In 1939, King George VI commissioned the Ministry of Information to produce three posters designed to reassure and prepare the British nation for an inevitable war. The posters were designed not so much to deliver any specific instruction, but rather to suggest an attitude - from King to country - towards the unknown. Stiff upper lip, old boy.
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. [more inside]
posted by 6am
on Nov 19, 2008 -
38 comments
Propaganda is now officially hip.
Barack Obama's presidential campaign has
struck a
palette with those interested in good, effective design.
Shepard Fairey was recently given the opportunity to create a
screenprinted poster for Obama's campaign, which sold out quite quickly. Next, his campaign turns to artist Scott Hansen, aka
ISO50 for his visual art and
Tycho for his music. Mr. Hansen's
poster employs his idealistic and nostalgic style, yet more direct than his typical dreamy work. It's quite lovely.
posted by blastrid
on May 23, 2008 -
64 comments
If you can make it through the glacially paced intro and can put up with the typically clunky, often laughable and jingoistic fifties-style narration, this 1958 film from Chevrolet,
The American Look is worth viewing. Chock full of futuristic telephones, toasters, blenders, office machines, architecture and more, it's a mid-century design lover's dream. The film is visually striking and elegant, and presented in widescreen format. Here's part
2 and part
3. Or see it here in its
entirety.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 12, 2008 -
15 comments
Just the other day I was thinking about World War 2-era propaganda songs, so of course I gave a listen to
Smoke On the Water. Say what? You didn't know it was about kickin' Hitler's ass? Or Hirohito's? Guess you weren't listening well enough when ol'
Red Foley sang:
"...there'll be nothing left but vultures to inhabit all that land, when our modern ships and bombers make a graveyard of Japan..." I tell you, they just don't write songs like that anymore, friends. Anyway, by 1951 Red was looking forward to
Peace in the Valley.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 9, 2008 -
20 comments
Need money? Have a blog? Well, your troubles may be over: "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering." Of course, if you don't want to play along, there are other ways to make your blog useful:
Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience.... If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and... take down the site (and the blogger) themselves....
Who might you be interested in
"clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers"? Oh, the US military.
posted by orthogonality
on Apr 5, 2008 -
20 comments
Triumph of the Will - the Director's Cut This rare director's cut of Triumph of the Will (German: Triumph des Neger) is a propaganda film by the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. It chronicles the Nazi getting fonky at Nuremberg. The film contains excerpts from rhymes kicked by various Nazi leaders at the Congress, including dat Brooklyn flava by Adolf Hitler, interspersed with footage of splifted party members.
posted by empath
on Oct 6, 2007 -
39 comments
“War Made Easy" is a documentary with Sean Penn narrating, and is based on a
book by
Norman Solomon . This is an award winning expose on how the American Public has been led into a 50-year pattern of government deception and spin, dragging the United States from one war
into another. Remarkably this film exhumes archival footage of official
distortion and exaggeration from LBJ
to George W.
Bush, revealing in stunning
detail how the American
news media have
uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations. Brutally persuasive this film presents disturbing examples of
propaganda from those we want to believe in.
posted by Rancid Badger
on Sep 29, 2007 -
51 comments
My Right Wing Dad is a new-ish and rather informal blog that aims to provide "a chance for folks to examine the unrestrained rhetoric that is quietly passed from in-box to in-box in America," by hosting a collection of the emails that form an often untraceable and unacknowledged part of public discourse in the U.S., especially on the Right. Tagged by category (for example:
God,
college,
flag,
liberal, and
World War II), the amateur archive presents a range of colorful opinion, not all of it strikingly accurate, and some of it offensive. In efforts to understand
liberal and conservative habits of communication, it may be worth considering the role of forwarded email in the electoral process, and the
reasons that the forwarding of email is popular among some people, and whether this behavior tends to correlate with particular political opinions. The emails hosted on MyRightWingDad may in any case be enlightening, unless you're already on the forward list of someone in the know.
posted by washburn
on Aug 15, 2007 -
105 comments
"Japanese Relocation" - A short propaganda film created by the US government & the "Office of War Information - Bureau of Motion Pictures."
