Yes. Each time a socialist or a communist reads him.
Tintin is a character that everybody can re-appropriate.
As he's an incomplete human, made only of the qualities everybody values (with none of the qualities-some-view-as-flaws and flaws-some-view-as-qualities), he's a flattering mirror to everyone, and compatible with pretty much any ideology.
That's both his limitation and his strength, the reason of his success and of his criticism.
He's consensual to an extreme.
Almost all of his stances and actions can be interpreted through different angles. Take the Zorrino incident, with the fruit basket. Tintin can be "protecting a helpless representant of the Indian minority against two representatives of the dominant white ethnocidary culture", or be just "defending the weak against the strong".
Someone sensitive to racism issues in South America will read the former, someone racist will focus on the latter.
Someone else can even go as far as criticizing the scene for typically showing "weak passive indigeneous people unable to stand for themselves without a western intervention".
That's why I talked in some other post of the "rorschach blot" aspect of Tintin.
Socialists, communists, liberals, conservatives, fascists, Nazis, all would have you believe they are for justice and peace.
However, they disagree on what it means (what the injustices are, what the threats to get rid of are, what the causes of misery are, etc).
Tintin is abstract enough to be a symbol for all of them. The baddies in
Shooting Star can be the bankers and the powers of money if you're left-winged, or Jews if you're right-winged (yeah, take
that, right-wingers).
In both cases,
Shooting Star is enjoyable to read.
I think the only exceptions would be
Soviets, as Stalinists don't like it much,
Blue Lotus, which was criticized then for its anti-Japanese politics, which, according to Hergé, was going against Belgium's official position, and
Congo for being clearly pro-colonialism.
There's some direct - and hilarious - sarcasm against racists in
America, but it has disappeared in the English translation.
Look, the only thing we know of Tintin's political engagement is that he has a pacifist symbol on his helmet. And yet, people have posted about Tintin not being a pacifist.
Nothing will stop a reader from building "his" Tintin in his mind, and that's cool.
As for Hergé's original intentions, all I know is that Tintin is strongly anti-consumerist. And it's certainly no coincidence if a hippie is mistaken for him in
Picaros.
If I may quote (and horribly clumsily translate) the Sadoul book again:
Sadoul: Do you think that the "powers of money" lead the world ?
Hergé: I'm convinced of it. Not in the extravagant way that we see in "Tintin" albums, but economy leads the world, industrial and financial powers condition our way of life.
These gentlemen, of course, won't wear hoods when they meet in their directors boards, but the result is the same as if they did.
To produce is their main goal. To produce always more. To produce, even if one must, for that, polute the rivers, the sea, the sky, even if one must destroy the vegetation, the forests, the animals.
To produce and to condition us, to make us "consume" more and more, more cars, more deodorants, spectacles, sex, tourism...
It is against that form of "civilisation" - if it can still be called "civilization" - that part of the youth is revolting today, especially in the USA.
Let's not be fooled: active protests, long hair, denims, hair-bands, conscientous objection, pop-music, the research of some eastern philosophies, even drugs are many signs of this youth's rejection of this way of life.
This youth refuses to let itself be reduced to the role of consumerist beast.
Sadoul: And is Tintin against the society of consumption too ?
Hergé: Absolutely against, of course! He always took sides for the oppressed. And the oppressed, in that very case, are all of us, victims that we are of this form of society.
Well, that's something, I suppose.
What I think is that Tintin is nothing specific: technically, he's the "common denominator" between all of Herge's ideologies and sensitivities throughout the years. And Hergé evolved a lot. For any real or fictionnal character to
be anything (right-wing, left-wing, any specific current), he has to be Tintin
plus something.
