propaganda posters the great war

Manipulating the masses: How propaganda was used during World War I

World War I was a conflict that not only consumed the lives of the soldiers in the trenches and battlefields, but also had a powerful impact on the hearts and minds of millions at home.

This was done through the strategic use of propaganda.  The proactive manipulation of people's attitudes through the media played a surprisingly pivotal role in shaping public opinion and mobilizing resources.

But how exactly was propaganda used during World War I?

What were the different types of propaganda employed by the warring nations?

And how did it influence society's perception of the war? 

What is 'propaganda'?

The term 'propaganda' often carries negative connotations, associated with manipulation and deceit.

However, its roots are far more neutral, derived from the Latin 'propagare', meaning 'to spread or propagate'.

In essence, propaganda is about disseminating information, ideas, or rumors for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.

It has always been a powerful tool of persuasion, with the capability of molding public opinion and directing collective action.

Propaganda, as a concept, is as old as human civilization itself: from the ancient Egyptians who used it to glorify their pharaohs, to the Romans who utilized it to control public opinion.

However, it was during World War I that propaganda was used on an industrial scale.

It leveraged the advancements in mass communication technologies such as the printing press, radio, and cinema.

Governments quickly realized that to sustain a war on a global scale, they needed not just the physical resources but also the psychological backing of their citizens.

How countries used propaganda

Each nation involved in the war had its unique propaganda strategies; h owever, there were common themes and techniques that transcended national boundaries.

Firstly, and most obviously, propaganda was used to justify the war, usually to portray it as a noble and necessary endeavor.

At the same time, it was used to demonize the enemy. To do this, it would paint them as a threat not just to the nation but to civilization itself.

In a much more benign way, it was also used to mobilize resources by encouraging men to enlist or for civilians to buy war bonds.

The British, for example, established the War Propaganda Bureau early in the war which  enlisted famous writers and artists to create compelling propaganda materials. 

These were distributed both at home and abroad.

The Germans, on the other hand, relied heavily on propaganda to maintain morale during the British naval blockade.

These blockades had prevented shipping from reaching German ports, which caused severe food shortages in Germany.

In comparison, in the United States, which entered the war later , the Committee on Public Information, which was established by President Woodrow Wilson, launched a massive propaganda campaign to build support for the war effort.

Interestingly, this campaign was not just aimed at adults but also at children, with propaganda materials distributed in schools to instill a sense of patriotism and duty from a young age.

In Russia, propaganda was used to try and maintain support for the war amidst growing social unrest, which eventually led to the Russian Revolution .

The Russian government used propaganda to portray the war as a fight against German imperialism.

This was aimed at appealing to the nationalist sentiments of the Russian people, but it had little effect in the end.

Common types of WWI propaganda

During World War I, propaganda was employed in a variety of forms, each designed to serve a specific purpose.

The types of propaganda used can be broadly categorized into recruitment propaganda, war bond propaganda, enemy demonization propaganda, and nationalism and patriotism propaganda.

Recruitment propaganda

One of the most visible forms of propaganda during the war was recruitment propaganda.

As the war dragged on and casualty numbers rose, it became increasingly important for nations to encourage more men to enlist.

Recruitment posters often depicted the ideal soldier as brave, honorable, and patriotic, appealing to a sense of duty and masculinity.

Iconic images such as Lord Kitchener's "Your Country Needs You" poster in Britain, or Uncle Sam's "I Want You" poster in the United States, became powerful symbols of the call to arms.

War bonds propaganda

Another crucial aspect of propaganda was the promotion of war bonds. Financing the war was a massive undertaking.

So, governments turned to their citizens for help.

War bond propaganda aimed to convince the public that purchasing bonds was both a financial investment and a patriotic duty.

These campaigns often used emotional appeals. It suggested that buying bonds was a way to support the troops and contribute to the war effort.

Enemy demonisation propaganda

The demonization of the enemy was a common theme in World War I propaganda.

By portraying the enemy as monstrous, barbaric, or inhuman, governments could justify the war and stoke a sense of fear and hatred.

This type of propaganda was often based on stereotypes or outright lies, such as the infamous "Rape of Belgium" campaign by the Allies, which exaggerated German atrocities to gain international support.

Nationalisation and patriotism propaganda

Finally, propaganda was also used to foster a sense of nationalism and patriotism.

This was especially important in multi-ethnic empires like Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, where loyalty to the state was not a given.

The resultant nationalistic propaganda often used symbols, myths, and historical narratives to create a sense of shared identity and purpose.

The impact on society

One of the most significant impacts of propaganda was its role in creating a culture of sacrifice and service, where everyone was expected to do their part for the war effort.

