OPINION:
James Bond, the double-oh-seven man of mystery and intrigue of Ian Fleming’s famous spy novels, and the character who made many a movie star even bigger movie stars, is receiving a new literary look, one that is softer, kinder and more politically correct. The publisher is taking out certain offenses and reissuing the novels in newly censored form.
Can you say gaslighting?
At this rate, Bond, James Bond, will soon become Jamie, the binary intel agent who moonlights on the weekends in drag in front of dollar-waving bar hoppers looking for good times.
“Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., which owns the rights to the author’s work, employed sensitivity readers to look at the texts and make recommendations for changes,” The Guardian reported. “The changes include the removal of the N-word in almost all cases, and omitting references to the ethnicity of a number of minor characters.”
The newly issued spy novels will also include disclaimers, something akin to: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.”
The lines between history and censorship aren’t just being blurred. They’re being actively erased.
The Bond series is just the latest target of woke-happy snowflakes who think they can gaslight their way into nirvana.
Dr. Seuss suffered the P.C. treatment for six books deemed too terrible for today’s readership. So, too, Roald Dahl’s classic, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” when the character Augustus Gloop was changed from “enormously fat” to simply “enormous.”
It’s not just books that get the cancel culture redos.
Mr. Potato Head underwent a gender realignment surgery of sorts when the cancel culture came for his maleness and made him into a sexless creature.
“Mr. Potato Head Getting Gender-Neutral Rebrand to Promote ‘Equality and Inclusion,’ Hasbro Says,” People wrote in February 2021.
And don’t forget Disney with its ridiculous cave to LGBTQ culture with a policy to remove the tags, “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” from its Magic Kingdom greetings. Again, with the inclusion.
“We want our guests to see their own backgrounds and traditions reflected in the stories, experiences and products they encounter in their interactions with Disney,” the company said then, in a July 2021 statement.
This is the stuff of fascists who will stop at nothing to control a culture, control a government, control a country, as well as all its citizens.
Bond, James Bond, is a fictional character — sure. But so are the characters in other books deemed offensive by today’s standards. So are the characters in “Gone With the Wind.” So are the characters in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” So are the characters in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” So are the characters in — well, all the books in all the world marked “fiction” rather than “nonfiction.” Do we cut out all the offensiveness to appease today’s woke pinheads?
Thing is, to make characters come alive, to make them believable and real and true, whether in print or in film, it’s necessary to use the verbiage of the day, the references of the time, the tones and attitudes and phrasings and rhetoric and descriptors of the era. Conversation is illuminating in oh-so-many ways; it’s not only what the person says that clues the reader to his or her personality, motivations and secret, subtle unstated character traits — it’s how the person says it.
And how a person in 2023 says it is most definitely not how a person in 1960 would say it. Or how a person in 1920 actually said it. That’s called truth.
That’s called historical accuracy.
“In ‘Live and Let Die,’ Bond’s comment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are ‘pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much’ has been changed to just ‘pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought,’” The Guardian reported.
Why?
Because “sensitivity readers” tapped to sift through the Bond series say such a reference sets Blacks in a bad light, that’s why.
Here’s another “sensitivity” change: In another scene, Bond visits a nightclub in Harlem and references an “audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough.” That’s been changed to instead read, “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”
Of course, books in public middle schools that are pornographic in nature or that push radical gender theories via sexually explicit descriptions are never cause for these “sensitivity readers” alarm. That’s called tolerance and diversity.
Really, more to the truth, that’s called the communist manifesto.
“China’s Communist Party Takes (Even More) Control of the Media,” ChinaFile.com wrote in a 2018 headline. The story goes on to say that China established a new “Voice of China” division under the CCP’s “Central Propaganda Department” and in so doing, in effect, seized control of film, radio, television, book publishing, the Internet and news media.
“[This] consolidation … can be seen as a continuation of trends that … are indicative of Xi Jinping’s emphases on the centralized role of the Party in regulating all aspects of political, social and cultural life,” the news outlet went on to write.
Tyrants do love their control. Like Mao Zedong and his cultural revolution, today’s communists, both in China and elsewhere, simply live to control. Lust to control. Fiction, first. Nonfiction, next.
Take a page from history and stop the censorship — before history is wiped clean by the censors.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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