Offensive language for offensive intentions

So Mark Twain’s classic story of a boy growing up in the American south during slavery is being rewritten… The adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being expurgated.  All the nasty offensive bits are being removed so it is more palatable to today’s more politically correct audience.  It will no longer offend our delicate sensibilities. Electing Bush twice and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in two illegal wars is palatable; the N-word in a classic work of literature however, is more than we can take.  To the 40% of the Americans who don’t believe in evolution history is a malleable thing. If they don’t like it, change it, it’s that simple.  

My problems with this idea are too numerous to mention, but they can be classified into two categories, literary and historical:
Literary:

1. You didn’t write it assholes! It’s not yours to change!
2. You don’t like it…. don’t fucking read it! No one is forcing you.
3. Oh, it’s required reading at your kid’s school so you are in fact being forced to read it, you say…That’s because it’s a classic work of literature, written by a brilliant man, depicting a time in history where such vocabulary and actions were the norm and your child will benefit enormously from the knowledge. And here is a novel concept for you… let your child make up his own mind about the book, he’s in high school and even though you are a limited troll-like creature with the IQ of a Texas School Board member, there might still be some hope for your child, who knows.
4. First amendment, free speech, freedom of expression… ring a bell?
5. Censorship is a bad thing, accept that as a fact, it’s true. Repeat after me “Freedom of expression….goood. Censorship…. baaad.”

Mark Twain was never politically correct, he was brilliant freethinker who questioned the government, society and his peers.  Through his brilliant body of work he gained worldwide fame, his works have been translated and admired around the world, he is an icon of American culture.  Which begs the question of the people who are expurgating his work: Who the fuck are YOU?

Historical:
The time and place of the story could never be politically correct by our standards, there were in fact slaves in the south and the N word was used in reference to them.  That cannot be changed. It already happened. It’s done. It can no more be changed than the US’s economy and international credibility can be restored after GWB.  It’s gone and cannot be altered.

Now as to the N word that is so offensive: it’s just a word, a specific group of letters to which a meaning is assigned. That group of letters can only be as offensive as the meaning that is assigned to it.  The only reason the N word is offensive is that it carries its historic connotation.  It is offensive because slavery and the demeaning subjugation of an entire population is offensive to us.  If historically it had been used to refer to puppies today we would probably think it’s a cute word. The group of letters alone is not offensive, the context and the history associated to that group of letters, on the other hand, is extremely offensive. So by removing the N word from its historic context, by expurgating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we are actually removing the characteristic that makes the word offensive, its association with slavery in the south. Remove slavery, subjugation, subservience, imprisonment, and the horrors of that social condition from the word and it will no longer be offensive. Similarly, remove the offensive word from the context of slavery and the context itself will be less offensive. Therefore any attempt to sanitize works like Huckleberry Finn is in fact an attempt to assuage the horrors of a slave past, and doing so is offensive to the memories and histories of the people who had to endure those horrors.  It happened! People lived through that humiliation and social depravity for centuries. And now these assholes come along with some whitewash to make it seem less than it really was.  No! The N word is offensive because its history is offensive, you cannot remove it from that context without making the context itself less offensive, and to do so is to spit in the face of millions of people who suffered and still suffer with the injustices of slavery.

It has been said that if we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it.  In this case it seems to me that some assholes are trying to sanitize the history of slavery in America to make it more palatable to the younger generation.  What exactly are their intentions?