James Bond books edited to remove racist references
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
This is much more like Victorian prudery and moral panics than some foreshadowing of a totalitarian state. Stop being overly dramatic.
Capitalists making independent business decisions is pretty far from 1984.
Do you also believe that one time you thought you saw a pig talk means we are headed towards an Animal Farm situation?
It's not too the next step where totalitarianism comes into play.
Especially when it gets to the point where having stepped over these boundaries in the past can lead to being targeted by the government / powerful corporations / employers.
But it's 100% relevant to be bringing into the conversation.
You could probably knock the years back to Obama if you want, but Prop 8 was in 2008 so it's hard to go earlier than that.
NOI segregationists have existed for a long time in the post-segregation era.
https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-con...
https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/billinfo/default.aspx?BillN...
(1) Enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex; or (2) Treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor's sex and asserted identity.
What am I missing here?
HB1 text: https://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/113/Bill/SB0001.pdf
(a) A healthcare provider shall not perform or offer to perform on a minor, or administer or offer to administer to a minor, a medical procedure if the performance or administration of the procedure is for the purpose of:
(1) Enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex; or
(2) Treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor's sex and asserted identity.What mostly white people in charge are comfortable with publishing is never the whole story.
For example, everyone knows the details of the Barbary, Arab, Ottoman, Caucasus, Saharan, and Andalusian slave trades, and countless movies were made showing how whites suffered under them, and their mythologized wars to end them. Some were even made showing Blacks' suffering under the Saharan slave trade, as it was politically useful for whites to demonize Arabs.
However, did you know Europe and its colonies also engaged in slavery? Before the US abolished slavery in 1865, 12 million Black slaves were shipped to the Americas. Mostly to South America, but some to North and the US as well. That may be less than the estimated 11-17 million the Saharan slave trade claimed, but it's hardly something we should ignore.
Of course the white people in charge aren't comfortable publishing this, so it has been relegated to the footnotes of history.
Yes? It seems you're sarcastically referring to very recent history in which some people are like, you know, the actual legit dominance of white narrative in history and pop-culture could maybe be dialed back a bit and we could do a better job of representing the stories of all the people who are part of our shared experience instead of just the white ones?
Slavery and Indigenous American genocide only very recently happened, and there remains a lot of residual inequity, including modern-day slavery in the prison marketplace. The people you're complaining about are also in the country where those things happened, so obviously they'll be more prominently discussed in history than the Saharan slave trade. There's also a lot of discussion about banning teaching of these topics, so it needs to be discussed and defended; as far as I know, Florida isn't banning teaching the Saharan slave trade.
Why can't it be a foreshadowing of a totalitarian state of Victorian prudery?
They promote the changes, stoke the outrage via press releases, stir up support for "the originals" and make bank from two highly talked about simultaneous releases of the same old product.
For context:
Dahl’s publications are extremely lucrative. In 2021, his literary estate was bought by Netflix for £500m. So, despite the writer himself being more than three decades dead, his market share must not be allowed to diminish. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/26/updati...
From the article: The word “n-----”, which Fleming used to refer to black people when he was writing during the Fifties and Sixties, has been almost entirely expunged from the revised texts.
If you want your James Bond books that have the hard r n-word, they’re still there for you on eBay, undoubtedly.
From what I can tell the only reference with "the hard R" is not in reference to anybody in particular but rather as a chapter title that is in reference to Harlem and is a direct call back to the famous Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten.
https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/lcdrg/appendix/bla...
If you had read the article you linked, you'd have known that the United Negro College Fund emphasizes its initials rather than its full name. "In 2008, reflecting shifting attitudes toward the word Negro in its name, the UNCF shifted from using its full name to using only its initials, releasing a new logo with the initials alone and featuring their slogan more prominently."
Look on their website. Their official history does not mention the term "negro" once.
https://uncf.org/the-latest/75-years-strong-highlights-from-...
You will be unable to find in at least the last 30 years, any publications from the UNCF that use the word "negro" to refer to black people.
> That's a lazy counterargument
So the real question is, what made you make your initial comment in response to mine? Did you misread it?
You mean someone decided to take offense. It's literally equivalent to "Asian" in that it describes a geographic origin. And negro, as pointed out, was preferred by MLK himself, yet we're just supposed to believe it's offensive because that's what we're told.
What this is is a show of power, picking random words and deciding they're offensive, and making an example of anyone that doesn't dance to this tune.
