The other day came the news that the library in Botkyrka municipality, on the outskirts of Stockholm, had burned older editions of one of the Pippi books, Pippi in the South Seas (1948), because local officials have decided that they \u201ccontain racism.\u201d<\/p>\n
After this action came to light, the municipality issued a press release acknowledging that the books had indeed been destroyed because they contained \u201cobsolete expressions that can be perceived as racist\u201d \u2013 but that they had been replaced on the library shelves by a 2015 edition of the book from which those expressions have been carefully scrubbed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Since Lindgren died in 2002, of course, she was not around to grant anybody the right to fiddle with her prose. Her publishers had simply taken it upon themselves to do to her work what a lot of people would love to do to, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Mark Twain, Lindgren was the very opposite of a racist. But her use of language in Pippi in the South Seas, like that in Huck Finn, violates the Left’s current ideological tests.<\/p>\n
The news of the Botkyrka book-burning was first reported on a July 9 broadcast by investigative journalist Janne Josefsson, who appears to be one of the few level-headed practitioners of that profession left in Sweden. \u201cWhen you burn books for ideological reasons,\u201d Josefsson later told Expressen, \u201cthere’s something in me that says, wait a second now, are we really going to let these things disappear? Shouldn’t they be allowed to survive so that that I can explain to my child that this is how you talked in those days?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To Big Left, history is just another egg to be broken to make the omelette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Swedes burn books to sanitize the historical record… …of\u00a0Pippi Longstocking. The other day came the news that the library in Botkyrka municipality, on the outskirts of Stockholm, had burned older editions of one of the Pippi books, Pippi in the South Seas (1948), because local officials have decided that they \u201ccontain racism.\u201d After this action […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-justice","category-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63796,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63795\/revisions\/63796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}