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REVISTA IEEE 9

http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee 289 Manuel García Ruiz The cartoon, the new weapon of the First World straightforward and simple medium, accessible to all social classes irrespective of their cultural background. Picking up once more on the question I put to the reader at the start, are we able to speak of cartoons of an ideological nature produced during the First World War? Categorically, yes. The pamphlets, posters, cartoons, comics etc. published during the conflict were undeniably ideologically charged and found a relatively broad and receptive audience. To a lesser degree, the revisionist works that saw the light of day after the war (most of these in recent years) contain a dominant desire to awaken feelings of rejection or blame in times long after the event. For many years, the Great War had been relegated to an overlooked part of our history, partly as it was overshadowed by the attractive part that followed, which was to be more universal and which, in particular, grew to mythic proportions in cinema. Yet, it has also been confined to a corner of our memory due to its rawness, because of the horror that it awakens in our conscience. No explanation could be found as to the moral regress endured following a period in time in which humankind seemed to prosper in leaps and bounds. There has been an abundance of studies, treatises, books and also comics that have appeared around the centenary of the war to jolt us into remembrance. Within a few years, our memory will tend to forget once more and the gap left by the Great War will be filled until a new event awakens us with another dramatic development to shake our conscience. What could be of greater interest would be how governments might act given a repeat of a situation like that experienced a century ago. Today’s society demands instantaneous real-time information, hence media such as the internet and its social networks, or television, have triumphed. Even conventional media, such as the press, have been forced to adapt so as not to lose this battle. And governments, or any group seeking notoriety, do not think twice before making use of these media available to them. It is worth considering whether the most obsolete, such as those that we have analysed here (comic strips, cartoons, posters etc.) could find their place in a future crisis. The most rational logic would invite us to answer no, yet why pass up such a simple and cheap tool that -certainly in today’s world- has achieved widespread dissemination? One only has to recall the uproar and consequences unleashed by the publication of several drawings of Mohammed in Norwegian and Danish weekly papers in 2006. Or how the PSYOPS section (Psychological Operations, part of Information Operations) of the US Department of Defense widely uses similar means, especially in countries which currently have lower levels of education. This is why the cartoon and other similar publications will not fall into disuse if a new conflict or serious crisis situation is to break out, especially as a supplementary resource. All of this without accounting for the potential that they offer in the present day for shaping patriotic or nationalist ideologies. Owen Griffiths provides an example of this in his work Militarizing Japan: Patriotism, Profit and Children’s Print Media, or current comics that seek the support of the public, usually a young audience, in order to create a climate of animosity against a rival country.

REVISTA IEEE 9
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