ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth century, Americans and Europeans frequently referred to Africans and persons of African descent as apes and gorillas-subhumans that deserved enslavement. Allied propaganda during World War II often depicted Japanese soldiers and politicians as buck-toothed monkeys, bats, or vultures who wore glasses with black, round frames and thick lenses. In turn, Japanese propaganda depicted Americans and British as freakishly narrowheaded, thin-nosed, and thin-lipped, “the ugly enemy,” “hairy, twisted-nosed savages,” “panting heavily, menacingly” approaching “the Land of the Gods.” One poster portrayed President Roosevelt as a rapacious beast with fangs and outsized hands, reaching toward Japanese lettering (Brcak and Pavia, 1994). On September 11, 2012, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood party member Mahmoud Khalil stated on Al-Nas television that the American “has a huge body. Eats like a pig. He is like a raging bull” (source: MEMRI TV). Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as octopuses, spiders, snakes, vultures, and so on-and, given that they were beasts and vermin, the better to persecute and murder them since they were not human and possessed no admirable qualities whatsoever. These images and metaphors represented efforts by some members of one ethnic or national category to stigmatize, inferiorize, and verminize the members of another category of humanity, to invite members of their own “kind” to treat the “others” as if they were animals fit only for slaughter. Such language and representations are often born during times of conflict, such as warfare and extreme international tension, much of which was generated by the regime in power that produced and endorsed these despicable images in an attempt to influence the popular mind to think along the same lines.
