Oldal 34 [34]
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Christie Davies
they are an utterly trivial matter. Images—like humour—are a thermostat telling
us what the temperature of a conflict is (Davies 2001, 2011); their contribution to
the conflict is very limited. Those who study images are always likely to be tempted
to exaggerate the degree of their feedback into the conflict because it makes their
own scholarly efforts seem more relevant. The recent vicious murder of the car¬
toonists of the French periodical Charlie Hebdo by Muslim terrorists, angry at the
cartoonists’ mockery of their prophet Muhammad, is merely an epiphenomenal
incident in the endemic clash of civilisations (Huntington 2002) between the Is¬
lamic world and that of the Western world of freedom and democracy. The Charlie
Hebdo cartoons were not persuasive incitement to carry out a violent deed. Rather,
they angered the Muslim enemy, much as Boris Efimov’s cartoons in WWII an¬
gered the Nazi leadership. If Hitler had won he would certainly have carried out his
threat to kill Efimov. Bad luck for Efimov but hardly a contribution to a war effort.
Anti-Semitism in Wartime: The Jews as the Enemy Within
If we now turn to the propaganda influenced cartoons and images produced in
wartime by the Nazis and their allies and collaborators from all over Europe de¬
picting enemy Others in WWII, what is striking is the pervasiveness of an unam¬
biguous and thorough-going racist anti-Semitism (Judd 1972: 135-138). For the
Nazis’ supporters and propagandists, anti-Semitism is their core ideology and in
their posters the Jew is made responsible for the war and the attacks on Germany;
he is shown as the enemy also of Croatia, the Ukraine, the Low Countries, France,
indeed of any country that has a tradition of vicious anti-Semitism that can be ap¬
pealed to. The Jew is shown as controlling Britain, the United States and Russia
and binding this unnatural alliance together (Aulich 2007: 39, 180; Bryant 2005:
90). In Figure 5 the Jew gobbles them all up. In the posters and cartoons it is
claimed that Churchill and Roosevelt are themselves in reality Jews, or at the very
least the mere puppets of the Jews (Bryant 2005: 77, 132; Judd 1972: C24).
In another image entitled The Jewish Plot against Europe, Britain’s John Bull
shakes huge hands with the Soviets over the map of Europe, an alliance set up by
the sinister Jew whose head hovers in the sky above. Yet another reads Behind the
power of our enemies lies the Jew. A caricatured Jew peers through a set of allied flags
as if hiding behind a curtain.
The anti-Semites repeatedly claimed that the Jews had caused the war and were
the instigators of the bombing of German cities by the RAF and USAAF (Bryant
2005: 98). The Western enemies were not hated in their own right and were not
even seriously rejected Others but were puppets of the Jews who were the seriously
hated super-Other.
For the Nazis the familiar, cultured German Jews who had repeatedly proved
their loyalty to Germany, far from having been assimilated, are represented as the
poor, traditional, strange-looking Jews of the stetlach of Galicia in disguise and
now secretly undermining Germany. The Jew never changes. He is the Der Ewige