Anti-Jew Propaganda

Whilst reading an article on genocide, I came across a description of a typical anti-semitic poster from World War 2. The poster was said to depict a Jewish man, in a fairly grotesque and inhuman manner, he was portrayed as being quite overweight and evil looking. A quick search with google found some good examples of the sort of propaganda that the Nazis used to ignite hatred and fear of the Jews.

Hatred and fear both seem to be very important tools in making one group turn against another group, such as what happened during the Holocaust and the Genocide in Rwanda.

Here are a few links (hope these work, this is my first attempt at putting hyperlinks in) to some anti-Jewish pictures. The latter two were from posters as far as I can tell.

This one appears to be fairly recent, as I believe it depicts the former Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, and George W. Bush. Notice how Ariel is portrayed as a monster.

I am not sure when this one is from, but notice how much the Jewish man looks like the general idea of Satan. He looks quite evil.

This one is particularly good (or bad, in the evil sense). It seems to portray an overweight Jewish man, grinding up people (presumably good, hardworking Aryans) and making lots of money from this.

I could add more, but I think these give a pretty good idea of how some typical propaganda portrays the "evil" others. That is, the people who belong to the "outgroup". If this is the sort of portrayal of Jewish people that you saw during WW2, no wonder it would have lead to fear of the Jewish people. I mean, looking at some of those posters, you would be lead to believe that Jews were indeed very greedy and scary.

If you want to find similar pictures, I suggest typing "anti jew propaganda" or similar search term into google.

environmental factors in genocide

from what i have found so far, there are certainly many psychological variables which contribute to a genocide, but i have also found that there seem to be quite a few environmental factors, such as social inequality. should i also mention these environmental factors, though they are perhaps more relevant to sociology rather than social psychology? any ideas/comments would be appreciated

that's it for now
brett k

research into genocide

well so far my research strategy for blog 1 - genocide has been much the same as that which i would do for an essay. i look on EBSCOhost (academic search premier, and the psychology databases) for a few different keywords, so to start with things like "genocide" then i start to narrow it down.

not only have i searched for information on the rwanda genocide, but also on another genocide, which is probably just as well known, that is the genocide (and associated war) in the former yugoslavia. i find this particularly interesting because i have a friend who lived through the war, from the bosnian/croatian side (not sure, but this may not be completely accurate as i believe they may have been opposing sides at some point) and it is very interesting to find out why this may have happened. once again (as with rwanda) the main factor with the yugoslavia genocide appears to be the different ethnicities such as croatian/serbian/bosnian/etc...i may be detecting a pattern here...

both rwanda and yugoslavia genocides were to do with different ethnic groups, and the main difference between the different ethnic groups that i can spot is that they had different religious perspectives (at least in the yugoslavia one, i am not yet certain if hutus and tutsis had different religious perspectives though i suspect they probably did)

i have to admit, i find researching all of this genocide stuff a bit depressing - and scary - to see just what people are capable of. i need to remind myself that in each of these terrible situations, there is also a lot of bravery, and the positive aspects of human nature also seem to shine through.

my next step will be to actually take a good look at the articles/websites/etc that i have discovered so far, and hopefully develop a concept map from there. i will upload it onto MindMeister, and probably provide a link or something when i actually have something there to link to!

please, any comments or thoughts are most welcome

Ghosts of Rwanda DVD

i saw the "ghosts of rwanda" dvd today in the lecture. to be honest i didn't really know that much about what happened in rhwanda, i just knew that there were two different ethnic groups, the tutsis and the hutus and that there was a lot of violence.

not only was what actually happened terrible and shocking, but the fact that (most of?) the world knew about this, and did nothing, seems to be unforgivable.

i think what happened in rhwanda seemed to have some similarities with what the nazis did in WW2...people turning against their fellow rwandans, and killing people (everyone - including children) simply because they were members of a different social group. what i keep thinking about is the fact that there is a good chance (i am really just guessing here) that all rwandans, both tutsi and hutu share common ancestors. so genetically they are probably very similar, the only thing which separates them is the social idea of ethnicity. i need to find out more about just what the differences were between tutsis and hutus. i'm not sure if religion came into it, but i wouldn't be surprised.

this is my first real blog posting so please comment or ask me any questions or share your own thoughts.

thanks all
bk

blog submitted, testing again

hello, i have now submitted my blog feed, hopefully successfully - and this is just another test.

bk