Oldal 28 [28]
OCR
26 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 Germans 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 involving 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 horribly 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
