Dictatorship of Virtue and Erasing Past by Changing Words

Do we have the right, in light of our contemporary sensibilities, to change history books and literary works and essays? Is it appropriate, for example, to replace the racist adjectives that Al-Mutabnabbi had attributed to Abu al-Misk Kafur with different ones, or to remove Shakespeare’s character, Shylock? Is it tenable, in the name of reason and rationality, to remove the witches from “Macbeth”?
The dictators of virtue, who are right, or believe that they are, and want to impose their view of what is right on reality and history on that basis, justify these sorts of things.
Roald Dahl was a British children’s book author who died in 1990. His views on public matters were repugnant, especially his acute anti-Semitism and some of his vulgar depictions of women and people of color. However, his books have sold over 300 million copies, they have been translated into 68 languages, and they continue to be read by children across the globe on a broad scale.
Nevertheless, the British publisher Puffin Books, which is owned by Penguin Random House, has changed some of the terms in his books to make them more “politically correct” and more aligned with our sensibilities, disinfecting these works of prejudices against particular communities and groups. Anything tied to weight and corpulence, mental health, gender, and race, has been altered. For example, in his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was published in 1964, the phrase “enormously fat” was changed to become “enormous.” In another book, Witches, the phrase “working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” was changed to “working as a top scientist or running a business.” The word “black” was removed from his description of machines, which he had called “black, murderous, brutal-looking monsters.” “I became white as a sheet” was made “still as a statue.” However, as a result of the uproar that followed these “corrections” of Dahl’s books, it became evident that books by Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and others had been cut in similar ways, and that some US and British publishers have begun hiring editors known as “sensitivity readers.” According to their job description, they are readers who “come from specific backgrounds, or those with particular life experiences reading manuscripts to help eliminate problematic and harmful representations.”
It is not only politicians who denounced these actions; some prominent intellectuals have also loudly objected. Salman Rushdie is among those to have contributed to the debate. The British-Indian Booker Prize-winning author tweeted: “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” and he added that those who had imposed this censorship “should be ashamed.” As is now well known, few have paid heavier costs for their right to express themselves than Rushdie. Indeed, after having led a secretive life since Khomeini’s notorious 1989 fatwa, he is still recovering from the injuries he had sustained after last year’s attack in New York, which also left him with only one eye.
Pen America, which counts 7,500 writers among its ranks, called the recent developments alarming. As though he were crying out in protest, the American director Steven Spielberg commented: “It is our history. It is our cultural heritage”...
The fact is that this behavior constitutes nothing less than an assault on history and a falsification of cultural heritage. If this process is allowed to run its course obstructed, if there is no resistance to this censorship, the outcome would be a glaring assault on creativity. The creative output would be rendered tedious and unimaginative, and every work would espouse the same discourse as all the others; the past, as a whole, would be distorted in a way that kills the credibility of narratives that try to explain it. It would also spell the end of our dependence on hard documents to discover and study the past. This is no different from the process that dictatorial and totalitarian regimes undertake to “rewrite history,” nor to cropping pictures as Stalin had done when he removed Trotsky and other Bolsheviks from pictures in which they could be seen standing next to Lenin. Who knows what swamp of lies we could end up in, given the possibilities opened up by today’s artificial intelligence technologies?
Those who support this censorship have said that they aim to “protect” children from cultural, ethnic, and gender stereotypes in literature and other cultural works. However, protecting through fabrication and forced ignorance turns society as a whole into children instead of protecting children. Here, we should keep in mind that “protection” can be afforded by teachers and parents, to say nothing about life experiences themselves and the lessons they teach us. Footnotes or appendices that clear things up could be added to the texts from which the children should be “protected,” or they could be supplanted with notes like those that have been added to the latest German edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. These are all controversial matters; these questions could be debated and their answers modified. However, censorship, erasure, and changing the terms used in the original text to “protect” children should not be matters of debate. Since Plato’s Republic at the latest, “children” have been the primary targets of dictators of virtue, who seek to conduct experiments on them, taking advantage of their weakness to start history over, time and again, from scratch. This is because the experiences and meanings that have been accumulated throughout history are nothing, to these people, but contamination that can be cleaned out by changing words!