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32 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 cartoonists 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 Islamic 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 angered 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 depicting enemy Others in WWII, what is striking is the pervasiveness of an unambiguous 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 appealed 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
