Just Because: 'Faces of the Enemy'

A new exhibition at the British Library defines "propaganda" broadly, as "any communication designed to change the way we think or to alter our behaviour" (story, video): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22569913
   It put me in mind of a book I stumbled across many moons ago, called Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, by Sam Keen. It is more about what we usually think of when we hear the word "propaganda," and much of it has stayed with me and come back to me time and again, especially in these post-9/11 years. It begins like this:

Part 1

   Look carefully at the face of the enemy. The lips are curled downward. The eyes are fanatical and far away. The flesh is contorted and molded into the shape of monster or beast. Nothing suggests this man ever laughs, is torn by doubts, or shaken by tears. He feels no tenderness or pain. Clearly he is unlike us. We need have no sympathy, no guilt, when we destroy him.
   In all propaganda, the face of the enemy is designed to provide a focus for our hatred. He is the other. The outsider. The alien. He is not human. If we can only kill
him, we will be rid of all within and without ourselves that is evil.
   How are these faces of the enemy created? And why is the repertoire of images so universal?

Germany, WWII       from the book

The Enemy As Stranger: Consensual Paranoia

   No one knows for certain when warfare became an abiding human habit. Some archaeologists believe there was a pre-Neolithic Eden peopled by peaceful hunters and gatherers, and that greed and systematic violence arose only when the agricultural revolution created sufficient surplus wealth to tempt some men to steal what others had produced. The best evidence we have suggests that warfare is no more than 13,000 years old. According to Sue Mansfield, our earliest human artifacts from the Paleolithic period testify to hunting, art, myth, and ritual, but give no pictures of men engaged in battle.

   Once invented, warfare became a nearly universal practice. But there are enough exceptions to establish the crucial point on which hope rests its delicate case: enemy making and warfare are social creations rather than biological imperatives. The peaceful people, such as the Hopi, the Tasaday, the Mbuti Pygmies, the K'ung Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Copper Eskimo, the Amish, and others, show us that human beings are capable of creating sophisticated cultures without the use of systematic violence, without a warrior class and a psyche organized around defending the tribe against an enemy. According to Geoffrey Gorer,

   The most significant common traits in these peaceful societies are that they all manifest enormous gusto for concrete physical pleasures—eating, drinking, sex, laughter—and that they all make very little distinction between the ideal characters of men and women, particularly that they have no ideal of brave, aggressive masculinity. ... They do not have heroes or martyrs to emulate or cowards or traitors to despise; their religious life lacks significant personalized gods and devils; a happy, hard-working and productive life is within the reach of all.