Contemporary morality is an interesting beast. I was just discussing Tin Tin and looking at the chronological order of his stories, and while I enjoyed them as I child I have forgotten most now. In the process of this I discovered that his first story was about him traveling to the Soviet Union to take on some corrupt Soviets officials. Hergé it turns out wrote his Tin Tin stories for the children’s section of a conservative newspaper called Le Vingtième Siècle which at the time was attempting to gently align itself with the Nationalist cause, something far more shady and unsavoury than current versions despite all the protestations – although time will tell. Hergé himself was traditionally right wing and after the war was accused of being a collaborator for his participation in a nationalist newspaper in Belgium while under Nazi occupation. His first story was directly and intentionally anti-Communist, with his second even more controversial as he sends Tin Tin to The Congo.
There have been many calls to limit the production of this second story with it’s racist caricatures and stereotypes, not to mention the Belgian history of imperialism and genocide in the Congo only decades earlier. Looking at other stories of his it is likely his interactions with Native Americans would be politically incorrect, and most likely racist by modern standards and don’t even get me started on the horrors committed towards the Scots when Tin Tin goes north. The problem though is whether we should ban these stories. Were his trip to the Congo to be produced now there is no doubt it would be written with racist intentions and should be viewed and dealt with accordingly. Banned, I don’t know, because you enter a minefield of grey areas of hate speech and freedom of speech, but definitely a productive reaction would be necessary. Now it would be the same story with the same images, and it was written by someone with nationalistic and racially surperior ideals but the idea of banning it horrifies me. Perhaps I’m being an apologist for the times, as anti-fascism is not a new thing, but intentional or unintentional racism was arguably more commonplace now than then. The truth is we have no idea how people in the future will judge us for what appears normal and acceptable now as abhorrent in one hundred years. Winston Churchill is admired by many but he was a racist imperialist. The reality is many people were, and that isn’t an excuse because racism in any form is disgusting but Tin Tin was a man of his time. In many ways it is a fascinating historical document. Our morality is debatable, contemporary morality is evolving at ever faster rates, Tin Tin may have been a racist but he had a cool dog and a mate named after a fish, I’ll resist the temptation to throw him in the fireplace of time just yet.
Observations and Misunderstandings 