As a teenager I was fascinated by the books of my then favourite author Roald Dahl. Shining a flashlight on the beautifully illustrated pages, I absorbed every word he wrote underneath my blanket, giggling quietly, and hoping my mom wouldn’t notice I was still awake. Sometimes, I stopped reading to smell the paper. It smelled so much better than an iPhone screen.
At midnight, I was supposed to be sleeping already, but my curiosity to find out what would happen with little bookworm Mathilda, the Fantastic Mister Fox, the Big Friendly Giant, and many other characters that sprouted from Dahl’s creative genius, kept me wide awake… until Mister Sandman entered my room and finally, completely against my will, closed my eyes, and brought me dreams. I could’ve continued reading forever, if it wasn’t for him.
These were the wonderful, enchanting tales that brightened my youth. They made me travel to other universes, where everything I could imagine was possible. I didn’t read those stories, I lived in them. I tried moving objects without touching them, just like Mathilda did – unsuccesfully, of course, but I was convinced I’d succeed one day, as long as I persisted and focused hard enough.
I hedonistically imagined drowning into the same chocolate river Augustus Gloop fell into, how the warm, melted Côte d’Or praliné (the Belgian chocolate brand of my choice) would cover every inch of my body, and how delightful that would be. (Today, I would rather drown in a river of Ruinart blanc de blanc.)
Augustus Gloop was one of the characters in the book ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, in which he was described as being ‘enormously fat’. Because that’s how Dahl imagined him: an annoying, greedy little boy who also happened to be overweight. ‘Fat’ is a perfectly understandable and correct word in the English language, synonymous with heavy, chunky, bulky, or, as the Oxfod Dictionary defines, ‘having a large amount of excess flesh’. Fat is the opposite of slim.
I don’t remember having been offended by this description when I was reading the book, even though I was a chubby little girl, being quite aware of her chubiness, as my class mates didn’t miss an opportunity to remind me of it. Their remarks weren’t nasty enough to make me burst out in tears, but they were too unkind to be forgotten.
I obviously didn’t enjoy being called fat, but the word shook me up and made realise the time had come to make a change. As a result, I went cold turkey on Häagen-Dasz and Belgian fries, and replaced them with souops and salads. For six months, the only place in which I nibbled on chocolate bars was my imagination.
I also joined a spinning class. My efforts paid off: I lost more than 10 kilos and turned into a healthy, thriving, slim adolescent who no longer cursed her muffin top in the fitting rooms of clothing stores. At the same time, I let my hair grow and got rid of my glasses and (horribly painful) braces. Suddenly, the same girls who laughed at me, started complimenting me. I was so proud of my bodily metamorphosis, that would probably not have taken place without a fair amount of fat-shaming from my peers. It wasn’t kind of them to call me fat, but it might have been, well, necessary.
Calling someone fat is obviously insensitive and rude. However, it is no longer allowed to use the word fat in any context, even a fictional one. The adherents of the woke ideology of tolerance and inclusiveness, arguably the most intolerant, oppressive body of thought in the world today, want to impose the idea that the use of the word fat is no longer permitted, but that being fat should be applauded, that it is something to be utterly proud of. Even morbid obesity should be respected, and anyone daring to question their dogma of aesthetic equality, no matter the amount of kilograms displayed on their scale, is a bigot, like Roald Dahl.
Fat is beautiful, and fat is healthy – end of story. All of us are beautiful, since ugliness no longer exists. Neither does idiocy, brilliance, mediocrity or virtuosity – all human beings are equally intelligent, capable, and talented. Criticising anyone has become a crime. We are all walking on eggshells, our sincere apologies ready to be expressed for an accidental, obviously unintentional, slip of the tongue.
And Roald Dahl, according to his publisher Puffin Books, has made too many of those. His literary masterpieces have recently been scrutinised by ‘sensitivity readers’ – a term Orwell could’ve come up with – who were endowed with the task of deleting and replacing terms and passages that might disturb or offend any of the readers and make them want to hide in their safe space, trembling with fear, desperation, and anger.
The term ‘enormously fat’ has thus been replaced by ‘enormous’. Mrs. Twit is now ‘ugly’ instead of ‘fearfully ugly’, and the Oompa Loompas are no longer ‘little men but ‘little people’, which is more gender neutral (and which is, ironically, not considerate of the feelings of dwarfs, who might get hurt by that particular adjective). The words ‘mother ‘ and ‘father’ have been replaced by ‘parent’. (Political commentator Ben Shapiro hilariously remarked he was pretty sure Mathilda didn’t have transgender parents.)
Mathilda was a smart cookie who read books of great writers, among which Rudyard Kipling. But according to the wokies, Kipling was a sexist pig who dared using the word ‘man’ in his poems:
“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings, nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a Man, my son!”
So, Kipling unashamedly assumed his son’s gender! That is why his name was replaced with Jane Austin. (The poem ‘If’ is one of the most brilliant poems I’ve ever read, by the way.)
Roald Dahl wrote ‘Rudyard Kipling’, not ‘Jane Austin’. If Matt Walsch would have asked him what a woman is, he would’ve replied it was an adult female human being with breasts and a uterus. He also believed being overweight was often the result of gluttony, which is correct, because gluttony exists and it does accumulate lipocytes in the body, called ‘fat’. He did not write his books with neomarxist dogmas in the back of his mind! The censorship of his words is a lie, the deletion of his sentences a rape of his thoughts.
Hands off our cultural heritage!
We must not allow dangerous ideologues to infiltrate every level of society, to the point of altering original texts of children’s books, written by literary legends, in order to propagate their sickening ideas! What’s the next step? Rewriting history books so as not to hurt the losers of wars? Maybe deleting all negative-sounding words from the dictionary? It would certainly be far more efficient – if words don’t exist, we can’t use them in the first place.
The censorship of Roald Dahl is a dark omen for the future, predicting the establishment of govermental censorship offices that will check every book for any content that is inconsistent with the neomarxist ideology before it is allowed on the market. Prohibited books will not be burned, they will be deleted from a computer server with one single mouse click.
This is a clear manifestation of Orwellian Newspeak. It is Wokespeak, and the protest against it isn’t loud enough. Those who read Orwell’s chilling novel ‘1984’ will be familiar with the closing paragraph of this essay:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right”.