That's not the only reason the US Federal government decided to stop its use in official documents. It's also a terribly inaccurate term - exactly WHERE in the East are you talking about? India, which is in the East, is far different from South Korea, which is also in the East. I'm sure that people in those disparate regions would much rather not be lumped together in a single category.
It's a lazy, outdated term used by lazy people.
I was alive in the 80s and 90s, nobody was mad about "oriental", especially and specifically immigrant communities that don't care about American culture war. It's just fashion.
> It's also a terribly inaccurate term
I can think of nothing more anti-Nazi than showing a little respect for people of color in our popular fiction.
The company thinks they can sell more books if they no longer alienate a large portion of the reading public. Maybe all the white folks bought 007 books, and now they want other races to buy 007.
What is distinctly missing from your fantasy is the removal, destruction or burning of the prior editions of the book. You can still get the racist edition if that’s your thing. Hell, they’re on zlib.
By now I'm used to Soviet union being ignored whenever convenient, but I've never seen it forgotten in the span of seven words.
> Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced. [..] For instance, in the 1950 edition of The Ordeal of Sevastopol, censors made over three hundred cuts, screening the book's references to Frenchmen as "a people of very lively imagination", and the chivalrous treatments which the French gave to Russian prisoners—such as eating in the passenger's lounge and being given a hundred francs per month—were extracted from the text. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union
> "Hitler didn't snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." [..] In Germany, Owens had been allowed to travel with and stay in the same hotels as whites, at a time when African Americans in many parts of the United States had to stay in segregated hotels that accommodated only blacks. [..] After the parade, Owens was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria New York and instead forced to travel up to the reception honoring him in a freight elevator. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens#1936_Berlin_Summer...
> "An overwhelming majority [74-82%] of the men feel that negro and white soldiers should be separated both during and after training" - pg. 10, Attitudes of White Enlisted Men Towards Sharing Facilities With Negro Troops, US War Dept., 1942 - https://archive.org/details/us-war-department-final-race-won...
It's not a history book or news report being edited to leave out things people in power find uncomfortable. It's popular fiction being edited to leave out things historically oppressed and abused peoples find hurtful and for whom the past is far from dead.
The fallacy of your argument is that it somehow implies some coordinated attempt by some kind of obscure force that is conspiring to control society. That's no different than other conspiracy theories.
This is falsification.
> You’ll never find an unbiased version of history whether it’s written by the victors or the defeated.
That is true. I think being unbiased is extremely difficult. Maybe impossible; I am not sure. Worse yet, there would never be a way of knowing whether something is biased or not.
Please explain how releasing an edited, updated version of a book that is more marketable in today’s world is censorship when the original works are fully available.
That is actually not what censoring a book means. According to the Oxford Dictionary [1]:
> to remove the parts of a book, film, etc. that are considered to be offensive or a political threat
Regarding your last comment:
> Please explain how releasing an edited, updated version of a book that is more marketable in today’s world is censorship when the original works are fully available.
That would be by definition.
Regarding your second comment:
> The original book will continue to be found in used book stores, church rummage sales, parents end tables, and so on for years and years to come. Scans are certainly available online at the various pirate sites, so likely available for my lifetime at least.
They would be around. They would become rarer and rarer overtime. Most people would grow up believing that the author wrote the censored version of the book. Moreover, they would grow up believing that the way the book was written was reflective of the setting of the book in our actual history. That is the way of things and the censurers know it.
[1]: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
It's not the choice.
But requiring notes; this is already assuming that the reader is an idiot that can't think by himself.
A two edition approach might work well.
One edition would have the text just as the author wrote it, with notes added or maybe even short articles to explain things to today's readers. That could include different attitudes toward race in the book's time, period slang that hasn't survived, other language changes, technology, clothes, government, housing, and more.
The other edition could be the story updated for a modern setting. If it is set in London for example and the protagonist frequently travels around town in a dog-cart, update that to a taxi. If the story involves a religion that people then thought was maybe some kind of shady cult but is now fairly mainstream, replace that with some current shady possible cult (e.g., if you were updating "A Study in Scarlet" you might change Mormons to Scientologists).
The annotated original edition would be the one you'd use in literature class, or read on your own if you wanted a period piece, or knew enough about the time the book is set in to not be slowed down to much by out of date references.
