The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (105 page)

39
. The Allies as aliens: Nazi poster for Dutch consumption, depicting the United States as a monstrous synthesis of beauty contests, jazz music, black boxers, gangsters, the Ku-Klux-Klan and, of course, Jewish plutocracy.

40
. Counting the dead after the destruction of Dresden in February 1945. Many victims were reduced to mere ash.

41
. The enemy as subhuman, I: Japanese megalomania personified in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s caricature‘Mr Moto’.

42
. The enemy as subhuman, II: Phoenix war-worker Natalie Nickerson writes to thank her Navy boyfriend for the Japanese soldier’s skull he sent her as a souvenir from New Guinea. According to Life magazine, she named it‘Tojo’.

43
.‘Monstrous beings of metal moving about in the distance’(Wells): two American tanks advance under Japanese fire during the Battle for Okinawa, June 1945.

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. The face of surrender: a Japanese naval lieutenant is persuaded to lay down his arms on Okinawa. Japanese aversion to dishonour and mistrust of Allied intentions meant that a majority of the island’s defenders preferred to fight to the death.

45
. A Soviet soldier tries to steal a Berlin woman’s bike. This was the least of the crimes committed by the Red Army as they advanced through Germany.

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. The Third World’s War: soldiers training in Guatemala to fight the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Although notionally a war between capitalists and Communists, on close inspection the Guatemalan civil war was as much an ethnic conflict between Ladinos and Mayans.

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. The new face of totalitarianism: Chinese children read from Chairman Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, a manifesto for civil war between the generations.

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. My enemy’s enemy: the butcher of Cambodia, Pol Pot (left), greets the modernizer of China, Deng Xiaoping (right), in Phnom Penh in 1978. The common enemy in question was Vietnam. Deng was not above butchery himself, as he proved eleven years later when pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square threatened the Communist monopoly on power in China.

49
. Self-esteem through genocide: Milan Luki c, who stands accused of murdering Bosnian Muslims in his home town of Vis?egrad in 1992.