| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
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an instrument of political propaganda.5 Caricatures of this kind have, of course, a traditional function in prewar situations and during wars, where they are deployed as political propaganda directed at an external enemy. The Mohammed caricatures, multiplied and disseminated globally across the media channels, were received not as an internal communication within one culture but as a war of images that spilled over into an intergroup conflict. Whether intended or unintended, the Danish caricatures intensified the hate on either side and moulded a milieu in which the step from indignation to rage, aggression, and violence was practically prescribed.6 In such a case, prejudice aggravates and enforces a division between in-group and out-group that is thereby transformed into an insurmountable abyss. It works no longer (as in satire or comedy) in a critical way, as a corrective to a shared norm, but as a pure form of conditioning hate and programming averse responses. In a context of intergroup conflict, caricature becomes a political weapon and a strategy of mobilising radical emotions in a war of images that is fought in the mass media.
This brings us to the second aspect, the mass response. Prejudices are harmless as long as they remain a characteristic of individuals. By cherishing their prejudices, individuals harm only themselves. They cut themselves off from new choices, experiences, tastes, discoveries. A prejudiced person lives in a narrow, fenced-in world, but that is not necessarily detrimental to the lives of others. Individual prejudices, just like idiosyncrasies, are of minor concern and at most a case for therapy. They become dangerous only when they are shared by a large segment of society and people in power who are influential and make important decisions. What makes them so troubling and dangerous is their tendency towards mass distribution and their ineradicable tenaciousness, which implies repeated reactivations.
Their speedy mass reproduction is a feature of prejudices that is stressed in all studies on the subject. Prejudices spread like rumour and tumour cells; like contagion, they take an easy yet strong hold on the psyche. What makes them so acceptable to otherwise mature and reflexive persons? How do they come to stick so easily and tenaciously? In