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Of the books produced for children not all were overtly ideological. Many were escapist or animal tales, little different from publications before and after the war.3 More ideological were stories of exemplary lives, cartoon adventures in comics and adaptations of fairy tales.4 A more formalised propaganda appeared in Vichy’s schoolbooks.5 Yet neither Vichy nor the Germans could rid the country of pre-war books and comics. Children’s books about the Great War, depicting heroic Frenchmen, women, children and animals fighting the hated Boches were abundant, and
frightened civilians descend. In the story accompanying the photo, Time magazine aptly noted that: ‘The photograph fast became part of the redemptive fairy tale spun by Americans to make some rough sense of Sept. 11. The good guys … saved the day, the evil ones were blotted out’ (quoted in Silberstein 2002: 95-6). In a similar and simultaneous discursive move, the story of Afghanistan and Iraq is also