That negative public response came from all sides of the political spectrum, of course. If this hypothesis is accurate, it seems as if the problem might have been that the publisher uncritically accepted the hostile framing of "woke." Turns out it's not actually about censorship.
That’s an interesting point. Of course, corporations are willing to accept socially progressive language as a business matter, but they aren’t really “of the progress movement” so to speak.
“ It feels like a bait and switch, ignoring the very real issues with the writer while labeling as bad, wrong or offensive words that have no such inherent value.”
I read this as: editors are changing just some words in order to save Dahl, who should be banned completely. And Salon author calls their own stance “against censorship”. Hm.
Honestly, more like a malicious compliance way of doing it; designed to generate that backfire and aim atleast part of the blast at the "wokies" or whatever bullshit term you want to label non-conservatives.
As I said on reddit about this:
Warner Bros. have done fine with the pre-amble to their older cartoons that says something to the effect of "yo, this was written back when attitudes were different, they were shitty attitudes, but to erase them is to pretend it never happened."
A similar preface in the books would have worked much better, but wouldn't give you any amount of PR like this.