Tintin, politics and human rights: reflections of a fan

After the war Herge was arrested several times for alleged collaboration, but he was never charged. In contrast, the editor of Le Soir was tried and executed. While one can fairly think ill of Herge's gutless stance during the war, he was not alone amongst artists who kept their heads down under Nazi occupation.

Tintin and Politics

On politics, Herge's pre-war King Ottakar's Sceptre does have a poke at fascism, with one villain (unseen) named Musstler, an apparent combination of Mussolini and Hitler. Communism is slammed in Land of the Soviets and totalitarianism in The Calculus Affair. In The Black Island, first published in 1937-38, the villain is German and the British are good guys, in contrast to the allocated nationalities in The Shooting Star.

Rampant capitalism is satirized in Tintin in America and is demonized by the war-mongering multinational oil companies in The Broken Ear and Land of Black Gold. Respectable and powerful businessmen are revealed to be drug smugglers in The Crab with the Golden Claws andThe Blue Lotus, and a slave trader in The Red Sea Sharks. The respective multi-millionaires in Flight 714, Laszlo Carreidas and Rastopopoulos, compete in a memorable scene over who is the most evil. Finally, Alcazar's rebel Picaros in Tintin and the Picaros are sponsored by the International Banana Company, perhaps an ironic nod to the manipulative role played by multinational fruit exporters in Latin American unrest, for example in Guatemala and Honduras.

Democracy is not necessarily promoted in the books. The benevolent Ottakar was still an absolutist monarch. Tintin also became good friends with two dictators who ruled with an arbitrary and bloodthirsty iron hand, General Alcazar and Emir Ben Kalish Ezab. The rule of these characters is hardly preferable to that of their eternal rivals, General Tapioca and Sheikh Bab El Ehr. However, Herge clearly acknowledged the failings in Alcazar and Kalish Ezab. Memorably, there is the classic denouement on the final page of his final completed volume, Tintin and the Picaros. Earlier in that story, Tintin and his friends fly into San Theodoros, where people live in devastating poverty under heavy policing with a sign towering over them, "Viva Tapioca". As Tintin flies out, having successfully engineered a bloodless coup by his friend Alcazar, the same people languish in the same poverty in the same police state, the only change being the sign, "Viva Alcazar".

The Blue Lotus, first published in 1936, portrays China prior to and during the Japanese imperial invasion. The set of panels where Japan engineers the Mukden incident as an excuse to invade China, and its staged walkout from the League of Nations, are masterpieces.

Tintin and Racism

Herge's sensitivity to the Chinese people in The Blue Lotus was ahead of its time, most evident when Tintin and his young friend Chang laugh at the racist and ridiculous stereotypes ascribed to Chinese people by Westerners. The book is also scathing in its representation of arrogant Westerners in the Shanghai International Settlement. Many decades later, Herge repeated the dose in his respectful portrayal of Tibetan monks in Tintin in Tibet.

Similarly, Prisoners of the Sun was ultimately sympathetic to Inca Indigenous culture, threatened by Western plundering of its treasures (though one might think that sun worshippers would understand an eclipse of the sun). Furthermore, there was acknowledgment of the mistreatment of Indigenous people in Tintin in America, ahead of its time in 1931, when they are pushed off their lands by unscrupulous oil speculators. Finally, Herge highlighted the instinctive racism suffered by the Roma in The Castafiore Emerald, who are forced to live on a garbage dump and are automatically accused, wrongly and without evidence, of the theft of a precious jewel.

Yet Herge was not, unfortunately, immune from racist stereotypes himself. Tintin's early excursion to South America in The Broken Ear (first published in 1937) brings him into contact with a primitive cannibalistic jungle tribe. However, the inner dignity of the Arumbaya tribe may be acknowledged by the fact that the "lost" explorer Ridgwell has abandoned his modern Western lifestyle in favour of living with them. While he is sympathetic to the Chinese in The Blue Lotus, the Japanese fare very badly.

Tintin in the Congo vies with The Shooting Star as Herge's greatest literary sin. First published in 1930, it depicts an arrogant Tintin gallivanting around the Belgian Congo chasing gangsters, dispensing his patronizing white man's wisdom to stupid and lazy monkey-like natives. Also notable is Tintin's bloodthirsty attitude to wildlife, blowing up a rhinoceros, shooting about a dozen antelope, and skinning a chimp to disguise himself.

While Tintin in the Congo is a colonial rant, it is undoubtedly a creature of his time. One cannot doubt that the book would have largely reflected contemporary Belgian attitudes to its colony, and a prevailing absence of concerns for animal welfare. However, should this dinosaur of a racist book be freely available today? In response to anti-discrimination complaints, some libraries and booksellers in a number of countries have removed the book from children's sections (see, eg, here). The strongest argument against its broad availability is probably not that the book will promote racism, but that it will provoke feelings of inferiority amongst children of African descent.