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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.

Prediction: The classic versions will quietly disappear from print and sale at some point in the next year with no fanfare nor announcement. If they were ever offered at all; I'll need to see these Classic Editions in an actual store to believe it.

This is not a win for those against newspeak, this is delaying the publisher's plans for a little while, at best. A win would have been the total scrappage of the censored versions.

I agree with your prediction. There are many ways to not make something available while making it "available," and I see little reason to believe that the same people who wanted these Bowdlerized editions to be created to begin with wouldn't go with one of those ways. If they made some sort of public announcement and/or contractual commitment to print at least as many copies of the original versions as the Bowdlerized ones and to enforce some sort of mechanism by which the former are always accompanied wherever the latter are available, that might be one thing, but they didn't. Barring further developments, I fully expect the state of the books in 2025 to be virtually identical to what would have happened if there had been no pushback at all.

This is not a win for those against newspeak, this is delaying the publisher's plans for a little while, at best. A win would have been the total scrappage of the censored versions.

Also agreed. I'm not even sure this counts as even a step towards a win. The fact that Bowdlerizing any old work of fiction like this was seriously considered shows a deep rot in the system, and anything short of firing every decision maker who signed off on this to serve as an example to what happens when you make a mockery of the industry and annihilate Penguin's reputation wouldn't be a win, IMHO. Coming short of that, just scrapping the Bowdlerized versions would have been something close to a win, but even that didn't happen.

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