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Sure, that kind of stereotyping by parents teaching their children to be bigots is probably harmful overall! Harmful neighbor country rivalries last centuries, probably because of just this kind of reinforcement. Then every now and then you get a Kosovo or a holocaust.

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I think those are misattributions. Civil wars break out both among same ethnic groups as well as different ethnic groups.

Wars can then force people to see other stereotypes as characteristics of bad things. Kind of like the caricatures of Nazis and Japanese Imperialists. When Japan went into Nanking, they didn't need some psychological trick to enable them to go on their campaign any more than the US or USSR needed psychological tricks to bomb Dresden or East Berlin.

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