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Christie Davies
Soviet (Vaksberg 1994) or Sunni and Shia Muslim (Wistrich 1991: 206-239) all
the ills of the world, whether a defeat in war, an economic crisis, unwanted social
change, political decline, moral failure are to be blamed on the Jews, even though
the causes clearly lie elsewhere. Hence the continuous use of the same images of
hate that pass from group to group, and move easily between religious and secular
ideologies. Ihe anti-Semitic examples (Fig. 8 from Catholic France, Fig. 9 from
Catholic Austria and Fig. 10 from the Soviet Union) all denounce imagined and
fictitious Jewish traitors. No other nation in Europe or the Middle East has been
consistently treated in such an extreme way (Wistrich 1991).
We are looking here at an Other different from the rest; an image that is para¬
noid. Anti-Semitism goes way beyond the resentments found elsewhere of mid¬
dlemen minorities or of immigrants whose numbers continually increase and who
refuse to assimilate or are of incompatible religions. Such resentments may well
be legitimate but the resenters cannot draw on an ancient but flexible hatred and
develop the delusion that the Other is immensely powerful and sinister. Only anti¬
Semitism does that. Within Europe anti-Semitism is a crime sui generis, a unique
phenomenon that led to a unique tragedy and this is reflected in the distinctive and
different images of the Jew as Other.
Images Generated by Europe’s Other Paranoid Oppressor—Soviet Socialism
The only other murderous insanity in twentieth century Europe even comparable
with anti-Semitism was Soviet socialism, which also led to the death of tens of mil¬
lions of people (Rummel 1990) and collapsed through its own intrinsic rottenness.
Soviet images of the Other also reveal the enemy as hiding a sinister self. Trotsky is
shown as a secret Nazi (Efimov 2005: 27, 56, 59, 63) and as conspiring with a host
of ‘fascist’ enemies of Stalin’s Soviet Union including the Japanese (Efimov 2005:
57) in which each is drawn as one of the many heads of a squamous hydra, that
mythical snake-bodied being. Countering them in the cartoons is their antithesis,
the NKVD, the secret police, the sword of the party, hard where they are (suppos¬
edly) slimy and squelchy, straight where they are entwining and entrapping, clean¬
ly sharp where they are venomous. The sword like the lance is the open and direct
weapon of the heroic chivalrous warrior; it is the opposite of the knife, the hidden
weapon of the assassin; the knife of the ‘knife in the back’. The honest sword is
the aristocrat’s weapon, as against the flail or pike of the peasant or the longbow
of the men of the mountain who hide in the rocks until the gallant knight goes
by. How curious to see the NKVD represented as or using a knightly sword (like
the Stasi, which called itself the sword and shield of the party in the DDR), even
though Soviet socialism meant the return of serfdom, and how ludicrous given that
the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB were the most secretive and underhand
of organisations. They infiltrated every institution and came for their victims at
night. Totalitarian images of the Other not only lie but also invert the truth. This
strange merging of enemies and their ideologies into a single enemy, even when the