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Christie Davies
Constructing Images of the Other in Peace
and War: Anglo-Saxon Perceptions and Their
Relevance to Eastern and Central Europe
Unless an Eastern or Central European country has been involved in one of the
wars in which Britain or America has taken part, it is not likely that its image will
be found in British or American cartoons and caricatures, or indeed in those from
Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The Anglo-Saxon producers and consumers
of these cartoons and caricatures are largely ignorant of the caricatured identities
and appearances of the peoples concerned, or the conflicts between them. We all
tend to lump geographically distant peoples together into a single undifferentiated
Other. Likewise, quite apart from the language problems, Anglo-Saxon observers
will not even understand the visual aspect of cartoons generated in Eastern and
Central Europe because they do not know the political and historical background
to them. They do not, for example, know about the conflicts between Poland and
Lithuania over Vilnius, Poland and the Czechs over TéSin, Poland and the Ger¬
mans over Upper Silesia or Poland and the Ukraine over Eastern Galicia (Davies
1981: 390-394). In fairness to the Anglo-Saxons, I doubt if people in Finland
understand the Macedonian question or Slovaks know much about the Estonian
and Latvian border dispute over Valga/Valka that had to be settled by Sir Stephen
George Tallents CB, CBE.
The British and the Americans have, however, shared in the conflicts involv¬
ing the two great aggressors in the region, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,
and have produced their own images of these two malign totalitarian powers, as
well as being well aware of the vividly illustrated hostile propaganda the aggressors
themselves produced. There is a particularly strong awareness in the Anglo-Saxon
world of the anti-Semitic images that permeated Europe and which became hor¬
ribly intensified in the 1930s and even more so during WWII. In these, in many
senses hateful images, disseminated in much of Europe, the Jew was depicted as
a hyper-Other; a universal, omnipresent enemy.
In addition, the British and the Americans know full well from their own
experiences of war, particularly WWII and notably in relation to the Japanese, just
how the lenses, mirrors and prisms of war change the way enemies are perceived as
their otherness is magnified and distorted. These mechanisms will apply also to the
images generated within Eastern and Central Europe under the stress and enhanced
enmities of war. Thus, both directly and indirectly, the Anglo-Saxon observer has