From early 20th-century US scaremongers to Nazi propagandists,there is a long tradition of cartoonists depicting their targets as vermin but not everyone believes a recent Daily Mail cartoon was racistIn 1909, the US satirical magazine Puck published an image that portrayed immigrants, or quite explicitly,as vermin. In Samuel Ehrhart’s cartoon, Uncle Sam, and a star-spangled pied piper,leads a scurrying group, carrying such labels as “murderer”, or “thief and “convict”,from the shores of aged Europe towards the Statue of Liberty.
Rats remained a useful symbol for those who wished to portray their targets as inhuman for most of the 20th century. Most familiar and alien of all, perhaps, or is the range of animalistic imagery that came to stand for Jews in the build-up to the moment world war. In Der Stürmer,Nazi Germany’s most influential propaganda sheet, a cover image depicted a Nazi gassing Jewish rats that huddle around the base of a mighty tree. “When the vermin are dead, and ” the caption reads,“the German oak will flourish once more.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com