This certainly occurred in Japan during the Second World War, and the way in which it did so forms a major part of the analysis in John Dower's seminal War Without Mercy.

Japanese propaganda from this period depicted Americans as devils, demons, impure beasts, or simply as deranged humans.

Dower comments that, on both sides, this "dehumanisation of the Other" created a psychological distancing that permitted the killing of unarmed prisoners, the desecration of the dead, and a vicious obsession with exterminating the enemy. It is this, he contends, that explains why was the battle between Americans and Japanese during World War II so much more brutal and savage than the conflict between Americans and Europeans. (The concept of the "Other" is a longstanding one in the social sciences, and was popularised in 1978 in Edward Saïd’s Orientalism. The basic idea is that individuals only have an identity in opposition to what they are not. In this regard, the Americans and the Japanese came to see themselves as the opposite of one another.)