The updated edition would be the one most people who just want to read a good story could choose.
> But requiring notes; this is already assuming that the reader is an idiot that can't think by himself.
Most people aren't reading works of fiction to think. They are reading them to be entertained. If they like some characters in the book they will often adopt some of the attitudes or behaviors of those characters without even realizing it. This is especially true of younger people.
This appears to be an argument for banning or rewriting all fiction with any characters in who disagree with the current orthodoxy.
That seems like a terrible idea, other than it will provide employment for some zealous English grads who can't write their own stories well enough to get published.
It has female characters with names like Pussy Galore. It's an adolescent fantasy that was mocked by the Austin Powers movies.
The character Q is a cheap plot device for resolving plot issues easily once the author has painted himself into a corner. Once in said corner, you go back in time and insert some gadget invented by some prescient genius that Bond will never use again and probably should have used at some earlier point but didn't.
James Bond is dated and really no longer works well. He was originally a ladies man in a conservative era when women did not readily put out who saw so much action because his wife died and he was all heart broken over that and women knew he was the marrying kind and blah blah blah. Now that everyone goes on Tinder and casually hooks up with random strangers, there's nothing special about James Bond getting laid left, right and center.
It's juvenile, it's out of date, it's misogynistic and generally ridiculous. It does not need anyone handwringing about trying to preserve its original form like there's something sacred there.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly watch the movies. But, no, they are not high art that requires special protection for the benefit of future generations.
What I find deeply concerning is not the distortion of the pristine original state of James Bond. What I find deeply concerning is the whitewashing of cultural artifacts and the implications of both the intent of such actions and the potential outcomes. The quality of the content itself does not reduce the cultural popularity and impact that the content had in its time, and altering the content can only cloud any modern examination of the past.
Old content that ages poorly should do just that - age poorly. We should look back at it and roll our eyes and wonder what we were thinking. We should draw conclusions from this more modern examination that help guide the creation of future content that doesn't perpetuate the same problems.
There is no progress without reflection and a place from which to move forward. And this quickly turns into a "First, they came for..." type of scenario, IMO.
Popular works being kept current so we can still enjoy them even though things have changed is nothing at all like "First they came for...."
It's more like the opposite of that.
If anything, neo-copyright should protect the original works from alteration by the copyright holders.
Do we? Further, than translating from English to a different version of English?
> Westside Story is an updated version of Romeo and Juliette.
It is not, it’s an adaption at best.
Yes. Literally what you said, right here.
But if they use the original title and author, I expect the original work. Because that's literally what the title and author on a book cover mean - this work, as written and approved by this author, no different than the ingredients list on food. Anything else* is lying.
*Translations give the translator's name, and don't pretend they're the original. And editors probably should be credited, but at least in that case the edits are approved by the author.
Besides the point. A significant audience found value in its stories. Are you the arbiter of what is good or bad? You go down this road, there is no limit to what will be censored or deleted altogether. Even the stuff you personally find to be great art. It is literally trying to modify history.
Why is that a negative? If it inspired other art, even as a parody, that makes it a valuable part of culture.
James Bond has inspired countless imitations, and has resonated with generations of people around the world. It doesn't need to be high art to be enjoyed. Everyone watching the movies or reading the books today will have a different perception of the material, in the same way we view art produced centuries ago. Art exists within the context of its period, and changing it to suit new generations produces strange results, completely disrespecting the author's intention.
Would you feel the same way if we started altering paintings someone considered offensive? That's as ridiculous as these changes.
Of course, this isn't new with books. Popular works go through many editions throughout history. We should be able to go back and read older editions, but sometimes these become harder to find, as new ones become more prevalent. Let's hope that won't be the case here.
Edit: Question to the downvoter: Which woke IP didn't flop?
OK, point taken
Edit: and Avatar 2 is not an example of a "new IP"
How about this: American soldier joins Cherokee resistance fighters and successfully defends burial ground from "liberation" force trying to tap oil reservoirs underneath the land. Okay, now the Cherokee are blue aliens, the oil is "unobtanium", and there are spaceships.
That certainly qualifies.
Star Trek was always woke, starting with its at the time quite "woke" black communications' officer and many plots with aliens as stand-ins for different races or nations. The initial show got cancelled (as is often the case with even successful sci-fi) but it gave birth to a giant franchise that continued to be at least somewhat "woke" by contemporary standards. Definitely not a flop.
