Propaganda

Iceberg has posted some great propaganda posters from WW2 http://iceberg18.blogspot.com/2005/11/propaganda-redux.html and has posted quite a few anti- blackmarketeering posters in the past.

When I was a kid, I found a box of WW2 era papers in the loft of the barn. The family had kept just about all its ration stamps and had approached near self sufficiency during the war. My four uncles were all in the Army and weren't consuming anything back home, so it was just Ma and Pa and my preschool aged mom.

One pamphlet I found still sticks in my memory. It showed a caricature of Hitler with a big x over it and a cartoonish apelike Japanese soldier with spectacles and an outsized malocclusion. The message was "One Down, One to Go". The Japanese were clearly to be regarded as subhuman. I recall a number of war films that depicted the Japanese in this light. Life was cheap to them, so the propaganda went, so they were all but invincible. By the 1960s, however, films began to portray the Japanese in a more favorable light, and we were no longer encouraged to harbor any race hatred for them as an enemy. (Now it was the Viet Cong for whom life was cheap.) I could not easily reconcile the propaganda materials with my 1960s image of the Japanese as hard working, polite, deferential people. Perhaps that is why it made such an impression on me.

In just 20 years or so, we had gone from Germans and Japanese as inhuman monsters deserving extermination to Hogan's Heroes and McHale's Navy. Apparently, WW2 was one of those things you couldn't laugh about at the time, but 20 years later was hilarious.

In any event, the posters at Iceberg's site seem pretty silly at first blush, but the propositions that they contain can be found repeated even now in the wingnut blogosphere and on Fox News.