The subject has been much discussed previously on MetaFilter.
Here and
here, among other threads.
posted by The Deej
on Jul 25, 2007 -
21 comments
FBI 101 -- "Essentials for Writers," an "exciting and informative" interactive workshop for writers being offered to members of my union -- the Writers Guild of America, East - by the FBI Office of Public Affairs and FBI New York. ... -- Very interesting account of a workshop the FBI puts on for writers in NY.
What's in it for the FBI?
...The only question we have for you is 'Will it show us in a good light?'" ...
posted by amberglow
on Jun 9, 2007 -
13 comments
War vs. Democracy: Untold Stories from the Lynch / Tillman Hearing --
...U.S. soldiers whose injuries or deaths remain mired in secrecy. Pat Tillman's brother and fellow Army Ranger Kevin Tillman advocated strongly for other families still waiting for answers. ... "The family was told, it was -- quote -- 'an ambush by insurgents.' Two years later, they found out that those -- quote -- 'insurgents' happened to be the same Iraqi troops that he was training. Before his death, he told his chain of command that these same troops that he was training were trying to kill him and his team. He was told to keep his mouth shut." ... Thorough and eye-opening examination of the many ways the military spun, lied, withheld information on soldier deaths and injuries for propaganda purposes (and even delayed action until cameras were present in the
Jessica Lynch rescue).
posted by amberglow
on May 12, 2007 -
29 comments
Them dirty l.....ls ! Some students examined six months worth, or 115 episodes, of some very well know "show" using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I. The IU researchers found that the host called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average. Who's this sizzling firecracker ? We make audience , you decide !
Link to full paper.
posted by elpapacito
on May 4, 2007 -
31 comments
Llaguno bridge is a documentary offering an alternative point of view
on some of the violent events that took place in Venezuela during the
coup d'etat attempt of 2002 [1]. Some local private television are accused of deliberatedly picking some facts in an attempt to support the ongoing coup ; different videos taken from different angles show how some people were wrongly accused of shooting at unarmed masses of demonstrators. Regardless of political preferences and actual events, it is an interesting documentary on how easily facts can be misrepresented.
posted by elpapacito
on Apr 29, 2007 -
8 comments
Propaganda. The death of Horst-Wessel . A clip from a documentary about the rise of the Third Riche and how it used
Horst-Wessel's song "The flag on high" and his death as a tool of propaganda.
Then ending with a clip about propaganda from the film
Network.
posted by nola
on Mar 1, 2007 -
10 comments
Added January 8, 2007: The US Navy has a message for you(Tube) concerning the Navy Seals: "They are warrior diplomats and trusted teammates in the war against terrorism. They understand the political and cultural sensitivities of the countries in which they operate."
Added October 22, 2006: This former Marine commander has a message for you(Tube) as well, concerning "cultural sensitivities". Speaking of his part in the assault on Fallujah: "I started to cry... the woman seeing my reaction... put her hand on my cheek and said Insha'Allah... cause these people over there can accept it as God's will... but no, it wasn't God's will, it was my fucking order. I gave the order to fire those rockets into the building, and I killed her family. I have to live with that..."
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jan 9, 2007 -
29 comments
A Nazi Christmas Since its most ancient days, the Christmas holiday has been continually reshaped to serve commercial, social, and political ends. These Nazi-era Christmas materials, including an
Advent calendar and an
essay on how to turn Christian holidays into National Socialist ones, come from the
German Propaganda Archive of the Calvin College library. Of course, the Allies also enlisted Christmas in both pop culture and propaganda with
cards,
V-Mails,
and posters.
posted by Miko
on Nov 29, 2006 -
21 comments
