The Commission for Racial Equality in the UK has taken on a decidedly sinister tone by calling for a Tintin book, Tintin in the Congo, to be removed from sale because it is racist.
A CRE spokeswoman said: “This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ‘savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles. “How and why do Borders think that it’s okay to peddle such racist material?
I am pleased to say Borders’ reply was a polite NO:
Naturally, some of the thousands of books and music selections we carry could be considered controversial or objectionable depending on individual political views, tastes and interests,” [a Borders spokesman said] “However, Borders stands by its commitment to let customers make the choice. After consideration of this title, we have instructed all stores to move it to the adult graphic novels section.”
Choice? CHOICE? That will never do! Clearly we need some more laws!
The fact is, Tintin is racist. So what? It is a very good illustration of the attitudes of the era in which these stories were written (Tintin in the Congo was published in 1930), which was during the Indian summer of colonialism (with apologies to the people of Tibet still under Chinese colonial occupation circa 2007).
I personally find books glorifying socialism hideous as history has proven again and again that socialism is repression and its end state is mass murder and horror. Maybe I should demand Borders stop selling those. Better yet, maybe books shops should not sell anything that offends anyone, which should limit them to selling phone books in all likelihood.
You can get your very own copy of Tintin in the Congo here (UK) or here (US) (I notice that Amazon in the USA wimped out and did not show the cover illustration).
Customers who bought that also bought Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which according to a reviewer has been “derided” as “anti-communist propaganda”. Seems like you can annoy all the right people by buying Tinitin books!
Get out while you still can, Perry.
I was never much in to Tintin as a kid,
I was more an Asterix lad myself.
So not being overly familiar with the out put,
I take it there are no titles like
Tintin and the end of Caliphate, or Tintin and the Mad Mullahs then?
Well there’s an Idea! I’m a reasonable cartoonist. What if I knock off the above two titles?
What would the CRE say then?
I was more an Asterix lad myself.
I once considered applying to go on Mastermind with Asterix as my special subject.
“Hergé’s adventures of Tintin” must now surely become a rallying cry against the stupid, self-preening people who issue lofty edicts and demand history changes to their distorted prejudices.
In fact, one day we will admit that organisations such as the CRE are really responsible for so much racial ill-feeling by continually stirring a pot that was likely to settle all on its own.
Next we’ll be burning books…
I wonder what these people would have to say about the four copies of Mein Kampf sitting on the shelf of my local Barnes and Noble. That book is even older, and arguably much more racist.
I think these CRE people have WAY to much time on their hands.
Perhaps they would like to further emulate their obvious heroes of the SS and the Inquisition and burn a few books.
Chris Harper:
Your first question on your specialised subject.
What was the ingredient in the Druid’s magical potion which was added to improve the flavour?
I think these CRE people have WAY to much time on their hands.
Perhaps they would like to further emulate their obvious heroes of the SS and the Inquisition and burn a few books.
Chris Harper:
Your first question on your specialised subject.
What was the ingredient in the Druid’s magical potion which was added to improve the flavour?
Censorship in the west is getting really really tiresome. The US Surpeme Court is slowly begining to claw back some of the ground that was lost under McCain Feingold, but it never should have been lost in the first place.
Censoring Tintin is probably being seen in France and Belgium as a sort of cultural war crime, rather than as supression of free speech, they do plenty of that, thank you very much. Titin is a sort of icon over there, The Blue Lotus and Titin in Tibet preached racial tolerance while other bits taught you francophones to hate ‘anglo saxons’
The Mysterious Star was orginally published under Nazi censorship. mmmm?
Titin is a classic BD and should be treated as such, but lets not make more of it than it is. Just a comic book.
Imagine the noise they would make if they ever actually read a book. Fortunately for those who do love to read, such groups are led around by people who are much too busy preening and polishing their piety to visit a library.
“What was the ingredient in the Druid’s magical potion which was added to improve the flavour?”
Lobster I think. But it would have a tough job to do: the mixture of petrol (“Asterix and the black gold”) and mistletoe (all of them) must have been pretty rank….
I actually find phone books a lot more objectionable than Tintin.
I remember someone trying to introduce me to Tintin at a young age. I read one book and was “what the *heck* was the point of that?”. I wasn’t quite sure whether I was too stupid to get the jokes or whether there weren’t any.
Asterix I fell in love with immediately.
The effort to ban, or more often to re-write, literature and history is a determined effort to control what everyone thinks. The actual result will be a population that, through ignorance of the past, is not capable of thinking.
This hack job is a prime example.
This sort will one day re-write the last line of Orwell’s 1984 to “As he should”.
Zinn? Hack job? Surely he is just following the Ellsworth Toohey school, ‘bringing history alive’.
“. . . the Ellsworth Toohey school . . .”
Just so.
For another example of racial stereotyping in early 20th century literature, try rereading Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Dr. Doolittle. The French hardly had a monopoly on such content.
