‘Gingin au Congo’

Last week, I blogged some excerpts from Newt Gingrich’s 1971 doctoral thesis on Belgian Colonial education policy in the Congo. I was delighted to see that Mother Jones‘s Dave Gilson was inspired to create a mash-up of Gingrich’s text and images from Herge’s horrifically offensive 1931 comic, Tintin in the Congo. (Sample frame to the left. I’m guessing that early Tintin title’s not going to be getting the Spielberg treatment any time soon.)

On another note, several people on Twitter have questioned whether it’s even fair to examine Gingrich’s 40-year-old writings. I agree it would be wrong to assume that Gingrich still agrees with the opinions in the paper. (For one thing, I’m guessing he no longer thinks global inequality is a greater national security threat than nuclear weapons.) But I also think that Gingrich’s frequent references to his own academic credentials, as well as his assertions that an understanding of Saul Alinsky and “Kenyan anti-colonialism” are necessary to understanding President Obama’s worldview, make his own early scholarly works fair game.