MMMM # 71 - The Swiss Cheesy Image

      LBJ had his mushroom cloud/daisy/little girl commercial. Then there are the more recent graphic "Hope"poster for Barack Obama as a candidate. And let's not forget the Abu Ghraib prisoner photos.
     There is no denying the power of  images to influence people.
     But I thought it was just in America where an image + a dumb argument for or against something actually worked to convince citizens how to vote.

     Enter Switzerland, where a xenophobic poster helped sway a majority of the voters in that usually tolerant country to ban the towers often constructed with Muslim mosques. The shape of the minaret's were perfect for the right-winger anti-immigrant forces, who made posters showing minaret missiles. Allow the minarets, and Switzerland would quickly be governed by sharia law they argued. Really.
      If you think the anti-immigrent battles in the U.S.have been fierce, you haven't see what's happening in a lot of Europe.
     Here in the U.S., we are, after all, a nation of immigrants (except for the Native Americans), so fighting againt the latest wave of newcomers is an old game.

 Europeans are new at it, since, till recently, they lived in pretty insular communities. The Irish lived in Ireland. The English lived in England (except when they decided to live in Ireland too, starving the Irish to the extent those who managed to survive suddenly wanted to live somewhere else too). The Germans lived in Germany (except during two World Wars when they wanted to live somewheer else.Same for the Japanese). Anyway, you get the idea. This whole xenophobia thing is relatively new to a lot of Europe.

     Here in the good old USA, most of us are used to "foreign" people living among us. And the rest of us are those foreign people.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]