Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Roald Dahl and the limits of cancel culture

Roald Dahl in 1954 (photo: Carl Van Vechten)

Roald Dahl was a proud antisemite but if it’s real courage you’re after, look to his family who, a mere 30 years after his death, have finally acknowledged that the children’s author wasn’t keen on the Jews.

The Sunday Times reports that the family ‘recently met for the first time in several years to discuss the problem and published a discreet apology for his racism on his website’. In the statement, buried deep on the official Roald Dahl website, his family ‘deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements’, though they make no mention of what these ‘prejudiced remarks’ were or to whom they were directed. Indeed, as the Sunday Times reports, the statement was ‘never displayed prominently, or sent to the media or Jewish groups’. It sounds distinctly like an apology to be cited rather than seen.

Of course, had they gone into detail, there would be rather a lot to apologise for. Dahl told the New Statesman in 1983:

‘There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.’

He pronounced that ‘there aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere’ and claimed the truth about Israel’s conduct in the Lebanon War was being ‘hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned’. Turning to US politics, he inveighed against ‘powerful American Jewish bankers’ and declared the government ‘utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions’. He branded Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon ‘almost the exact carbon copies in miniature of Mr Hitler and Mr Goering’. At the same time, he suggested Jews lacked ‘guts’ because, ‘from my wartime experience, we saw almost none of them in the armed forces then’.

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