Enemy Images In War Propaganda

In the post 9/11 world, the emotionally charged concepts of identity and ideology, enmity and political violence have once again become household words. Contrary to the serene assumptions of the early 1990s, history did not end. Civilisations are busy clashing against one another, and the self-proclaimed pacified humanity is once again showing its barbaric roots. Religion mixes with politics to produce governments that abuse even their own citizens, and victorious insurgents too often fail to carry out the promised reforms. Terrorists blow up unsuspecting pedestrians, and allegedly democratic nations threaten to bomb allegedly less democratic ones back to the Stone Age. Mass demonstrations materialise like flash mobs out of nowhere, prepared to hold their ground until the bitter end. Where does all this passionate intensity come from? To better understand how the ideological enmity of today is moulded, spread and managed, this book investigates the propaganda operations of the past. Its topics range from the ruthless portrayal of female enemy soldiers in an early-20th-century civil war setting to the multiple enemy images cherished by Adolf Hitler, and onwards, to the WWII Soviet Russians as a subtype of a more ancient notion of the Eastern Hordes. Of more recent events, the book covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the still ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. The closing chapter on cyber warfare introduces the reader to the invisible enemies of the future.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - General and Theories of International Politics, grade: 3,0, Malmö University, language: English, abstract: The following text will mainly concentrate on the concept of enemy image. In the Oxford Dictionary the word enemy is defined like this: An enemy is „a person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something“. Indeed, hostility and opposition play an extremely important role not only in our everyday individual life, but of course also in political relations – national and international – and social relationships. We a confronted with news about hostility and enemies every day by our newspaper, television, radio and the Internet because the phenomenon of enmity is present all over the world and can be seen as an ineradicable characteristic trait of humanity. The paper will firstly analyse the concept enemy image by consulting different authors and academic text concentrating on the question: How can we define an enemy image? Afterwards it will discuss, if one can recognize a certain similarity in the way political actors create an enemy image by the question: Which patterns tend to reoccur when enemy images are produced? Finally, the consequences of enemy images when they are accepted in society play a role. When we go back in history, we can find uncountable examples of enmities which had war, violence and suffering as consequence: Religious groups like Christians fought against Muslims in several crusades, whole nations have become hereditary enemies such as Germany and France after 1800 or several nations formed alliances to combat one big enemy like Hitler and his Nazi Germany during World War II. The next part of the essay will focus on an empirical example, namely the extreme right-wing party in Germany, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (the National Democratic Party). It will elaborate on how they deliver their views upon immigration, non-Germans and Germany itself by analysing their homepage (npd.de) in order to discover how they treat the concept of enemy image in their political program and try to find out in how far their adoption of enemy images fit into the results worked out the chapter before. I chose that party as my empirical example, because for me as a German, it is very interesting to see how the Nationalists try to justify their anti-democratic, non-multicultural and nationalist ideas by creating enemy images in order to gain voters and popularity amongst the population. [...]

Focusing on the intellectual dimension of the American war effort, this book examines how the US government created representations of its enemies, with particular emphasis on the âeoepathologiesâe of Japanese and German culture, mind and nature; and the subsequent consequences this construction had both for America's conduct of the war, and the peace that followed. It examines the process of enemy-making - or âeoeenmificationâe - as part of the American culture of war through a systematic comparison of âe~constructionsâe(tm) of these enemies, arguing that the ideas behind these images are key to understanding this important aspect of the global history of World War II. These images of the German and Japanese enemies were created to encourage participation in a war to defeat the evils of the Hitler-Mussolini-Tojo Axis, but as a consequence they also shaped the approach of the U.S. to the project of reconstruction when hostilities ended. To illuminate this, the book examines the key interpretive framework that shaped the American approach to both the German and Japanese enemy and the postwar world: the medical model of diagnosis, prognosis and cure. Knowledge of the medical model illuminates the way that the United States, as represented by the âeoeknowledge eliteâeÂ, assessed the two enemy powers and the prospects for lasting peace. As early as 1941, academic observers emphasized the importance of the study of âeoenational characterâeÂ, which was influential in preparing propaganda, training military personnel, and defining Occupation policy for Japan and Germany. The focus on the enemy as disease âe" requiring diagnosis and cure - presented in this book provides a new approach to the intellectual war effort for the European and Pacific Theaters and an innovative insight into understandings of World War II.

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds. According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.

Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities. Editors: Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Editorial Board: Arjun Appadurai, New York University, Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg, Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich, Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara, Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University, Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen, Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College, Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra, Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna, Samuel Weber, Northwestern University, Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania, Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin, Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong

Eastern European museums represent traumatic events of World War II, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Warsaw Uprisings, and the Bombardment of Dresden, in ways that depict the enemy in particular ways. This image results from the interweaving of historical representations, cultural stereotypes and beliefs, political discourses, and the dynamics of exhibition narratives. This book presents a useful methodology for examining museum images and provides a critical analysis of the role historical museums play in the contemporary world. As the catastrophes of World War II still exert an enormous influence on the national identities of Russians, Poles, and Germans, museum exhibits can thus play an important role in this process.