Censoring our culture and civilization

The censors have been coming for Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.  By the time they finish sanitizing every politically offensive phrase or character, we will have libraries filed with books containing nothing but blank pages.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Peter Caddle’s report on Breitbart re: Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels:

Ahead of a coming re-release to mark the 70th anniversary since the release of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale novel, the first in the James Bond series, the publication reports that the works have been “rewritten” to appease woke sensibilities.

The revelation comes after a week of controversy surrounding recent reprints of Roald Dahl’s books, with it being revealed that the works of fiction have been edited in order to change or remove language deemed problematic. . . .

Full report is here. 

Here’s Robert Spencer, writing last week at Front Page about Shakespeare and other classic writers:

A day in the life of destroying a civilization

The UK’s Prevent program, which is supposed to be protecting the Sceptered Isle from terrorism . . . has kept busy looking for “far-right extremists” and has now published a helpful guide to spotting those dangerous right-wingers. It turns out that they’re people who read Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, 1984, and other great works of English literature.

. . .

Prevent casts a wide net. The UK’s Daily Mail reported Friday that among the “potential signs of far-Right extremism” and “key texts” for “white nationalists/supremacists” that Prevent flagged were the “comedies Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, the 1955 epic war film The Dam Busters, and even The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare.”

And much more: “A report by Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) described how far-Right extremists promoted ‘reading lists’ on online bulletin boards.” These include “The Lord Of The Rings by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1984 by George Orwell and the poems of GK Chesterton. It also referenced films including The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Great Escape and Zulu.”

Other books, shows and films on Prevent’s list included that bane of freshmen literature majors everywhere, Beowulf, and other monumental works including Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Historian and broadcaster Andrew Roberts marveled: “This is truly extraordinary. This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilised, liberal, cultured education.”

Yeah. It almost seems as if the Prevent top dogs don’t want people to get a civilized, liberal, cultured education. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Prager: Explaining Conservativism II

 

Dennis Prager continues his deep dive into what it means to be a conservative.  Here are his concluding paragraphs from the Jewish World Review:

Explaining Conservativism II: Why the Left Hates It

. . . The conservative wants to pass on to every generation the best that human beings have created. Depriving young people of the greatest art, literature, music and ideas is a form of child abuse. The result has been generations of ignorant and foolish people, many of whom are actively working toward the opposite of what the "progressive" label suggests: taking society backward.

I would wager a serious sum of money that most American college students could not spell "Beethoven," let alone recognize any of his music; has never heard of Dostoevsky; and would not recognize a single sculpture or painting by Michelangelo. Instead, they learn about "preferred pronouns."

For these reasons, the end of conservativism must lead to the end of Western civilization. When you don't conserve the ideas and art, the religious moral values, and even the nuclear family that made Western civilization the most advanced civilization — materially, morally, scientifically and artistically — ever devised, you will no longer have that civilization. You will have morally confused, emotionally broken, lonely and angry young people — who will eventually wreak havoc on all that is good and worthy of surviving.

We conservatives want to conserve the beautiful, the profound and the wise.

What does the Left wish to conserve? The answer is: nothing. That's why everything the Left touches it destroys. The less you conserve, the more you destroy.

Read his full column here.

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