Hiding History
Back in the '90s, a company called Cleanflicks started editing movies to make them 'Mormon family friendly.' It did so without the permission of the movies' directors, producers, and other owners, and got sued out of business. Hollywood had, however, recognized the market potential of "clean" movies decades prior, with TV edits of PG and R movies before cable and streaming emerged (some of them ludicrous - the Blues Brothers TV edit substituted "bamboozle" for "bullshit", and the Blazing Saddles TV edit was so chopped up they had to add footage to keep it long enough), and with sanitized versions for airlines.
Such alternates did not bury the originals, however. Nothing was lost, no creator's content was scrubbed from history, and the original versions existed in parallel with the sanitized.
Today's censors and cultural scolds aren't down with that. Behold, the revising of works by Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. The revisionists don't merely seek to create "clean" versions of those books for people who want to read them but don't want to be subjected to what is today considered offensive or bigoted or stereotyping or whatever. Their desire is that the new versions supplant the old ones, effectively scrubbing the bad bits from history. That Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth was to alter old newspaper stories to fit the party's changing narrative is an unheeded lesson today.
One of the great ironies at hand is that these censors are either the same people or hand-in-hand with those who are screaming bloody murder about parents wanting to curate their grade schoolers' libraries to exclude sexual content. The hyperbole aside, I'm far less skeptical of parents who seek to manage what their young 'uns are exposed to than teachers who insist that they, not parents, should be the arbiters. Parents have skin in the game, teachers don't. Parents have the ultimate responsibility for raising their children, the Leninists among us notwithstanding.
Teachers get to go home without those kids every day, get to move on to the next batch every year, and can quit, change jobs, or change careers with little or no baggage, whereas parents are stuck with the outcome of what kids are taught until those kids become adults. Yes, many teachers take their jobs seriously, and feel responsibility for their students, but their “risk” is far, far less than that which parents face.
A parallel: this is why I recoil from the "stakeholder" notion of corporate responsibility. Without the assumption of risk, without that skin in the game, those who aren't shareholders have none of the pressure to demand or encourage things in the company's best interest. Stakeholders have the power of repercussion-free destruction, and they can tear a company they don't like down without any personal loss. So it goes for teachers inculcating divisive, racist, or mentally damaging ideas into young people. They aren't the ones to pick up the pieces when a kid is ruined.
But I digress. What is the goal of those who seek to change old books? What is the cultural benefit of erasing from history the way some people used to talk and think... or, worse, to scrub reality from them? This isn't simply excision of the N word and the like. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl's Augustus Gloop was described as "enormously fat," but since "fat-shaming" is now a Bad Thing, he is now just vaguely "enormous."
Behold, the ambiguity of “enormous:”
Robert Wadlow, Shaq, and Walter Hudson all qualified as "enormous," but ponder how much information is lost in removing "fat" from the book? Is Gloop’s self-destructive gluttony as evident? Might someone simply think him a giant rather than a beachball of a boy? Is it so important to elevate “fat-acceptance” over the the irrefutable health risks of obesity that this horrid little boy warrants a whitewash?
In "Matilda," the description "great horsey face" was changed to "face." Was the ghost of Secretariat offended, perhaps, or is there so much fear of offending the long-faced that the excision was deemed appropriate?
The Oompa-Loompas description as "small men" is being changed to "small people." Did some suddenly become women? Are the censors seeking to introduce transgenderism into the Oompa-Loompa klatch?
Witches described as being bald beneath their wigs may, it seems, give a false impression as to baldness, so "There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that" was added to the text.
These censors don’t dub such changes censorship (only the other team censors), but that’s either self-delusion or outright lying. It’s worse than actually banning the books, because it seeks to alter reality.
Pushback and outrage prompted the publisher to promise to continue printing the original texts, but I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that, not too far in the future, the printing of those originals will quietly cease. I'd also not be surprised in the least if the big sources for books (hello, Amazon) either deprioritize the originals or don't carry them at all. Amazon already curates what they sell, and you'd not be wrong in guessing that curation has a cultural bias. Being a private company, that's their right. As I've noted in the past, our cultural scolds have figured out how to get around the First Amendment by working through and with dominant private sector companies that aren't subject to 1A strictures.
Josef Stalin notoriously rewrote history, as this "disappearing" of Nikolai Yezhov, a former right-hand-man who fell out of favor illustrates.
Most of us recoil from this sort of stuff, but some, unfortunately, appear inspired by it. The ghastly and deceitful 1619 project, which seeks to supplant America's actual history with a fabricated narrative, is among the more notorious examples.
Notoriety prompts pushback, but it is the stealthier, under-the-radar revisionism that represents the true danger. Nibble by nibble, the historical record is being altered, and like the frog in the pot, many won’t realize it until it's too late. If a couple generations complete their educations with altered historical record, past realities may indeed disappear from the collective consciousness.
Why would someone do this? There are the obvious "race hustlers" and other cynically self-serving manipulators, but such a movement goes nowhere without a cadre of true believers. Such people, either so mortally offended by century-old euphemisms that they can't abide their continued existence - or, as likely, so white-knight high-dudgeoned that they have to scrub on others' unrequested behalf, aren't the sorts to give up. They'll continue to press, and treat every pushback as proof that they're right. As Glen Greenwald opined in an interview with Russell Brand,
They genuinely believe that anybody angry with them or dissatisfied with them must by definition be somebody whose thinking is misguided, who has poor character, and who therefore needs to be controlled, therefore needs to be constrained and limited in what it is they can do.
These folks fall into the "useful idiot" category, no matter that they're at the fore of this censorship march. The people smiling all the way to the bank are the cynics who see opportunity in this. I paraphrase George Santayana:
Those who hide history hope to repeat it.
There can be no compromise with people who don't believe in liberty. Cede not a single inch to censors.
Truer words….
“ Teachers get to go home without those kids every day, get to move on to the next batch every year, and can quit, change jobs, or change careers with little or no baggage, whereas parents are stuck with the outcome of what kids are taught until those kids become adults. Yes, many teachers take their jobs seriously, and feel responsibility for their students, but their “risk” is far, far less than that which parents face.
A parallel: this is why I recoil from the "stakeholder" notion of corporate responsibility. Without the assumption of risk, without that skin in the game, those who aren't shareholders have none of the pressure to demand or encourage things in the company's best interest. Stakeholders have the power of repercussion-free destruction, and they can tear a company they don't like down without any personal loss. So it goes for teachers inculcating divisive, racist, or mentally damaging ideas into young people. They aren't the ones to pick up the pieces when a kid is ruined.”