The Apple TV series For All Mankind is going into season 4 and is relatively popular. I liked it. It's full of "woke" stuff but is well written and is based on a really good premise. My favorite fan theory is that it's an unofficial prequel to The Expanse. Not sure I'd call The Expanse "woke" but it's also not not-woke and has a number of background elements like the popularity of polyamory and bisexual characters sure to trigger right-wingers.
I could keep listing sci-fi. Lots of "woke" sci-fi.
Films, lots of them. There's many films about civil rights and social justice struggles that are quite good and did not flop: Mississippi Burning, Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave, Hidden Figures, etc. Disney has recently made a bunch of Pixar films that are pretty woke and didn't exactly flop.
I do agree that there's been a fair amount of stuff that feels like "woke" plot points have been shoehorned into it, but that's just bad writing. Bad writing is bad writing.
If anything the woke stuff might be getting shoehorned in in a frantic attempt to dress up a turkey. "Lets throw some gay characters into this shitty movie to be edgy for gen-Z."
If I watch a bad episode of Star Trek, I don't come away disliking Gene Roddenberry as a person, it's just a bad episode. Some of the woke stuff is actively obnoxious and self-aggrandizing beyond merely not landing.
Sure saying "wow series X is woke because a character is gay which means it's pandering and sucks" is lazy, but at a certain point there is a point where it's useful to have a word to categorize this phenomenon.
Other words can simply be used. "Woke" shouldnt have to be diverted so far from its original definition just to become a convenient catchall term.
That kind of corporate group-think is the opposite of creativity and it’s why so much children’s entertainment is so bad since they’re basically doing paint by numbers trying to cover each buyer demographic they’re fantasizing about.
"Wait, you don't understand, your ideas are cool, but the publishers don't want revolutionary concepts, it's too much risk. It's better to take Call of Duty II, Fifa 2008, or Doom IV, this is why here we are only developing franchises"
Awwww, they were right....
I would quote Shakespeare on love and blindness, but I’m not sure what term is au courant for the ocularly impaired.
This is in spite of the fact that each individual customer would choose the unsanitized version for themselves.
"Another altered scene features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated.
The original passage read: “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.”
The revised section replaces the pigs reference with: “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”
Not exactly sure why would it have different description in any night club, no matter what location (which I didn't even noticed at first).
It is important for media consumers to only associate POCs with positive attributes
In time it will even out. For now people are justifiably not wanting to argue about whether their poorly educated, highly violent, dishonest, obsequious black character is bravely demonstrating that all races can be terrible, and not just a lazy racist stereotype like we’ve seen over and over for the past hundreds of years.
Are my future kids reading Huckleberry Finn gonna assume riding down the Mississippi river back then would of been completely not racial? Great novels are largely historical records. You're reading paintings of humanity behind the mask of the times.
Not sure how this sentence is supposed to work. Surely the point of doing this is to bowdlerize the original text to suit the period in which it is being published.
Thanks friend. I will use that term on ebay when the time comes
I was raised on Asterix[0] and Tintin[1] graphic novels. Not to mention the 1940s-era Tom and Jerry cartoons[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix
I think that some things are more significant because they stand in such contrast to other things at the time and place they were produced. I enjoy coming across some anachronistic work and finding how ahead of their time the author was. It could be something like an abolitionist or gay-rights advocate hundreds of years ago. It's inspiring. If I read these Bond books I might come away thinking that Ian Fleming was something that he was not.
On the other hand, I don't like the idea of whitewashing our sorted past in this way.
On the gripping hand, the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-woke crowd makes it difficult to not see them as exactly the reason people think this sort of thing needs to be done.
It's ok to kill people for a living, just have the right attitude while you do it!
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...
If there were a market for rewriting the Quran to eliminate aspects you find objectionable, you’re well within your rights to do so. No cultural heritage will be destroyed. The existing books still exist, and now your new version also exists.
In much the same way, the 007 paperbacks (yeah, the old school ones) will remain in some forgotten corner in my house probably until my kids have to clear it out. They’ll probably thumb through one and laugh at its outdated language and style. No one is coming to take the books away.
Edit: Or the movie industry which releases "Directors Cut" versions
Side rant - As a parent bringing my kid onto flights, I don't let them watch content I'm not okay with, but if the person in-front of me decides to turn on something horrible, the best I can do is try to block his view of their screen.