You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 14th, 2007.
Sales of a Tintin comic book have rocketed since the Commission for Racial Equality claimed it was racist, a newspaper reported Saturday.
Sales of “Tintin in the Congo” have shot up by 3,800 percent after the CRE watchdog claimed it contained potentially highly offensive material, said The Daily Telegraph.
It is hard to be a fairminded person and NOT feel it is highly bigoted at best, so by today’s standards the CRE arguably has a point. But it is important to bear in mind that, by today’s standards, quite a bit of literature and entertainment pre-1950s — …”It was first published in 1931 but was redrawn in 1946…” — would now be considered “racist”. What is most important, though, is to confront that fact, not try to “ban” such material (good luck trying to “ban” it) in order to try to pretend it wasn’t like that.
The comic has reached number eight on Internet retailer Amazon’s most popular books list, the broadsheet reported.
A CRE spokesman accepted that its interjection could have sparked the rise in sales.
“It is a delicate balance but because we had a complaint from a member of the public we felt we had no choice,” he said, according to the newspaper…
“A complaint from a member of the public“? As in a single person? The CRE may not look at it this way, but if I were that person, right about now I would probably be pretty peeved: How stupid are you people?, stimulating sales by giving it free publicity; that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind in making the complaint. Thanks a lot.
A few of the many criticisms levelled at Franklin D. Roosevelt:
…Roosevelt … was attacked for his economic policies, especially the shift from individualism to collectivism that he represented with the dramatic expansion of the welfare state and regulation of the economy. Those criticisms remained strong decades after his death. However as the old generation died out so did these debates. One factor was the rise of Ronald Reagan, who greatly admired Roosevelt and who dominated conservative thinking by 1980.
Today, Roosevelt is criticized by Libertarians for his extensive economic interventionism. These critics often accuse his policies of prolonging what they believe would otherwise have been a much shorter depression…
…As World War II began, Roosevelt was among those concerned at the growing strength of the Axis Powers, and he found ways to help Great Britain, the Chinese Nationalists, and later the Soviet Union in their struggle against them. This prompted several ambiguous isolationist leaders, including air hero Charles Lindbergh, to criticize him as a warmonger who was trying to push America into war with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. This criticism was largely silenced in the public arena after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but was occasionally replaced by the private belief that FDR knew of the attack beforehand…
…Michael S. Sweeney … accused Roosevelt of misusing the Office of Censorship during the war. Sweeney says Roosevelt used it to censor media coverage of his travels in order to conceal his deteriorating health and to hide visits with his former mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherford.
Upon Roosevelt’s death in 1945, H. L. Mencken predicted in his diary that Roosevelt would be remembered as a great president, “maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln,” opining that Roosevelt “had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.”…
Particularly interesting, that last one. To Mencken, FDR admirers were “morons”. Similarly, Republicans today are often labelled as much the same by many who also claim loudly to admire FDR.
Recent Comments