John, I was talking about the comic books, the movies, and that sort of stuff that was going on in popular culture in the 50's and early 60's in North America...as well as the stuff that was disseminated to students in junior high and high school. It was calculated to portray WWII Germans and Japanese (not some of them, all of them) as sadistic, subhuman, evil monsters. It had nothing whatsoever to say about postwar Germans and Japanese. They were being cultivated by the government as Allies against the Soviets...that was a separate matter, and was based on a new hate campaign and a whole new war...against the Communists this time.

The Soviets were no doubt guilty of similar hate propaganda, and maybe worse. That doesn't excuse it when we do it.

Winning a war should be a cause for immense relief, thanksgiving, celebration, and then getting on with something more positive. It should not be an excuse for rubbing salt into the wounds of the wretched people who had the bad fortune to lose that war and depicting them in your popular media as inhuman fiends for the next few decades or the next hundred years. Could that be in order to perhaps expiate one's own collective guilt for having massacred cities full of civilians with firebombing and A-bombs? Very possibly. The best way to distract a people's attention from their government's own more questionable actions is to dump all the imagined evil in the world directly on someone else's shoulders, after all, isn't it?

That's the normal political game. Pass the guilt. Pass the buck. Pass the blame. Pass the ammunition. And get ready for the next war.

Munitions manufacturers have to live too, after all!