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Comment by nhchris | Hacker News Reader

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

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The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

I'm bored with people rolling this quote out and I disagree with the premise.

This is much more like Victorian prudery and moral panics than some foreshadowing of a totalitarian state. Stop being overly dramatic.

This is pure censorship, belittling people who call it out means taking the the side of censorship. Nothing overly “dramatic” about it (there’s also something to be said about using the word “dramatic” with a negative connotation).

Even if the revisions are fairly innocuous in themselves, it is still altering history in a way that impedes future generations from an honest legitimate view of history. Imagine a world with a filtered awareness for history. It is a closing of the mind.

Except it’s entirely voluntarily done by the owners themselves. Nobody forced them to do it, there hasn’t been an organized protest asking them to, it’s just a business making decisions about what they think will boost sales.

Capitalists making independent business decisions is pretty far from 1984.

Are corporations even mentioned in 1984?

The publishers could not care less about removing words due to the fact that they might be offensive in 2023. They are not losing any sales because of any specific words in these books. They are editing the books simply because it creates cheap publicity around the brand. This isn’t censorship, it’s a publicity stunt.

Man, this comment. We literally have telescreens in our homes. We know that the NSA has monitored every bit of information we emit. We have AI generated propaganda. Algorithms that turn us against each other, that monitor the cameras on every corner. We even had people violently attempt to overturn our democratic elections! And you bleat that it's just a little prudery.

I am just stunned that you equate A PRIVATE COMPANY doing whatever the hell they want with their own property to 1984.

Do you also believe that one time you thought you saw a pig talk means we are headed towards an Animal Farm situation?

The point is more that it's reaching a point where true history is hidden/questionable/edited/rare/debated.

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.

Tennessee just banned transition therapy for trans people and gave them a year to “detransition”. The owner of Twitter just replied “kek” to an outspoken segregationist. But sure, it’s capitalists trying to sell more pulp fiction that’s the biggest fascist threat in America right now.

Was the only non-fascist era in USA history 2015-2016 (Oberfell to Trump)?

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.

The Tennessee bill you’re referring to specifically prohibits children, not adults, from receiving puberty blockers, hormone therapies and sex change operations.

It is a transphobic bill that blocks all age and medical appropriate gender affirming care for a person under 18. This includes totally reversible actions related to social transition including name changes and clothing choices.

https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-con...

Have you read a summary of the bill? As far as I can tell, it specifically pertain to medical procedures and therapies. The activist article you linked mentions clothing and names as being things children may change when they see themselves as being transgender, but these certainly do not seem to be things prohibited by the bill.

https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/billinfo/default.aspx?BillN...

I did read the summary from the HRC (the largest LGBTQ lobbying group in the US, btw). I also decided to bypass another summary to read the text of the bill, which explicitly bans social transition by disallowing:

(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

You are missing that clothing and names have really nothing to do with gender outside of society imposed social concepts and that children should be allowed to grow up in the bodies they were born in and not made to feel alienated from their own selves to the point of self mutilation.

You're reading (1) without the context of (a).

(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.

How about you stop being an apologist for trans genocide? Try that.

One of the first medical procedures is social transitioning, which does not involve medicine or surgery.

One of the only good comments in this hellscape lol

Good to hear that Tennessee is standing firm against the medical abuse of children. Well done that state.

"History is written by the victors."

What mostly white people in charge are comfortable with publishing is never the whole story.

Is that why history and pop culture are filled with the heroism and benevolence of whites, and the crimes and hostilities perpetrated upon them by demonized people of color? And if you want to find examples of whites doing something wrong, or non-whites being victimized at their hands, you really have to dig for it, and such events are virtually unknown?

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.

You know, I'm not anyone in charge of deciding what goes into these republished works. I'm just some random internet stranger baffled at the people comparing edits to popular works of fiction which will be acknowledged in writing with a disclaimer to totalitarian regimes actively hiding the truth and pretending they haven't.

