James Bond novels rewritten with newspeak

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are being rewritten with newspeak semantics after a review by “sensitivity readers” declared some words and phrases too “racially insensitive”.

Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company which owns the rights to Fleming’s literary works, is overseeing the rewrites of the books for their re-publication in April to mark 70 years since Casino Royale, Fleming’s first book in the James Bond series, was published.

Ian Fleming himself was known to approve some changes to the texts before his death in 1964, such as replacing certain racial slurs in Live and Let Die with the term “black man” or “black person”.

Now The Telegraph has revealed some of the new semantic changes.

In Casino Royale phrases like the “sweet tang of rape“ and "blithering women” failing to do a “man’s work” will be removed as will references to same-sex attraction being a “stubborn disability”.

In Live and Let Die Fleming refers to Africans as “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much.” The phrase will now read “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”

In another scene, Fleming’s Bond describes his experience at a striptease in a Harlem nightclub:

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 pigs reference has now been replaced with: “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”

“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 authorized,” said the company.

“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.”

The new versions of the Bond novels will now feature a disclaimer:

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.

News of the Bond rewrites comes the week after it was reported that children’s literature classics written by famed British author Roald Dahl will be revised to reflect globalist newspeak.

The decision to censor the books was made by the Roald Dahl Story Co., which manages Dahl’s estate, copyrights and trademarks, and Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books. The two companies are working with an organization called Inclusive Minds, which monitors children’s books for unapproved speech. 

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance, Augustus Gloop is no longer “fat” but “enormous”. Oompa-Loompas are no longer “small men,” they are “small people”. Similarly, the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach are now “Cloud-People”. 

The following sentence was completely removed:

“Mike Teavee himself had no less than eighteen toy pistols of various sizes hanging from belts around his body, and every now and again he would leap up into the air and fire off half a dozen rounds from one or another of these weapons.”

The witty foxes in Fantastic Mr. Fox have been changed to female. In Matilda a reference to renowned male author Rudyard Kipling has been removed, and a reference to famed female author Jane Austen has been added. “Eight nutty little idiots” have become “eight nutty little boys”.

The “fat little brown mouse” in The Witches is now a “little brown mouse”. The sentence, “‘Here’s your little boy,’ she said. ‘He needs to go on a diet’” has become, “Here’s your little boy.”

A description in Matilda of Miss Trunchbull’s “great horsey face” has now just become her “face”. Where a character “turned white”, they now “turned pale”.

In James and the Giant Peach Miss Spider’s head is no longer described as black, and neither are the two black tractors mentioned in the story. The Earthworm, instead of having “lovely pink skin”, now has “lovely smooth skin”.

In The Twits Mrs. Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but “beastly,” and a “weird African language” is no longer weird.

In The Witches the narrator asks, “‘But what about the rest of the world?’ I cried. ‘What about ‘America and France and Holland and Germany? And what about Norway?’” The sentence has now been censored to remove the names of the countries.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed,” commented author Salman Rushdie.

Even globalist UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak opposed the censorship.

"When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the prime minister agrees with the BFG that you shouldn't gobblefunk around with words," said a spokesman for the prime minister Monday, using a word coined by Dahl.

Following significant backlash, Puffin's umbrella corporation Penguin Random House announced it will continue to publish the original texts in print so that readers have a “choice”.