Public ideas
George Orwell and Roald Dahl
The paragraphs below are from the introductory pages of a school geography book – The world and its people, Europe (Thomas Nelson, London UK, 1910) – prescribed by a state education authority around 1912:
The European peoples are the finest types of mankind. They have led, and they still lead, the way in peace and in war. They have advanced farthest in wisdom, skill, and knowledge. They have journeyed afar to dwell in most of the best lands of the globe, and now the European peoples, at home and abroad, govern the whole earth.
They have found out many of the secrets of nature, and have made the forces of nature their servants. They have invented gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, the art of printing, the railroad, the steam engine, the telegraph. They have explored the oceans and distant lands, they have reared lordly cities, raised noble buildings, written great books, painted wonderful pictures, composed sweet music, and studied the art of healing.
For them, the negro toils in the cane-brake, the Eskimo chase the seal, the Indian traps fur-bearing animals, the African crushes out his palm-oil, the Chinaman grows his tea, the Kanaka dives for pearls, and the Kafir watches his sheep. To provide the European with all that he wants, most of the other nations are engaged in labour. The raw products which they provide he skilfully works up into manufactured goods for the use of all men.
How should we regard such texts? With the same disdain we may treat hard-core pornography and promotion by a sports betting company?
Or should we try to learn not only how such drivel came to be written and placed on school curriculae, but also how it fertilized the ground for the horrors of the twentieth century? Massacres of aboriginal people in Australia and other “settler” countries, the White Australia policy, US racial segregation, colonialism, Nazism, apartheid …
Some say that we cannot airbrush history out of existence. But we can, with ease. Decades before word processors and Adobe Photoshop came onto the market George Orwell’s main character in Nineteen Eighty Four, Winston Smith, was employed rewriting history and re-interpreting old photographs.
Now the owners of Roald Dahl’s’ copyright have their own Winston Smith, culling words like “fat” and “ugly”, and removing references to “mothers” and “fathers”, lest children of same-sex parents are upset. James Bond will be sanitised to whiteout “pussygalore”.
Fortunately condemnation of such censorship is coming not only from right-wing guardians against wokeism, but also from liberal sources. Derrick Bryson Taylor, writing in The New York Times, describes the pathetic excuses Dahl’s publishers are using to justify their revisions. Megan McArdle, writing in The Washington Post, explains that it’s just wrong to rewrite Roald Dahl’s children’s books. Comparing Dahl’s rewriters with Thomas Bowdler, who re-wrote Shakespeare with all the naughty bits removed, she writes:
If our moral ideas are so self-evidently correct (and to be clear, I think that in many cases they are), then it should be easy to train children to recognize the past’s mistakes. In the process, we can teach them that even people they love and admire are capable of grave errors.
Has the world passed peak populism? Perhaps, but peak authoritarianism may still be some way off
Andrew Adonis, writing in Prospect, believes that we seem to have passed peak populism. He is encouraged by the fall of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson. He writes:
Populist leaders are in retreat partly because, when obliged to govern after their electoral successes, their variously impossible, nonsensical, corrupt, contradictory, absurd, xenophobic and anti-democratic measures have collapsed and/or united non-populists from across the political spectrum against them with energy and passion.
Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson have been constrained by institutions and traditions in democratic countries, but it could be rash to extend Adonis’s optimism too far. On a YouTube clip CNN’s Fareed Zakahia interviews New York Times correspondent Valerie Hopkins, on Putin’s solidifying support among Russian people. It has been a common belief that as the flow of body bags from the front increased Putin’s support would wane, but in fact Putin’s support has risen as people come to realize that the “special military operation” has involved serious warfare and more than 100 000 Russian casualties. Putin’s line about Russia fighting for its existence against a godless and decadent west, is gaining traction. (6 minutes)