Piers Morgan is outraged by what he labels the ‘cultural vandalism’ of editing Roald Dahl’s works.
New versions of the popular author’s children’s novels have been changed to remove potentially harmful material, with passages in works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda relating to weight, mental health, gender, and race being amended or omitted.
Among the hundreds of modifications, Augustus Gloop is now ‘enormous’ rather than ‘fat’ and the Mrs Twit of The Twits is no longer ‘ugly’ – but rather ‘beastly’.
Piers is furious about it.
‘For all of the people, products, books, brands, movies, meals, songs, ideas, and dead historic figures that have been outlawed by the cancel culture vultures, I never thought they’d be feasting on this,’ he began on Wednesday’s Uncensored.
‘Does your skin crawl as much as me when you hear that word – sensitivity readers, to ransack the great Roald Dahl’s iconic books?’ Piers said.
‘The thought police have taken a meat cleaver to some of the best-loved stories of all time, literally hundreds and hundreds of words and phrases have been cut or completely re-written,’ he went on, saying that it wasn’t ‘offensive to start with’.
‘In James and the Giant Peach, for example, the cloud men are now cloud people, presumably to avoid insulting non-binary clouds,’ the announcer went on to remark.
‘Dahl classified the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as little men, but now they’re just small people, in case any small men desire to become small women or small non-binaries.
‘In Fantastic Mr Fox, a line describing tractors – probably one of my favourites – as black has been deleted, because apparently just mentioning a colour of an object like a tractor is now racially charged.’
He added: ‘Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull no longer has a great horsey face, even though her face does resemble a horse, now it’s just a face, presumably to avoid upsetting any horses that might watch this or read it.’
Piers continued: ‘But it’s not being enjoyed by all, in fact it’s being reviled by all on all sides actually, because most people have common sense.
‘They think all this is nonsense, cultural vandalism, an attempt to rewrite history in a way that does it a disservice.
‘It’s no different actually to the cultural purges enforced by communists and fascists throughout history.’
He went on: ‘It’s insidious, the way that these wokies are gradually airbrushing the world and redrawing it in their own image with their own world view, and if you dare stand up to them, you must be cancelled, after they’ve shamed and vilified and abused you.
‘The aim is to make you hesitate before you use perfectly normal words through fear of causing offence, if you do that, it means their world view has already been imposed on you.
‘It means they already won.’
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also condemned the move on Monday, referring to one of Dahl’s own words ‘Gobblefunk’ which means to play around with words to invent new ones, with his spokesman commenting: ‘When it comes to our very rich literary heritage, the Prime Minister agrees with the BFG that you should not gobblefunk around with words.’
Piers Morgan Uncensored airs at 8pm on weekdays on TalkTV.
Source My Celebrity Life.