The Smurfs, the blue comic strip characters, are anti-Semitic and racist, treating blacks like moronic primates, a French author has claimed.Antoine Bueno, 33, a lecturer at the eminent Sciences Po political sciences school in Paris, says the blue figures represent an “archetype of totalitarian society imbued with Stalinism and Nazism.”…Bueno, a speech writer for François Bayrou, the leader of the centrist Modem party, says the Smurfs are like white colonizers of the 19th century in the way they view Africans.He also claims that the Smurfs’ arch-enemy, the wizard Gargamel, is a classic anti-Semitic caricature of a moneygrabbing Jew.Bueno writes: “Gargamel is ugly, dirty, with a hooked nose, fascinated by gold.”Papa Smurf, the village’s elderly white-bearded leader, is portrayed as a dictator, whose red hat and trousers are a nod to Stalin.Smurfette, the only blond female, created by Gargamel, to wreak havoc among his enemies is a misogynistic take on Aryan woman.
Personally, I always thought somebody must be living in a “mushroom village” to dream up a lost tribe of little blue people to begin with. But leave that aside for now; let’s just stick to the sociopolitical subtext here. What about Jokey Smurf? Haymarket-era anarchist, right-wing schizophrenic like the Unabomber, modern-day religious terrorist, trickster god, or simply the raw, destructive, mindless chaos at the heart of existence? Discuss.