Oldal 31 [31]
OCR
Constructing Images of the Other in Peace and War distorted anti-German way (Ponsonby 1991: 65—93). After the end of that war Hitler in his famous rant Mein Kampf (1974 [1925-1926]: 165-168) expressed his admiration for Britain’s propaganda representing the Germans as barbarians and Huns and contrasted it with what he saw as its feebler German and Austrian counterparts. Propaganda posters designed for the state have a single, aggressive purpose, far more direct and lacking ambiguity than is the case for cartoonists, unless they are under direct control, as, say, Stalin’s favourite cartoonist the wonderfully talented Boris Efimov was. In the Anglo-Saxon countries the image of the savage ape (see Fig. 2) was used as a way of getting men to enlist as volunteers or people to lend money (Bryant 2006: 111) to finance a war that did not directly concern them and which, a reasonable man would have realised, they should never have entered in the first place (Ponsonby 1991). The images were also sometimes used in cartoons and had a new lease of life in WWII. In peacetime the German image had been quite different even though there was very strong economic rivalry between Britain and Germany, exacerbated by the high tariffs placed by the Germans on British exports at a time when Britain allowed free trade; in British cartoons such as Figure 3 the German economic rival was shown as a plump merchant contentedly smoking a distinctively German pipe (Philippe 1982: 210-211). Making the enemy look simian is a fairly standard response to a violent conflict. When there were periodic violent conflicts in Ireland in the mid to late nineteenth century over sovereignty particularly at the time of the Fenian outrages in the 1860s, the Conservative and Unionist illustrated periodical Punch used similar images of the Irish (Curtis 1971) as in Figure 4 in which an Irishman wearing a hat labelled ‘Anarchy’ confronts Britannia in her helmet who is comforting a weeping Hibernia and holding a sword inscribed The Law. British Marxists and Republicans (Curtis 1985) have labelled these images as ‘racist’. They are not. They are a standard image used when there is a strong political conflict of any kind not just between nations but between political factions. Hibernia, the female image of Ireland used by Punch, does not look simian (Wynn Jones 1971: 195), nor would Castle-Catholics or Irish RICs have been portrayed in this way, but only those who were violently trying to destroy the union of Ireland with Britain. Conan Doyle (the inventor of Sherlock Holmes and his opponent the Irish villain Moriarty, whom he based on Nietzsche) was of Irish descent and a staunch Unionist. No one ever used Conan Doyle’s ancestry or race against him, as they would have done in an anti-Semitic country, indeed in Ireland itself, if he had been Jewish. Conflicts between nations are often just that, conflicts over territory or sovereignty without any underlying sinister ideology being involved. When the British conflict with Ireland receded, the savagely apish image reverted to being benign and is often linked to portrayals of the unskilled Irish immigrants with a long upper-lip, working with pick and shovel (McLachlan 1973) or in social controversies involving equally long upper-lipped Irish-American priests and 29
