Dambusters pilot Guy Gibson's dog "Nigger" (latin for black) is to be renamed "Digger" in a remake of Dambusters just in case it offends anyone in America.
Where to start with this kind of thinking? Who really is going to be offended by this? It's a dogs name not a racial slur. And so called because Nigger is latin for black not because Guy Gibson associated black people with Dogs.
It must surely be incredibly patronising and insulting to any black person that the writers of this remake, Stephen Fry and Peter Jackson think they won't be able to cope with this and need people like Stephen Fry to be offended on their behalf. Only PC obsessives could find a problem here where their clearly isn't one.
You can't just re-write the past anyway simply because by today's values it might be unpalatable. No one in America has done that with any other historical film I can think of. Full Metal Jacket and Platoon seemed to do OK at the box office.
The Dirty Dozen set during the same period managed to be fairly successful despite including the line spoken by Telly Savalas' character, "Sir, do we have to eat with niggers." And that really was racially offensive. Not much grey area with that question.
Even if Barnes Wallis owned a pet monkey called nigger and actually hated black people you still have to include it in the re-telling of the story if the monkey was relevant to the event because it would be a part of the history of it all.
Even though there is nothing to be offended about here Stephen Fry is intelligent enough to know we evolve from learning from our past prejudices, not from attempting to erase them. And so what if they were offended? Worst case scenario the black community in America don't see the film because the dog was called Nigger, so what? They wouldn't surely have expected the script writers to change the name for their sake would they.
So this must only be about money, being overly cautious so every one goes to see it. Which kind of betrays their laudable motives for changing the dog's name in the first place. I preferred Stephen Fry when he went into hiding because of being terribly confused. At least when he wasn't around he couldn't fuck up a decent war film.
Where to start with this kind of thinking? Who really is going to be offended by this? It's a dogs name not a racial slur. And so called because Nigger is latin for black not because Guy Gibson associated black people with Dogs.
It must surely be incredibly patronising and insulting to any black person that the writers of this remake, Stephen Fry and Peter Jackson think they won't be able to cope with this and need people like Stephen Fry to be offended on their behalf. Only PC obsessives could find a problem here where their clearly isn't one.
You can't just re-write the past anyway simply because by today's values it might be unpalatable. No one in America has done that with any other historical film I can think of. Full Metal Jacket and Platoon seemed to do OK at the box office.
The Dirty Dozen set during the same period managed to be fairly successful despite including the line spoken by Telly Savalas' character, "Sir, do we have to eat with niggers." And that really was racially offensive. Not much grey area with that question.
Even if Barnes Wallis owned a pet monkey called nigger and actually hated black people you still have to include it in the re-telling of the story if the monkey was relevant to the event because it would be a part of the history of it all.
Even though there is nothing to be offended about here Stephen Fry is intelligent enough to know we evolve from learning from our past prejudices, not from attempting to erase them. And so what if they were offended? Worst case scenario the black community in America don't see the film because the dog was called Nigger, so what? They wouldn't surely have expected the script writers to change the name for their sake would they.
So this must only be about money, being overly cautious so every one goes to see it. Which kind of betrays their laudable motives for changing the dog's name in the first place. I preferred Stephen Fry when he went into hiding because of being terribly confused. At least when he wasn't around he couldn't fuck up a decent war film.
