"I don't think we're showing an Arabic population carrying knives and stabbing Americans. "I think our sensibilities are a little different, but not that different," Forsher said. Some believe such caricatures, and the racist attitudes they fostered, allowed America to tolerate the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war. Often, the cartoons featured well-known animation characters, such as Popeye in Scrap the Japs, he said. This time, they included animated shorts that portrayed the Germans and, especially, the Japanese as ridiculous or racist caricatures, said Stefan Kanfer, author of Serious Business: Cartoons and America, from Betty Boop to Toy Story. Hollywood again spooled out patriotic films. One amateur poster showed a stylized Japanese man carrying a limp, naked white woman over his shoulder and was emblazoned with the words, "This Is the Enemy." A poster produced by an American corporation showed a giant Hitler with a handgun and a Japanese man with a bloody knife looming on either side of the globe, with North America between them. World War II posters showed shadowy Nazism looming over America and its citizens, and racist stereotypes of the Japanese with thick glasses, buck teeth, and sometimes animal-like features. Nevertheless, "This mobilization of hatred was so effective and powerful, that during the Second World War it made it difficult to believe the stories about the Holocaust," Winter said. Nor, apparently, was another story that World War I's Germans were boiling down enemies to make soap, said Pratkanis, co-author of Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. The problem was, it wasn't true, Winter said. It had to be amplified by children having their hands chopped off and women having their breasts chopped off." "Within days, the image wasn't good enough. "There were … Belgians and French who were killed as the Germans invaded," Winter said.
"It had to be something where the war was the sons of light against the sons of darkness. "In 1914, when war broke out, within weeks the image of Germans and Germany became filled with every symbol of barbarism that people could think of," said Jay Winter, a Yale University history professor whose specialty is World War I. In fact, the anti-German propaganda began even before America entered the war. Army recruitment poster depicted a crazed gorilla wearing a German spiked war helmet, holding a bloody club in one hand and a half-ravished woman in the other, and stepping onto the shores of America. Much of World War I's demonization propaganda seems blunt to modern eyes. "The Americans confiscated every print and threw the producer in jail." "Bad timing, as we were joining the war on the side of the British," Forsher said. On the other hand, an unfortunate group of filmmakers in 1917 put out The Spirit of '76, an epic about the American Revolution. Griffith's Hearts of the World, which showed Germans throwing babies out windows, Forsher said.
A cooperative Hollywood responded with films such as The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, To Hell With the Kaiser! and D.W. The Spanish-American War also delivered, perhaps for the first time, films gloriously recreating war events, Forsher said, and, "The government looked at it and went, 'Wow.'"įor World War I, the United States government created a propaganda office, and made sure to deploy movies in its propaganda arsenal. Arguably, it set a pattern for phony or embellished American wartime propaganda that would last at least through the Gulf War. Tales of atrocities also can dehumanize, as readers of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers learned when they got whipped up for the Spanish-American war with fake stories and sketches of Spanish atrocities that probably never happened. … You can kill a monkey a lot more easily than you can kill a neighbor." Fake Atrocities and Propaganda Films "That is why during World War II, a lot of caricatures became animals. "When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it," he said. "The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize," said James Forsher, a film historian and documentary filmmaker who has studied propaganda films, and who is an assistant professor of mass communications at California State University, Hayward. But, some say, the principle remains the same. Propaganda, both by governments and the private media, has evolved over the years as media has evolved. "The only way to do it is to justify the killing, to make the enemy look as evil as possible." Trevor Loudon's terrifying documentary "Enemies Within" exposes the ties between elected officials in the highest reaches of the United States government and their radical, anti-American allies."For most human beings, it takes an awful lot to allow them to kill another human being," said Anthony Pratkanis, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.