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James Bond books undergo rewrite to remove racist content

'The Daily Telegraph' revealed that the reissue of the Ian Fleming novels will feature a "disclaimer."

Placa conmemorativa de Ian Fleming en

(Wikipedia)

Published by
Rosana Rábago Sainz

The James Bond saga will also undergo woke censorship. Like Roald Dahl's books, Ian Fleming's stories based on the popular British agent will be rewritten and some of the content, which many have classified as "racist," will be removed.

The Daily Telegraph revealed the news. As reported by the British newspaper, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that holds the copyrights to Ian Fleming's works, decided to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Casino Royale, the first book in the series, by reissuing all the thrillers. However, instead of respecting the original wording, the company decided to commission so-called sensitive readers to review the classic texts before ordering their rewrites.

Sensitive readers are a group of people who carefully analyze each text, prior to publication, for offensive content, misrepresentations or stereotypes. They decided to reissue Ian Fleming's novels with by a "disclaimer" stating the following:

This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.

Racism and sexist attitudes, removed

In particular, the newspaper clarified, several passages that sensitive readers considered racist have been rewritten. In the book Live and Let Die, James Bond describes the aspiring African criminals in the gold and diamond trade as "pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much." This was rewritten and will now read as "pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought."

Another example comes from a scene in the same book. In it, Bond goes to a striptease at a nightclub in Harlem, New York. There, the original description claimed that the men became agitated with the following sentence: "Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry." The sentence will now read as follows: "Bond could sense the electric tension in the room."

These are not the only cases. As reported by The Telegraph the word nigger, which Fleming used to refer to black people when writing in the 1950s and 1960s, was dropped entirely. This expression was replaced, in most cases, by "black person" or "black man.” However, The Telegraph reported that other offensive expressions, were kept in the novels:

References to the “sweet tang of rape,” “blithering women” failing to do a “man’s work,” and homosexuality being a “stubborn disability” also remain.

Changes authorized by Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming Ltd. claims that the changes were authorized by the author of the novels, Ian Fleming himself. In fact, they claim that while Fleming was still alive, he allowed U.S. publishers to tone down racial references in Live and Let Die:

We at Ian Fleming Publications reviewed the text of the original Bond books and decided our best course of action was to follow Ian’s lead. We have made changes to Live and Let Die that he himself authorised. Following Ian’s approach, we looked at the instances of several racial terms across the books and removed a number of individual words or else swapped them for terms that are more accepted today but in keeping with the period in which the books were written. We encourage people to read the books for themselves when the new paperbacks are published in April.
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