I read both Asterix and Tintin
and loved them. The Tintin story The Red Sea Sharks was a superb adventure story, better than many a later James Bond.
Of course Tintin is hated. He has a white dog, called Snowy, who thinks for himself. The bastard…
Well, what do you expect from a country where they remove Churchill’s cigar just because they think it could encourage someone to smoke.
The “Tintin” books deal in sterotypes – not just of Africans, but of everyone.
For example, the British “Thompson twins” are a sterotype of British people of the time.
As for the Africans – sorry but some (although certainly not all) of them did do bad things (the sterotype did not come from nowhere).
If such things as the life of Lugard were not forbidden subjects these days people would know that this “evil British imperialist” (like many others) spent his life fighting against such “cultural practices” as human sacrifice and cannibalism in both East and West Africa. Not a racial point – there were similar practices in Europe in Celtic times.
However, it was insenstive (to say the least) for a man from Belgium to raise such matters. Considering the state of the Congo under King Leopold (before it was taken away from him by the Belgium government in 1908) – although (it should be remembered) that the mutilations and killings in the Congo were mainly undertaken by Leopold’s African employees. And since the Europeans left many (although not all) parts of Africa have seen things at least as bad as the Congo in Leopold’s time.
The danger of “anti racism” is that it leads people to be unprepared for the real word.
For example, I am sure George Walker Bush would be as shocked by the term “lying Arab” as the most P.C. New York Times reader – but this led him (and others) to put rather too much faith in the words of Iraqi exiles. Whereas an “old hand” (or “evil racist” as he would be called today) like the old friend of my family we called “Uncle Bill” would never put trust in the words of an Arab (even though he was friends with many in his time in Iraq) because “the culture is different – they say what they think you want to hear”.
Also modern people would never use the term “thieving Arab”, and it is a good thing that they do not say such nasty things (unlike school boys when I was young). But it is not good that they did not guard stuff in Iraq in 2003 (although leaving stuff unguarded in Western cities would not make sense either these days).
In short P.C. stuff is fine (very polite, how one should talk) – as long as you do not actually start believing it.
As a article in the “Daily Telegraph” today (by Lesley Thomas) reminds me, Herge himself started to come out with (and believe?) various P.C. things in his later years.
Not just on Africa – so it is not a racial thing.
For example, the author says of his book “Tintin in the land of the Soviets” that it was “a transgression of my youth” and “I was fed by the failings of the bourgeois society that surrounded me”.
Of course the real Bolsheviks were far WORSE than they are shown in “Tintin in the land of the Soviets” – they murdered tens of millions of people (and did all sorts of other horrible things). However Herge managed to convince himself that they were fluffy.
The facts were known in the 1930’s (not just in books such as “I Choose Freedom” but even in articles on the terror famines in popular newspapers such as the “Daily Express” – but some people managed, over time, to forget or to pretend to themselves that everything they had been told were capitalist lies).
Just as the Belgium people in the Congo in 1960 managed to convince themsleves that with the end of imperialism things would be basically O.K.
They did not understand that Leopold (evil though he was) had not come from Belgium in the years before 1908 and done nasty things himself – local people had done them. The Belgium people in the Congo in 1960 tended to have little idea what would hit them – or hit all the African people around them
Again being P.C. is fine – it is more than fine, it is the polite way one SHOULD talk. As long as one does not actually believe it.
No doubt some people will be disgusted with some of the things I have written above (although they are not racial points – white people in various cultural circumstances have done the worst things anyone could think of, for example the Bolsheviks were white). But remember the following:
You (the nice people) go through life being shocked by events in such places as the Congo or Iraq (or trying to blame them on Bush or whoever) – whereas these events are what I expect to happen.
I hate phone books. Bloody alphacentric bastards.
By the way, I have all the Tintin books – actually, my Son&Heir has them, because I used to read them to him as bedtime stories when he was little.
Favorite character: Bianca Castafiore. I have all her recordings, too.
I love Asterix. I read both English and French – and happily, the puns are different in the two languages, so I can read each book twice without repeating anything.
Asterix for me too.
And what must the censors make of the gloriously sexist Asterix book “La Rose Et Le Glaive”? And Uderzo wrote that only about 15 years ago, so no historical excuse for it.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, Caesar makes an army of women to conquer the troublesome Gauls, knowing they are too gallant to fight them; the Gauls solve the problem by organising a sale of fashion accessories and textiles to distract them. Brilliant, and a rare moment of genius in the otherwise rather disappointing post-Goscinny books.
Good news. It seems sales of the book are up as much as 3800% as a result. A fine vindication of what Paul Marks said about sometimes still being proud to be English. Keep it up!
One hopes this will teach the PC crowd that, if nothing else, living and let living is often a pragmatic strategy – even if they can’t grasp the principled ethical reason for adopting it. Even if they don’t really learn their lesson, anything that keeps them off our backs is welcomed.