Agatha Christie classics latest to be rewritten for “modern sensitivities”
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Or do you suggest to only read news from sources aligned politically with your views regardless of whether there is or isn't any true in the news?
Anyway, in my opinion people who read the news and disregard facts that don't agree with their opinions is what I think is wrong with the world at the moment. Because of large number of these people, lying actually starts making sense, at least if you only care about getting elected. Because then what you say doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is whether you are able to exploit existing divisions to hijack voters by telling lies that agree with voters' emotions.
Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have original passages reworked or removed in new editions published
As noted already by galuggus this isn't the first time Christie works have had racially charged material altered, as happened with the US edition released since January 1940.
How long history of rewrites a book needs to have before it is no longer ok to mention there are rewrites in it?
This is an article about a new edition of old Christie books - there are no government officials here and the only journalistic abuses here are firstly by the publishers attempting to drum up press about an otherwise dull event and secondly by the Telegraph seizing on thin grounds to grab eyeballs by attempting to drum up outrage.
Older editions are still available in libraries and secondhand bookstores, in ten years there'll be different editions again.
If you're at all familiar with books and publishing .. well, you wouldn't be failing over this story in the manner that you are.
Oh yes, they are still available... until the next wave of "sensitivity borrowers" crops up demanding libraries remove those editions. That will happen and has happened already.
> If you're at all familiar with books and publishing .. well, you wouldn't be failing over this story in the manner that you are.
If you are at all familiar with censorship you would not treat this subject so lightly. Whether it is Soviet "socialist realism" [1] or Nazi "entartete kunst" (degenerate art) [2], these movements never fail to turn into some form of witch hunt.
Do you really want to support censorship?
[1] https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/socialist-realism/socia...
Notice also that the censorship laws explicitly do not apply to the Party and its affiliates: 5. Publications of the Communist International, the Central Committee of the VKP(B), krai, oblast and raion committees of the VKP (B), together with the Izvestiia of the Central Executive Committee and the All-Union Executive Committee, the works of the Communist Academy, and those of the Academy of Sciences, are freed from the political and ideological control of Glavlit.
[2] https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/entartete-kunst-the-nazis-inv...
Then this “inclusion directive” must have been adopted a very long time ago. Someone else has mentioned that this very book was retitled in 1940 due to its original title including the ’n’ word.
One wonders why the apparatchiks aren’t censoring the Daily Telegraph too. The answer, of course, is that their powers of censorship (and indeed their very existence) are largely imaginary.
>"Godwinning" does not really apply even though I did mention the Nazi ...
Err, ok. You mentioned the Nazis and also made another outrageous historical comparison that's hardly any better considered.
In the last two months there's been stories about Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, a couple of others and now Agatha Christie.
Each time there's been outrage teased in the right wing press obsessed with culture wars, a flurry of free press via over hyped social media discussion, and then yet another edition release by publishers of "original" Ye Olde UnWoke OG editions . . .
Are you seeing a marketing pattern here?
Two markets for the price of very little shit stirring via lazy click bait "journalists".
Perhaps you're a little too obsessed with death of the world via imagined censorship to notice the strings upon which you're seemingly blindly being tugged about.
If you allow your child to grow up reading this sort of material, they'll grow up to be like Suella Braverman.
I've no objection to leaving the warts in older books - they're slices of life past sliced and preserved in amber, and later editions form a flickering slideshow of changing values and views.
You put your finger on the reason there are stories about it. There are stories because there's money to be had from the outrage the stories bring.
Quick question for you - I just need a simple "yes" or "no" answer.
Would you be happy to display a book on your shelf with the title containing the word "N\x49\x47\x47\x45R" in two-inch letters on your library shelves?
I'm not from the US so I do not have the inhibition against the 'N-word'. Such a book would be on a shelf with other books of similar vintage, one which represents a certain time in history when that word was in common use. I do not have to agree with the contents of such books or with the titles chosen by their authors just like I do not have to a agree with many books written now and books yet to be written. I also have no problems with having 'Mein Kampf' or Mao's 'Little Red Book' (红宝书) on a shelf even though I do not agree with their contents and do not hold the authors in high regard.
In short, I know the difference between what was and what is. I do not know what will be but I try to do my best to keep it from going in the wrong direction, i.e. I try to keep from making the same mistakes as have been made in the past. One of those mistakes is censorship. I will not tire you with the well-known quotation from Orwell's 1984 about every book having been rewritten since I assume you have read the book.
Quick question for you - I just need a simple "yes" or "no" answer.
Have communism and socialism been tried in real life at a large enough scale to show whether these ideologies can be made to work?
A "yes" would need some examples of where this has been made to work at a large (i.e. nation state) scale. A "no" needs an explanation what all communist and socialist revolutions were if not examples of such.
