You are in:
- Archives » 2006 » February 2006
Drawn From Memory
The Jyllands-Posten cartoons have been accused of bearing similarities to anti-semitic caricatures from the Nazi era. Is this true?
Over at Transatlantic Intelligencer, John Rosenthal examines the case for the prosecution. He reproduces the twelve controversial cartoons, alongside twelve cartoons from Nazi newspapers and propaganda sheets.
The Nazi images show Jews in a predictably vicious and unflattering light: Fat beasts guzzling the world, spiders of evil lurking among the bodies of dead civilians, poisonous snakes threatening the purity of the German people, monsters gorging on the blood of innocents.
Unsurprisingly, the images are a great deal more insulting than anything the Danes came up with. So where do you look for caricatures of the same vile nature as those the Nazis used to attack the Jews? Well, the Middle East's newspapers, where Jews are routinely caricatured as wicked bloodsuckers, is the obvious answer.
But what about the pages of France's most esteemed national newspaper? Alongside the Nazi era images and the Danish cartoons, Rosenthal publishes editorial cartoons from the front pages of France's "newspaper of record", Le Monde. EURSOC has published one of the images above, by star cartoonist Serguei (his better-known colleague, Plantu, also features on Rosenthal's slideshow).
A monster feeding on the corpses of the innocent. Snakes strangling international bodies. A vampire removing his human mask to leer at a blood-drenched world. Shocking, familiar images borrowed from the Nazi bestiary of anti-semitism and used against the United States in France's leading newspaper.
The true inheritors of Nazi propaganda images aren't to be found in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten. They're in Paris, waging a campaign of hatred against the United States.
