Reflection and Analysis

The Problem with "Going Woke" Censorship - 3/15/23

Because, I mean, what girl is going to look up to one of those women and want to go into a STEM field? And doesn't that send the message that being a woman in STEM is evil?

Because as someone says in the article "Why the use of sensitivity readers is causing such a stir in the publishing world" by Mark Gollum, a sensitivity reader's job is to take offense, to look for an offense where there is none, and is this really the kind of thing we want to teach kids? Because think of it carefully. We are teaching the overweight kid to take offense at Augustus Gloop, who within that particular satirical work is meant to represent the dangers of overindulgence, and thus being a character the fat kids aren't supposed to relate to.

This is in contrast to one of my favorite characters from Matilda is Bruce Bogtrotter, who manages to eat the entire cake and is presented to the children as a hero, albeit one that the horrible adult authority figure still seeks to crush until the bitter end.

And yet, as I think about that, having read Eleanor Cameron's complaint on Dahl's Wikipedia page about how Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its supposed "phony presentation of poverty", further complain about the morals laid out, such as overeating and overindulgence in television, I have to wonder if anybody who criticizes his work has bothered to remember his work is satire. That there is meant to be this exaggeration of things such as poverty to help get his point across.

Given the existence of Bruce Bogtrotter in another book, do we really believe that the messages shown in the other children, such as Agustus Gloop, that he meant these to be taken as an absolute, or that he actually considered children more intelligent than many give them credit for, that the writer was more focused on the dangers of excess of anything, with Cameron's complaint "that TV is horrible and hateful and time-wasting"--well, pardon me for turning a deaf ear to her complaint given the recent studies showing that too much TV is indeed a bad thing.

As for him being antisemitic, I believe context is important.

And I'm saying this as someone who is supportive of Zionism, which is "a nationalist movement that espouses the establishment of, and support for a homeland for the Jewish people centered in the area roughly corresponding to what is known in Jewish tradition as the Land of Israel, which corresponds in other terms to the region of..."

--well, his not agreeing with this and not being supportive of Zionism doesn't make him antisemitic as people are claiming. Nor does his taking issue with some of Israel's actions, such as how "they killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut," make him antisemitic, particularly when there are those of us, Jewish and not, who are supportive of Zionism who aren't supportive of that.

As for the other references I see on his page, I find myself question whether it's actually antisemitic, but I'll quote the Wikipedia page for both of these, but here is the first quote, the quote involving supposed antisemitic things in his book.

"Jeremy Treglown, in his 1994 biography, writes of Dahl's first novel Sometime Never (1948): 'plentiful revelations about Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust did not discourage him from satirizing "a little pawnbroker in Hounsditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone."' In a short story entitled "Madame Rosette", the eponymous character is termed 'a filthy old Syrian Jewess'.'"

The problem is neither of these examples works. And yes, I get that the Jewish pawnbroker or tax collector can be a negative stereotype, but this doesn't make every instance of a Jewish character being a pawnbroker or tax collector a negative stereotype. As with any trope, it should be measured on its own merits rather than the merits of the ones that have done wrong. Although, in this particular case, we're talking about one of his works I've not read.