I'm asking this because to me it is incomprehensible that these ideologies somehow have remained acceptable in the public discourse where e.g. national socialism and fascism have been relegated to the dustbin of history while the death toll of communism and socialism outstrips that of national socialism and fascism combined. You do not hear anyone claiming that 'true fascism has never been tried' or 'the 3d Reich did not practice true national socialism', why then is it perfectly acceptable for supposedly intellectual people to claim that 'true communism' or 'real socialism' have never been tried?
[1] do mind that "social democracy" is not the same as "socialism" and is not what I'm referring to here, I mean "socialism" as being the ideology which strives after communal ownership of the means of production and the abolishment of private property and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which is supposed to lead to a classless society where government structures are no longer needed and will dissolve by themselves, i.e. a communist society
As you well know, this is not a binary decision.
> It should be pretty simple in this case
Mmm. Should it?
Agatha Christie stories have been rewritten a bit over the 100 years she has been published, most notably "Ten Little Indians", which was released in the US as "And Then There Were None", but was first published in 1939 with a different noun in the title which I will not provoke a response by using. I think they were still publishing it in the UK up until the 1970s under the original title!
This article, however, is trying to froth up the beetroot-faced "pint of carling and a filthy joke" Union-jack-t-shirt-wearing segment over "political correctness gone mad".
Bear in mind that this is the newspaper that was founded by Fascists for Fascists in the 1930s, and most recently had a headline on the front page saying we should be machine-gunning refugee boats to stop them landing in the UK.
It would help the credibility of what you were saying if you didn't keep making this basic mistake.
They were highly supportive of The Wrong Side throughout WW2, and even now are agitating for violence against minorities and refugees.
Anyone that buys it should be on some sort of a list.
This is completely false. You're again thinking of the Mail (if you're not just making stuff up). But even the Mail wasn't pro-Nazi during WW2. I'm not sure what sort of weird ahistorical picture of WW2 you must have to think that a British newspaper would even have been allowed to publish pro-Nazi articles in the middle of the war!
>and even now are agitating for violence against minorities and refugees.
Where? You still seem to be thinking of headlines that have appeared in the Mail, not the Telegraph.
It's also inaccurate to suggest the Telegraph is in any sense a tabloid. I'm left-leaning and do not much like the Telegraph as a newspaper. However, it was, for a long time, a serious and respected paper.
See how silly that looks? Don't agree with being labelled "far left" or "authoritarian"? Think this type of comment lowers the quality of the discourse? Refrain from this type of rhetoric and you'll be spared this type of retort.
You need to be aware that this is a newspaper originally founded in the 1930s by the Fascist Party, and fully supportive of Hitler and Mussolini.
Edit: no it wasn't, this was the one founded in the mid-19th century, who were highly supportive of slaughtering natives in India, and then went on to be highly supportive of Hitler and Mussolini by the early 20th century.
This is literally a newspaper for people who are happy to walk around outside with a Union Jack on their shirt and a swastika armband.
Edit: This bit is still true.
> I'm extremely far left, for which I make no apologies.
Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Nicolae Ceaușescu, etcetera. All extremely far left, all guilty of heinous crimes against humanity. Do you support their policies, do you excuse their deeds because they were pursuing the ultimate goal of international socialism?
Get a grip please, this is not Reddit. People walking around with a Union Jack on their shirt is fine by me, it is their national flag after all. People walking around with swastikas, hammers and sickles and other symbols of murderous ideologies is less so.
How do you define your 'extremely far left' ideology? What makes it 'extremely far left'?
Look at some of the far-right leaders - Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeni, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mussolini, name omitted to avoid triggering Godwin, Boris Johnson, Tony Blair - all extremely far right, all guilty of heinous crimes against humanity. Do you stand with them?
As to me standing with the ragtag assembly of disparate leaders who you label as 'extremely far right' [1] I wonder why you ask since I do not label myself as 'far-right' nor as 'right'. Those labels are just silly since political thought is not 2-dimensional. I sometimes agree with the "right", sometimes with the "left" (as in "traditional left", not the modern identity-politics lunacy), in some ways I tend more towards anarchy, in other ways I deem there to be a need for more authority.
[1] ...which is odd given that Hussein was the leader of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, Khomeini was pushed to power by leftists [2] some of whom continued to support him after it became clear he was intent on implementing a theocracy, Blair is a champagne socialist, Johnson a centrist populist, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler are various types of (inter)national socialists, Bush (which one? H.W or W?) a centre-right corporate puppet and Thatcher - finally someone who can be called 'right-wing' - just a straight right-winger.
[2] https://marxismexplained.com/2020/11/27/iran-revolution-1979...