In a new translation of Dante's “Inferno” into Dutch, the text about the Prophet Mohammed was deleted on the grounds that “not wanting to hurt unnecessarily”.
This worries the historian Christophe de Voogd, in view of this triumph of the new politically correct, which is directed solely against the Western heritage.
WORLD:
Would you say that behind the deletion of the Mohammed passage there is a desire for censorship?
Christophe de Voogd:
The word “censorship” is very general and in literary history refers first of all to interventions by religious or political authorities, i.e. a restriction of creative freedom that comes from above. However, this is the decision of the publisher, a member of civil society, which does not concern the expression of a living author, but rather the literary heritage itself, namely one of the most famous books of Western culture, the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. So it is a truly selective rewrite of the past, and in an Orwellian key.