Thursday, July 12, 2007
Fahrenheit 451 - or "Book burning at Borders, by and by..."
What ho! Shocking news, old boy. That well-known purveyor of fascist propaganda, Borders, is up to it's beastly old tricks again. Peddling offensive literature about those chaps of a different skin colour, what?
Or put it more simply the Campaign for Racial Equality want to stop us reading Tintin!
I should add at this point that I've never been a great fan of Tintin, but this does seem a tad silly. I'm sure I could, as a consenting adult, buy a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - for all I know it's available as a Penguin Classic - or something by David Irving, who was banged up in Austria not so long ago for Holocaust denial. But to complain, when the offending (and offensive?) book has already been moved into the adult section...
Before you know it they'll be goose-stepping down Whitehall and burning Biggles books for being nasty about the Huns and Noddy books for daring to mention Gollywogs!
Except of course that some re-issues in recent years have bowdlerised Biggles and re-cast Imps for Gollywogs in dear old Blyton's writing...
Or put it more simply the Campaign for Racial Equality want to stop us reading Tintin!
I should add at this point that I've never been a great fan of Tintin, but this does seem a tad silly. I'm sure I could, as a consenting adult, buy a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - for all I know it's available as a Penguin Classic - or something by David Irving, who was banged up in Austria not so long ago for Holocaust denial. But to complain, when the offending (and offensive?) book has already been moved into the adult section...
Before you know it they'll be goose-stepping down Whitehall and burning Biggles books for being nasty about the Huns and Noddy books for daring to mention Gollywogs!
Except of course that some re-issues in recent years have bowdlerised Biggles and re-cast Imps for Gollywogs in dear old Blyton's writing...
(And of course I understand the reasoning of the CRE, and have no objections to careful and sensitive revision to books that might, might I hasten to add, mis-shape the young mind, but there do have to be limits. I'm not sure I totally agree with a statement I came across many years ago, but you will guess that I sympathise with it - "All books are books, and therefore sacred." Now I wonder who wrote that?)
Labels: Grumbles, Life, Recommendations
¶ 12:30 pm
