Tintin: Because the Truth Is Too Ugly for Children

Now that Steven Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn" is due for release, the original Tintin books are getting new attention and one in particular, Tintin in the Congo is being called racist.

"...critics of the 1930’s children’s comic, said the book portrays Congolese people as infantile and stupid."

Maybe the Congolese should be happy with "infantile and stupid," because if you look to current events in the Congo, that's practically praise compared with a description of the reality:

For example, in the article in the Economist, Congo: Atrocities beyond words, A barbarous campaign of rape, we learn "All sides—government troops, says the United Nations, as well as the militias—continue to use rape as a weapon of war on a barbarous scale. "

Local aid workers and UN reports tell of gang rapes, leaving victims with appalling physical and psychological injuries; rapes committed in front of families or whole communities; male relatives forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters; women used as sex slaves forced to eat excrement or the flesh of murdered relatives. Some women victims have themselves been murdered by bullets fired from a gun barrel shoved into their vagina. Some men, says a worker for the UN's Children's Fund (Unicef), have been forced to simulate having sex in holes dug in the ground, with razor blades stuck inside.

Yes. It makes one long for merely "infantile and stupid."