So I grew up loving the Babar the Elephant stories. We just checked Babar the King out of the library for our son and he loves it, too. The thing is, as I was reading it I was struck by how subtly it sounded like Marxist propaganda: all about the workers and a celebration of collective labor, overseen by a benevolent dictator and an intellectual ‘old lady’…
I suppose it would make sense. The story was written in 1933, during the first serious stirrings of what would become communism. I figured I couldn’t possibly be the first person to have this impression, so I hit Google trying to find others who have had the same impression and came up with…nothing! That’s the first time that’s happened.
The best I could do was the book Should we Burn Babar?
that actually has the opposite opinion saying Babar was a colonialist and actually arguing that the Babar books are the opposite of leftist, and in fact are evidence that there needs to be more of a leftist bent to children’s literature. The closest I came was a user review of that book on Amazon saying basically that Kohl (the author) had it all wrong.
Humph. So there you go I guess. Finally I’m the first on the Internet to have an opinion about something.
