generally considered by the woke to be a protected class of oppressed victims like blacks? Pure speculation on my part, but food for thought.)

Ian Fleming Publications apparently felt that such changes were acceptable because Fleming himself authorized some tweaks in his work in his lifetime to accommodate certain markets. The company explained, “Following Ian’s approach, we looked at the instances of several racial terms across the books and removed a number of individual words or else swapped them for terms that are more accepted today but in keeping with the period in which the books were written.”

But Fleming is not alive today to authorize this wholesale rewriting at the command of so-called “sensitivity readers,” gender- and race-obsessed activists who have become the gatekeepers for politically acceptable works of literature, past and present. These people aren’t simply modernizing archaic language, like Chaucer’s Middle English, for today’s readers. They are altering the substance of the original works to reflect a Progressive worldview.

The works of art created by writers from eras different from our own must be protected from sanitization by the hysterically intolerant generation that created “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” the generation that cannot or will not define the word “woman,” the generation that believes reason itself is merely a “white” concept and that there are “other ways of knowing” that are just as valid.

On a related note, the Times of London is now reporting that readers are discovering that their digital versions of Roald Dahl’s books have been automatically and surreptitiously altered by the publisher to reflect the controversial new woke revisions.

“It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us and has made me weary of ebooks,” complained one reader. “I assumed that because the changes to the work were so big that I would be given the option of whether to download it.”

This is the reason I have been urging people for years to buy physical copies of the books they want to own and read (especially the classics, which are the works most likely to be targeted by totalitarians bent on eradicating the West’s cultural legacy): because the ebooks you think you own, you are merely renting. The publisher and/or seller (usually the woke giant Amazon) has the right to revise or even delete ebooks they deem unacceptable from your library at will and without notice. Stock up on hard copies of books that matter.

And don’t believe that the world depicted in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which “firemen” are tasked not with putting out fires but with hunting down forbidden collections of books and setting them ablaze, couldn’t happen here. If the whole manufactured COVID pandemic taught us anything, it’s that totalitarianism is only one public-health mandate away, and that a disheartening number of our neighbors are happy to embrace it.