Whinging Your Way to Utopia

If this Tintin story is as racist as the “campaigners” allege, and it is so grossly offensive to the general public, why then, hasn’t that a lack of demand pulled it off of the shelf? It was published in 1931 – after Marx’s Das Kapital, but before Mein Kampf which are also still on the shelf and have been exceedingly more harmful to civilization than a old-timey Belgian comic book.

An official British racism watchdog recommended on Wednesday that bookshops across the country remove copies of a comic book which tells the tale of fictional Belgian hero Tintin's adventures in the Congo.
Britain's Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) recommended that "Tintin in the Congo" be removed from shelves after it received a complaint from a member of the public who had seen it in a branch of the Borders chain of book stores.

To understand the meddlesome mindset of folks of the ‘campaigning’ ilk, the fact that it could go unpurchased or ignored would not enter their minds. While banning a comic book gives them the Tipper Gore air, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital would be defended as something use as a barometer of europe's history.

The same is true for all of three, whatever it is someone wants to ban. Besides, all three of these tomes seem to get scooped up by bipeds under 17 anyway.

(h/t to Ikonos.)

I still wonder how could ONE complaining customer be heard if certain well placed political outfits weren't willing to make something of it, and appealing to an already popular cause? In the pedantic world of contemporary advocacy the whole story can harldy be seen as some kind of brave challenge against a sea of iniquity, since one can hardly imagine any significant number of people in the western world in the past 20 years actually being for racism. Why too was Borders was targeted and not, say, an exclusively British bookseller? Probably because it would appear to come too close to home.