> Is that why history and pop culture are filled with the heroism and benevolence of whites

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.

> This is much more like Victorian prudery and moral panics than some foreshadowing of a totalitarian state. Stop being overly dramatic.

Why can't it be a foreshadowing of a totalitarian state of Victorian prudery?

Exactly -- it's bowdlerisation, pure and simple. This is a behaviour that the left used to abhor, but they've finally found reason to adopt the behaviour themselves.

Americans on the right seem incapable of seeing the difference between the dominant liberal institutions in power today, and "the left" which holds basically no power in the western world today.

To be clear this is the attention seeking behaviour of capitalist publishers .. there are no "the left" involved here.

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]

Absent any of this it'd just be just another release with zero fanfare or intereest.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/26/updati...

This is just capitalists trying to sell more books. You want the old books? They haven’t been burned or locked away. Nobody is being jailed for selling the old books.

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.

FYI, although the article wants you to make the jump that n----- = "the hard R", it's actually referring to a less offensive albeit very dated term - negros (as in the United Negro College Fund). Negro is a word that annoys me as well, but it's no different than People of Color/Colored People in that it's just a cringey old-timey descriptor.

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.

The best argument I've seen yet against such self censorship.

“Negro” is an offensive term. The US government does not use “negro”.

https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/lcdrg/appendix/bla...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCF

That's a lazy counterargument, and I assume you're just trolling. Please don't do that here. I'm not sure why you're trying to justify the use of an outdated term that is problematic if not immediately hurtful.

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

I'm not even counterarguing anything. Your comment in reply to mine wasn't even relevant. I never said it's not offensive, in fact my comment calls simply points out that it's less offensive than the word with the Hard R that shall not be spoken. Which clearly is accurate is it not?

So the real question is, what made you make your initial comment in response to mine? Did you misread it?

Martin Luther King preferred it to "black" for like the first 2/3 of things he wrote and said. Contemporaneous with when these books were written.

Can you think of any other offensive terms that might have been used commonly in the past but are now considered offensive? I’m sure if you sit down and really cook your noodle you might be able to come up with one.

I'm just lending some flavor. "Negro" is kind of like "oriental" in that it was never offensive but seems kind of old-fashioned now, which makes people assume it was.

Oriental is offensive if you use it to refer to people. If you use oriental to refer to things, it's OK.

> is offensive

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.

Never attribute to malice and all that, most people are probably just confusing fashion with offensiveness.

The term oriental is offensive because it's been used to reinforce the idea that those from the exotic orient are forever foreign and could not become American. This justifies exclusive policies, segregation, etc.

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.

That entire criticism applies equally to "asian".

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

Similar to the terms white and black then? So why does the government use those?

I won't be offended if you refer to me as an Occidental.

Except no party is doing this, but very capitalist firms in an attempt to appeal to new segments, to refresh their brand and to be on the news with their products. They follow a trend to fortify their business, that's it.

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.

The trend is fearing to offend and all the consequences and ((social) media) outrage that follows.

Yes it's a stupid trend (most trends are), but that doesn't mean it exists because of some hidden power conspiring to take control of western society.

George Orwell's book 1984 was written in 1949 to warn against totalitarianism. It was modeled on Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

I can think of nothing more anti-Nazi than showing a little respect for people of color in our popular fiction.

The point is that the shoe fits, which exposes that the virtuous intent is actually ignorant, misguided, invalid, counter-productive, and self-defeating.

That might be true if it were just about being more polite. But this is about control by establishing an approved vocabulary. Why else the need to rewrite past literature? It is a very condescending attitude to think you can protect people from "harmful thoughts". Archaic language is a key into deciphering cultures and other historical ideas.

Literally none of that is happening.

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.

"and Stalinist Russia. I can think of nothing more anti-Nazi"

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 popular fiction. There will be a disclaimer acknowledging the changes.

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.

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