The Nazi scare tactic being used against refugees in Europe
Are you afraid of the dark men all over your body?
By Asher Kohn
Billing itself as a “brave young Polish weekly,” W Sieci wasn’t particularly brave in its choice of cover: a blonde woman wearing the European Union flag as a toga, being groped by meaty, hairy arms. W Sieci’s cover story was titled “Islam’s rape of Europe.”
The title references Roman myth — Jupiter’s rape of princess Europa. But the creepy image of swarthy hands defiling a fair white maiden is a 20th-century scare tactic. The United States brought the myth into World War I, depicting a Germanic ape carrying a ravished chestnut-haired woman.
During World War II Japanese propagandists preyed on American racial fears (no, African Americans were not the bosses of any US town during World War II):
But it was fascists that made the threat much more explicit. The Italians printed these posters showing American soldiers carrying off Italian women:
Occupied Poland was put under Bolshevik watch (the starvlings are a nice touch):
And Nazi propagandists dropped leaflets on US soldiers depicting a rape scene near a dead body:
This sort of imagery peeks its ugly head out when people are at war. Or at least feel that they’re at war — the visual language of W Sieci tells its audience that there’s a sexualized threat to the nation’s women and the nation’s honor.
But it’s an old tactic used to attack an amorphous, animalistic “other.” The gruesome depictions were once a dirty way to fight a war. Now they’re just a desperate ploy to sell magazines.
