Down Orwell’s memory hole – ‘Ten Little Niggers’
Posted by admin978 on September 2, 2015 · Leave a Comment
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the all-powerful Party enforces political correctness by rewriting the past. Political deviations are rendered impossible by erasing true records of past events, eradicating cultural roots and traditions.
Today the world’s media acts as Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’.
One small but telling example is the worldwide publicity today for a poll to determine the public’s favourite Agatha Christie novel. The winner – as reported today by practically every English-language news site in the world – was And Then There Were None, which the BBC is now dramatising as a three-part series.
Not a single news site reported that this was not the book’s original title: it was first published in England in 1939 as Ten Little Niggers. It was only American sensitivity that led to alternative titles for U.S. editions – first as Ten Little Indians, then once this was deemed offensive to ‘Native Americans’ changed again to And Then There Were None – but the book was not retitled in England until 1985.
Such is the progress of political correctness: in the space of just thirty years we have adopted the liberal tyanny that not only forbids such a title as Ten Little Niggers, but insists that today’s audience shouldn’t even know of its existence.
