Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

> This is truly depressing. It’s 3AM here and I can’t fall asleep.

This is the symptom of a social media problem that you have, you should stop reading stuff that makes you that agitated.

Ok, I read the article [1] linked in that comment and I think it's mostly junk. To give one example, the author's picking on the large noses and wigs of the witches as somehow mirroring negative portrayals of Jews is a massive stretch. The stereotypes of witches include all sorts of negative prejudices against older women. Older people have larger noses (and ears), as their faces 'shrink in' a bit (and I think cartilage also can keep growing). Losing their hair or having 'strange' hair is also a prejudicial stereotype against older, unmarried, 'strange' women (because hair is considered such a defining aspect of 'normal' femininity).

The linking of 'secret societies who run the world' to an anti-Jewish message (to the readers of the books) is also a huge stretch and I think it wrong. That the people who actually 'run the world' are hidden was evidently part of Dahl's mindset. It's not an unusual mindset. Dahl attributed some powerful Jews as (at least part of) that 'secret society' in the real world, yes. I've read those anti-Jewish quotes from Dahl before and his thinking on the matter is pretty clear. But Matilda is a work of fiction. It's not at all strange that he reflected those 'secret power group' conceptions in one of his books with a cabal of witches actually running a fictional book world. But I don't think he in any way intended the book to be an explicit analogy to what he thought about our actual world situation, i.e. I don't think witches are meant to be a stand-in for Jews, and the big noses and wigs thing is pretty weak sauce to use to make that case, as I've already addressed. Contrast Matilda here to Orwell's Animal Farm which was written as an explicit analogy to the real world, and Orwell made clear links, e.g. Snowball == Trotsky, showing that he intended it as such. While Orwell's work is partly a warning against communism (and partly just a good story, well told), Dahl's Matilda isn't a warning against 'powerful secret societies who run the world', let alone Jewish ones; the secret, malignant society is simply a good fictional plot device and one that's been used many times before (sometimes with explicit prejudice, sometimes not).

[1] https://www.heyalma.com/is-roald-dahls-the-witches-antisemit...

I can't square that with their last sentence.

Moreover, when I feel empathy with someone who feels different and unrecognized by society, something still keeps me from advocating for the censorship and misrepresentation of a writer's ideas and internal logic.

I think what's stopping me is the knowledge that if I'm fortunate enough to write something that lasts beyond me, I sure as heck don't want anyone updating it for the sensibilities of 2053. Putting myself in someone's shoes, I think there's a word for that

> nothing is lost in the changes

This; the old books still exist. No one is coming for them.

The copyright-owners have simply decided that the new editions of the books will be different.

Hell, this might even be a simple cash-grab: if the books aren't selling as well now, and their royalty checks are shrinking, they may have done some basic market research and determined that the perceived crassness of the works was turning off modern book-buying-parents, and decided they could make more money with a revised edition.

If you don't like it, there will be thousands, millions of old copies at used bookstores and libraries; most old books don't get new editions, anyway. And if that's not good enough, by around 2060 most of the copyrights will have expired (his work spans the 1978 copyright change), and you can republish them with whatever changes you like to your heart's content.

Even in pretty far left and woke spaces I've seen most be against this. I don't even know who asked for this.