To later observers, such techniques may appear blunt and heavy-handed, but this tight juxtaposition of good guys/ bad guys is a very effective technique. Closely related to juxtaposition is the use of "foil characters," whether in written literature or in movies, who are two characters with some similarities (in birth, appearance, situation), but whose differences contrast more noticeably.

"Atrocity pictures" might even be extended to include other nonverbal items, such as relics from the martyrs and victims. Here, the most common is something bloodstained. "Waving the bloody shirt," a phrase used after the Civil War, described the way the Republican Party kept suggesting to Northern voters that the Democrats were responsible for the war.

War memorials remind us of the dead of previous wars. In America, most of the Civil War battlefields are preserved, but, due to the passing generations, are more likely to be visited by history tourists. In contrast, the Viet Nam War Memorial on the Capitol Mall, is still a shrine provoking an intense emotional response. Russia today still focuses much attention on war cemeteries and sites of Nazi atrocities (statues, pilgrimages, ritual ceremonies) to keep reminding people of the evils of their foes. So also the Israelis memorialize the Jewish Holocaust victims. Many complex human motives are involved in such memorials, but certainly one effect favors the propagandists concerned with stimulating and bonding a group ("Never again!")

Stereotypes are usually defined as "standardized mental pictures held in common by members of a group" which represent an oversimplified opinion or attitude about others. Stereotypes can be favorable, intensifying the "good" (such as the Dutch being "neat and tidy"); but, most stereotypes (or, at least, the most noticeable ones) are pejorative and unfavorable. Most stereotypes are created by those words and images discussed here as "name-calling," "horror stories," and "atrocity pictures" -- all ways of intensifying the "bad" of the other.

Stereotypes are easily recognized in poster art for wartime propaganda and in the caricatures drawn by editorial cartoonists. Some propaganda posters intensify the "good"; we commonly describe them as idealizing, romanticizing, or glamorizing certain qualities. Heroic-size figures, for example, are common: paintings of strong, handsome, muscular men and beautiful, determined-looking women, marching shoulder-to-shoulder, faces thrust forward, arms raised, are clichés of propaganda posters designed to glorify one's "own." Audio stereotypes exist too: military march music or villainous laughs and sneers can be associated and clustered with the visual images in our mind.

Caricatures can intensify the "bad" and are the graphic or pictorial equivalent of attack words. The artist selects certain features, distorts them by exaggeration, or associates them with something already hated or feared by the audience. The enemy is often seen as an inhuman monster (werewolf, lots of teeth, fangs, claws ripping with blood), or a fearsome, repellent animal (snake, shark, spider), or as a sub-human, animalistic brute. In 19th century nativitist American caricatures, for example, both the despised Negroes and the despised Irish immigrants were drawn as ape-like, gorilla-like, baboon-like brutes.

Dozens of other stereotypes exist and are used by editorial cartoonists as a graphic shorthand to intensify the "bad" of the enemies they attack: sinister intruders, evil foreigners, swarthy strangers, traitors, back-stabbers, bloated bureaucrats, profiteers, exploiters of the poor, fat cats, gluttons gorging themselves, misguided naive dupes, bumblers, incompetents, officials snarled in red-tape, buried in paperwork, prudes, bluenoses, prissy fussbudgets, rigid authoritarians, machine-like robots, unthinking order-followers, hand-wringing do-gooders, and so on. But the most intense visuals are likely to appear in war posters using the theme of enemy-as-inhuman-monster.

Scripts & Scenarios. A single word, a brief phrase, a picture or a cartoon drawing sometimes suggests a complete script or scenario for some people, mental dramas in the imagination, often recalling sermons or speeches heard long ago. The "Fall of the Roman Empire," for example, is a favorite scenario for conservatives. This phrase conjures up vague visions of decadent toga-clad, lazy laurel-leafed Romans frolicking with lithesome lasses in unspeakable orgies while the Huns/Vandals/Barbarian Hordes are about to sweep down upon Civilization in a Cecil B. DeMille mob scene. People who respond emotionally to the "Fall of Rome" scenario often see themselves as Prophets ("Wake Up, America!") or as Defenders of the Faith, ready to Hold the Fort, at the Last Outpost, ready, to do battle with the foe outside, but most irritated about their own colleagues -- The Enemy Within! -- who do not accept their ideas of their version of the impending Armageddon.

More seriously, consider that scripts and scenarios are the result of conditioning propaganda -- long-standing, low-keyed accumulation of ideas and feelings which become assumptions within a society. Hitler, for example, for nearly a decade before the actual imprisonment of Jews in Germany, exploited existing anti-Semitism and made the Jew a "scapegoat" responsible for all problems. The German propaganda machine repeated a constant tirade against the secret "Jewish conspiracy" to take over the world. During the 1930s, Nazi Germany passed scores of seemingly petty laws harassing the Jews: in retrospect, we can see the escalation from the first petty attack to the horror of the Holocaust.

War historian Philip Knightley (The First Casualty) writes, in May 2003: The images released this week on an Islamic website of the beheading of American Nick Berg by Iraqi militants and leaked pictures of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners are a "landmark in the whole history of the way wars are covered", he said.