I never heard of Tintin while growing up in rural Nebraska. When I later encountered him on the syllabus of an English course during my undergraduate years (there is a whole field of Tintin studies manned by people called Tintinologists, Tintinolators, Tintinites or Hergélogues) he seemed like yet another Euro-import beloved of east-coast elites—-the Perrier of comic book characters.
Tintin is the well-intentioned humanitarian cum freedom-fighter, a boy whose clean-living would bring equal pleasure to Jonathan Edwards and Michael Bloomberg. Not only moralistic but moral, not simply well-intentioned but in fact helpful, he represents Western liberalism at its best. His international adventures exude deep confidence in international interventions.
What’s strange about this is that Tintin was in many ways a classic red-America type: embodying the values of Belgium’s Catholic scouting movement, he debuted in the pages of a right-wing newspaper as an exposer of Soviet Communism.
And so critics have come to speak of two Tintins. On the one hand is the good liberal, on the other the character associated with the racism of Tintin in the Congo and the supposed anti-semitism elsewhere in the series. Liberals want to claim Tintin as a liberal hero at some moments (he was awarded, alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the International Campaign for Tibet’s “Light of Truth Award” by the Dalai Lama) while explaining away all his mistakes as the effect of residual conservatism.
This is a misreading of the series, and one that stems from a misunderstanding of liberalism. For if we are to make a level assessment of our political tradition’s real accomplishments, we need to acknowledge its failings. Racism and anti-semitism are very far from foreign to liberalism, of which Tintin is perhaps a truer icon than is usually acknowledged.
