We started to see woke come into the James Bond movies with Daniel Craig, but the latest Bond books are a whole new deal. A white Bond has been replaced by a Black, gay disabled 004. I mean, this is the world of secret agents and it makes no more sense to have a disabled field agent, that a disabled SAS operative. I Googled it but could find no such reference. Oh, and a Pakistani Muslim 009; well that could be useful in that part of the world, but surely such an agent would stand out anywhere else, maybe attract attention? But rationality has gone, and the Bond books are now to be woke all the way down the line.
Maybe so, but, go woke, go broke. I don’t know any Bond fans who will be reading this nonsense; certainly not Jeff Costello:
https://counter-currents.com/product/the-importance-of-james-bond /
“Earlier this year word came that Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which controls the rights to the deceased author’s novels, hired sensitivity readers to go through his books and purge anything that might offend the souls who write angry letters to the BBC over reruns of Fawlty Towers. (The ‘war’ must forever go unmentioned as ‘The Germans’ episode was pulled by the BBC.)
The newly republished novels warn those with thin skin looking for politically correct adventures that, “this book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.” Various awkward racial references had been scrubbed away leaving a bowdlerized Bond that could be safely read in any safe space.
Now that old Bond is dead, a new woke Bond can safely rise. Even though Ian Fleming has been dead since 1964, the estate turned to other authors to prime the giant money pump. Initially new Bond novels were written by prestigious writers like Kingsley Amis or former military men like John Gardner, but in more recent years turned to anyone willing to write woke for cash.
The latest of these come from Kim Sherwood, a University of Edinburgh lecturer who is interested in “women’s stories” and was authorized to write a feminist James Bond trilogy.
How do you write a feminist trilogy around one of the least feminist fictional characters around?
Easy, get rid of him.
Sherwood’s feminist trilogy of Bond novels has the superspy go missing while she invents new zeroes to take his place. Sherwood’s “feminist perspective” on James Bond gets rid of the white man and offers an “ensemble cast of heroes who we can all identify with.”
Ian Fleming Publications Ltd and Sherwood might want to look back at how that gimmick worked for the Pink Panther movies made after the death of Peter Sellers. But Bond didn’t actually die, he’s just been canceled. When he’s not turning woke, he’s just making way.
“I want to bring a feminist perspective to the canon,” Sherwood pitched, to “create a space for all of us to be heroes.” The technical term for that is a “Mary Sue” character. But do female readers of the Bond novels really want to be superspies, gunning down villains and surviving torture?
Ready or not, Sherwood debuted the new zeroes who prioritize “inclusivity, female heroes, and heroes of colour” including a black gay disabled 004 and a Pakistani Muslim 009.
Sid Bashir, the Muslim replacement for James Bond, remembers standing by his mother’s side at an Islamic cultural fair under a banner reading, “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic.” Another scene quotes the Koran and has Bashir saying, “May Allah bless your family.”
“I was born poor, black and gay, I know about hard times,” 004 who, it is important to note, is black and gay says. This isn’t just bad writing, it reads like a right-wing parody of wokeness.
In the new feminist novels, Miss Moneypenny has been promoted, Q has been replaced by a computer, and Bond by a woman, a black man and a Muslim man.
One scene takes place in a police station overrun by a leftist mob where “feminists, anarchists”, socialists and advocates for climate justice” have turned it into an “anti-capitalist party center.”
This is the woke utopia. Inclusivity means erasing everyone who doesn’t fit into this leftist vision of the ideal society.
“Bond has always been a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that can reflect us and shape us and I’m so excited to get to be part of that for a contemporary world,” Kim Sherwood argued.
The thing about fantasies is that they have to be grounded in something. The old Bond was a series of fantasies grounded in the Cold War and some espionage experience by Fleming, but wokeness is already a fantasy and Bond authors no longer know anything except politics.
Politics in Bond novels used to be subtext, but now it’s text.
Earlier this year, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd rushed to publication a new novel, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, to mark Charles III’s coronation. Every monarch gets the 007 writer that he or she deserves. Queen Liz got Fleming while King Charlie has to make do with Charlie Higson, a comedian, who famously accused Winston Churchill of being secretly gay.
The Bond novel celebrated Charlie’s coronation, dubbed “King Charles the Woke”, by going up against COVID conspiracists, immigration opponents, and critics of Black Lives Matter and the transgender movement who asked things like “What are we going to do about the Muslims?”
Conservatives are a pretty reliable demographic for James Bond novels, but much like the film industry, publishing is making it clear that it not only doesn’t want them as writers, but even as readers. That is even more true of the Big 5 publishing industry in the United States.
If Ian Fleming, the actual Bond author, were alive today, he would be one of the villains. Fleming was anti-union, opposed to the welfare state and a conservative. But the old Bond novels upheld the primacy of Britain while in the new woke novels, the touchstones are no longer patriotism and country, but diversity.
“Bond was struck by something. It was a long while since he’d been at any kind of function that was almost exclusively full of men. It felt strange. There was not even a pretence at diversity here. Athelstan hadn’t been the least bit concerned about ensuring that half of the people he’d hired to carry out his coup should be women, or non-white, or disabled,” the novel has him say.
Fortunately, the new Bond novels more than make up for it with women, non-white and disabled superspies who battle the forces of ignorance and skepticism about mutilating children.
Heroically they penetrate super-secret fortresses and uncover plots to say politically incorrect things on social media after Islamic terrorist attacks. And they always take time out to remind you of their suffering as black, gay, disabled Pakistani Muslims who are the real victims.
Who needs Bond, James Bond, when we’ve got Victim, Woke Victim?”