Do you get upset by words like “fat,” “ugly,” or “crazy”? Well, take comfort that your cultural betters are already scrubbing them from popular works of literature. As the Telegraph reported, new editions of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl contain a notice explaining that “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.”
It turns out the good censors at publisher Puffin, along with the Roald Dahl estate and an outfit called Inclusive Minds, have replaced or deleted hundreds of words from at least 10 books, including Matilda and James and the Giant Peach. Specific changes include the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory becoming “small people” rather than “small men” and a farmer in Fantastic Mr. Fox going from “Bunce, the little potbellied dwarf” to just “Bunce.”
Where to begin? As is the case with many bad ideas, the Dahl censors are justifying their actions by invoking a need to protect children. But whatever marginal benefits this may achieve in attaining “inclusivity,” they are grossly outweighed by this outrageous act of cultural and literary vandalism.
The censorship is an affront to the artistic integrity of Dahl and all authors who should suffer the indignity of having their work desecrated by a cabal of publishing bureaucrats. And even if you’re indifferent to the fate of Dahl—who was a nasty man in some respects—there is the bigger problem of how far all this will go. It’s hard to imagine the Inclusive Minds vandals will be happy to stop at Dahl. No doubt they already have ideas on how to improve other books, song lyrics, and paintings.
If you are somehow untroubled by all this so long as it’s progressive, then take a moment to think of how this idea to “review the language” of children’s books might play out in the hands of conservative activists eager to purge any mention of gay or trans themes from school libraries. There’s a reason the head of the literary free speech group PEN America just described Dahl-style selective edits as a “dangerous new weapon.”
So what to do about this? I came across an intriguing potential response while scrolling through Crypto Twitter, which is one of many forums sounding the alarm about the Dahl censorship. Namely, lawyer Preston Byrne proposed that authors should append a cryptographic hash to the cover of their books. Such a hash would not prevent censorship, but it would provide a means for readers to verify that subsequent editions of a book did not tamper with the author’s original text—a useful tool given that the impulse of censors is to pretend their version of a document is the correct and only one.
As an author myself, I hope it doesn’t come to this. I would much prefer that Puffin come to its senses and recant its decision to “review the language” of popular literature. But if this dangerous notion starts to spread, I would urge writers everywhere to protect the future integrity of their work with a hash stored on a blockchain.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
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