There’s art, and there’s propaganda. But where is the line between the two? Great art can convey a message, and visual propaganda can also be compelling art.
Bradley Davies’s book “Propagandopolis: A Century of Propaganda from Around the World” lets us decide for ourselves. It’s a collection of propaganda posters from the last century created by governments, rebel groups, nongovernmental organizations, and the United Nations.
Davies joined The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler from the United Kingdom for a discussion about his book.
Carolyn Beeler: Bradley, The book’s introduction quotes Adolf Hitler as someone who studied propaganda and used it to really grisly effect. I’m hoping you can read that passage that you included from “Mein Kampf.”
Bradley Davies: Yeah, sure. Hitler famously wrote a lot about propaganda, and this is one of the most famous quotes of his: “The receptivity of the masses is very limited. Their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
Do most of the propaganda posters and images that you have collected for this book follow that formula of just really hammering home a few basic points?
Yes, more or less. Hitler and [Joseph] Goebbels wrote about their appreciation for simple propaganda extensively, and most of the pieces collected here do generally communicate simple and often very specific messages. So, one example that I have here is a very memorable German poster from World War II towards the end, showing a skeleton riding a British plane over a German city at night during one of the bombing raids, holding a bomb that he’s about to throw down on the town below, with text across in bold simply reading “Blackout!” and smaller text at the bottom reading “The enemy sees your light.” The message obviously being that leaving your lights on exposes your house or your property to allied bombing raids.
Yeah, that image sticks with me, as well. You have that, as you said, ghastly skeleton. And I was struck by the fact that that could have been a propaganda poster from basically either side of that war because that message of, you know, turning out your lights was a universal one.
It was especially prominent in British propaganda during the Blitz [bombing campaign], for example. I do think that the German propagandists were more prone to having more graphic and spooky subject matter and imagery. The funny thing is you see a lot of it in Britain at the very start of the war, and then when bombing raids became less of an issue for Britain, you see a lot more in Germany, and Italy actually. Fascist Italy produced a lot of very similar stuff during the allied bombing campaigns.
You write that World War I really highlighted the importance of propaganda. Why was that?
World War I was basically the first conflict where everybody took propaganda seriously, both governments and the people. It was basically just because of the scale of it. I mean, even Hitler writes that, during World War I, Britain was the real vanguard for this sort of sophisticated mass persuasion. Right at the start of the war, they set up the special government propaganda bureau and they were tasked with, among a lot of other things, persuading Americans to get involved in the war, to manipulate public opinion against the Germans. And Britain was probably the first country to do this sort of propaganda on this scale. Germany did try to catch up but it wasn’t quite on the same level as Britain. But there was also a lot of popular participation in the propaganda effort.
There were a lot of publications in America, for example, prior to their entry in the war, calling for Americans to intervene on the side of the entente. And similarly, in occupied Europe, there was a Belgian artist, Gisbert Combaz, but he produced a famous series of illustrations attacking the German Kaiser Wilhelm. One example I do have shows the Kaiser Wilhelm with death, looking at a mountain of skulls, which the illustration kind of implies is of the Kaiser’s making. A lot of these illustrations were produced informally, but eventually republished officially by Britain and reproduced in America as well, which was a massive boost to the anti-German sentiment.
There is a lot of propaganda from authoritarian regimes collected in your book, Italian fascists, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and North Korea a bit later. Did you pinpoint differences in their approaches to propaganda?
Yes, they’re all massively different. So, in the 1920s, the Nazis, who weren’t in power then but obviously were working towards it, the fascists in Italy who were established and the Soviets, they were very avant garde. They really, really led into experimental styles with their posters. From that, you had the constructivist style of the futurist art style in Italy, which was very big. And Nazi Germany kind of borrowed stuff from the social democratic styles which emphasize big red colossal workers. You’d be surprised by how prominent the character of the worker versus the oligarchs is in Nazi propaganda in the 1920s.
But as that went on, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the USSR and North Korea, more recently, have all gone into their styles of realism basically, so that it was less abstract imagery of more just, in the Soviet Union’s case, matter-of-fact depiction of a peasant working on a collective farm or in Nazi Germany’s case, a matter-of-fact depiction of a soldier receiving armaments from a factory worker on the home front or in fascist Italy’s case, it would just be a soldier charging into the fray with a dagger drawn or whatever, slightly more exciting thematically, but less interesting visually, in my opinion. And in North Korea’s case, you know, they’re still publishing propaganda posters to this day, but the style hasn’t really changed from the 1960s.
So, democratic countries, including the US, of course, also use propaganda. In your book, you include a 1942 poster featuring the boxer Joe Louis. He was Black and served in a racially segregated regiment during World War II. Can you tell us the context for this poster and why highlight him specifically?
That was a very famous poster. Louis was heavyweight champion in the 1930s, and he famously was knocked out during a match in Nazi Germany in the first round of a boxing match. But in the 1938 rematch, which is one of the most important matches in boxing history, it lasted just two minutes of four seconds and Joe Louis went in with a with a knockout. And this was one of the events that really got him in the public eye. He fought a number of fundraising matches prior to joining the Army in 1942, I believe.
After that, he became an active contributor to America’s propaganda war and recruitment campaigns, of which this poster was a part. But the poster shows Louis in uniform with a bayonet, the text reading: “Private Joe Louis says, ‘We’re going to do our part and we’ll win because we’re on God’s side.’” And that quote comes from a speech that Louis delivered before a fight in 1942. But yes, he was a massive recruitment tool. He has this one quote. The quote says, “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.”
And you said that was in reference to your question about having to serve in a segregated unit back in World War II.
Precisely. Yes.
Bradley, I wanted to get to a specific example of a North Korean promotional poster from 1989 that’s in your book. It is for a world youth festival taking place in Pyongyang. And it looks like a Western concert poster. It’s got a guitarist and kind of a Jimi Hendrix pose, some real ’80s psychedelic colors. There is the image of a hammer and sickle imposed on top of the electric guitar, though, and it says in both English and Russian, “For anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship.” So, I’m wondering who the intended audience for that poster was.
Yes. So, that is a really, really interesting poster. It was produced to promote the, as you say, 13th World Festival of Youth, which was one of a series of festivals organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth, which is an organization of sort of communist-adjacent leftists, active throughout the Cold War, and still active today I think. As for the audience, the text is in Korean at the top and then English of Russian. So, it was presumably distributed internationally, as well as probably displayed at the festival itself. But yes, very, very cool poster, very unlike others from around the same time.
Why was it different from other stuff produced at the time by North Korea, or how is it different?
The propaganda posters published by, and that you’d associate with, North Korea would be generic ones featuring a soldier with a massive gun or a farmer harvesting wheat or something. The last thing you’d expect to see from, be it propaganda associated with, North Korea is a guitarist playing with a neon hammer and sickle above them and some psychedelic background below. Very interesting.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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