Fahrenheit 2023

First they came for the writers.

“Best-selling author Agatha Christie’s books have reportedly become the latest target of sensitivity readers reworking or removing original passages in the new editions of Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries,” the Washington Examiner reports.

The novels, written between 1920 and 1976, “are being stripped of certain language and descriptions that are deemed offensive,” and dialogue by “unsympathetic characters” has been cut out. Dame Christie, who died in 1976, is hardly the only target.

The James Bond literary franchise, Time magazine reports, “will receive a sensitivity review” of the 14 novels written from 1953 to 1966. The review “will see some racially offensive language and outdated stereotypes” removed from the books by Ian Fleming. The author died in 1964, the same year as “Goldfinger,” based on Fleming’s book of the same title and starring Sean Connery as James Bond and Honor Blackman as the unforgettable Pussy Galore, was released.

British author Roald Dahl passed away in 1990, and as CNN reports, his books Matilda, The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, have been “revised and edited” by an organization called Inclusive Minds.

Language relating to “gender, race, weight, mental health and violence had all been cut or revised, including the removal of words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly,’ and descriptions using the colors black and white.” The best-selling books of Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, pose other problems.

As the Associated Press reports, in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, “an Asian person is portrayed wearing a conical hat, holding chopsticks, and eating from a bowl.” Geisel’s If I Ran the Zoo “includes a drawing of two bare-footed African men wearing what appear to be grass skirts with their hair tied above their heads.” The books, therefore, “will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery.”

As the March 2, 2021 report notes, the books of Dr. Seuss “have been translated into dozens of languages as well as in braille and are sold in more than 100 countries.” So 30 years after his death, and nearly 120 years after his birth, the books of Theodore Geisel are being killed off. Way back in 1953, Ray Bradbury saw it all coming.

He set Fahrenheit 451 in the future when the primary task of firemen is to burn books. To prevent the books from being eliminated, people memorize the full text. Every book represents a person and to destroy a book is to destroy the author. In subsequent editions, Bradbury felt compelled to add an afterword.

A publishing house wanted to reprint Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” as part of a high school reader. The story describes a lighthouse with an illumination like a “God-Light,” making people feel as though they were in “the Presence.” Editors deleted both “God-Light” and “the Presence” and other authors suffered similar mutilations.

“Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepencilled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story,” Bradbury wrote. “Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead.”

Bradbury responded by firing the whole lot, sending rejection slips to each one and “by ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.” For Bradbury, the point was obvious.

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” In Fahrenheit 451, fire Captain Beatty described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from a book “until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.” Bradbury knew what it meant.

“It is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.” The world did get madder than it was in 1953, and is now far, far madder than it was in 2012, when Bradbury passed away.

The Marxist dogma that the past is nothing but a chronicle of oppression has been institutionalized. The nation lives under the dictatorship of the subjunctive mood (DSM), and unreality rules. Book burners now come disguised as authorities in diversity and sensitivity. What they really represent is...

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