Furthermore, propaganda influenced the way the war was understood and remembered.

It created a narrative of the war that highlighted the heroism and sacrifice of the soldiers, while downplaying the horror and destruction.

This narrative was often uncritically accepted, leading to a romanticized and distorted view of the war.

Ultimately, the use of propaganda during World War I may have had a significant impact on society by introducing new methods of mass communication and persuasion.

The techniques developed during the war, from the use of posters and films to the manipulation of news and information, became a standard part of political and commercial communication in the decades that followed.

The crucial role of artists and designers

Artists and designers' skills were harnessed to create powerful images and messages.

They were, in essence, visual storytellers, crafting narratives of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotism that resonated with the masses.

A well-designed poster or illustration could convey a message instantly and emotionally.

As a result, artists and designers used a variety of techniques to maximize the impact of their work: from the use of bold colors and simple, striking designs to the manipulation of symbols and stereotypes.

There are a number of very famous examples form various countries. In Britain, o ne of the most famous examples is the "Your Country Needs You" poster, featuring Lord Kitchener.

The poster, designed by Alfred Leete, became an iconic symbol of the call to arms.

Its simple yet powerful design resonating with the British public.

In Germany, artists like Ludwig Hohlwein and Lucian Bernhard created striking posters that promoted war bonds and recruitment.

Their work, characterized by bold typography and dramatic imagery, was instrumental in maintaining morale and unity during the war.

Then, in the United States, artists like James Montgomery Flagg and Howard Chandler Christy created memorable propaganda posters.

Flagg's "I Want You" poster, featuring Uncle Sam, became one of the most iconic images of the war, while Christy's posters, featuring idealized images of women, appealed to a sense of chivalry and duty.

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The propaganda posters that won the u.s. home front.

Albinko Hasic is a PhD student at Syracuse University, whose research concerns propaganda.

In 1917, James Montgomery Flagg created his iconic Uncle Sam  poster  encouraging American men to join the war cause with the clear message, “I want you for the U.S. Army!” as the U.S. ramped up preparations to enter World War I. Even though this was not the first instance of propaganda posters being employed on behalf of a war cause, the visual medium proved to be effective in the military’s recruitment drives and posters were routinely used to boost morale, encourage camaraderie, and raise  esprit de corps .  Posters were cheap, easily distributed, and fomented a sense of patriotism and duty. In World War II, the U.S. turned to artists once again in an attempt to influence the public on the home front. Today, these posters offer a glimpse into American society and the efforts to mold public opinion in the country. 

Rolled out on a massive scale in World War I, the popularity of posters as propaganda only further increased in World War II. With the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. began mobilizing once again but not just militarily. The U.S. government leveraged hundreds of artists across the country to deliver important messages through visual means. This included some relatively famous artists such as the creator of  Aquaman , Paul Norris, whose sketches were noticed by his superiors during his time in the military.  The artists’ designs were not just focused on the rank and file of the military either. The Office of War Information (OWI) believed that the ‘home front,’ was just as sensitive to enemy misinformation, and went to work creating a series of posters specifically focused on the population back home as the engine of the war effort in Europe and the Pacific. 

The designs and posters had a wide range in terms of messaging and design. Even though there was quite a number of posters in the U.S. with xenophobic or down right racist messaging and visuals, the majority centered around themes of tradition, patriotism, duty, and honor.  This was further expanded on the home front with themes such as conservation, production, work ethic, buying war bonds, tending to “victory gardens,” encouraging women in the labor force, and cementing a common enemy in the eyes of the American public.  

A Common Enemy Emerges

Several U.S. propaganda posters employed a tactic known as demonization.  This involved portraying the enemy as  barbarian , aggressive, conniving, or simply evil. Demonization included derogatory name calling including terms such as “Japs,” “Huns,” and “Nips,” among others. Several posters in the U.S tapped into demonization by showcasing the Japanese with overly exaggerated features and by recycling racist and xenophobic personifications.

This was often paired with messaging such as one anti-Japanese poster which portrayed Emperor Hirohito rubbing his hands saying, “Go ahead, please take day off!.” The tactic was clear, motivate the working population at home to avoid sick days through fear of the inhuman enemy who is planning an attack on the homeland at any moment. 

Fear was a popular theme employed by artists, even with differing messages. In one poster, a giant Nazi boot is depicted crushing a small church with the language, “We’re fighting to prevent this.” Often, fear was utilized as a way to encourage the purchase of war bonds. Numerous posters portray children wearing gas masks or under the shadow of giant swastikas with clear messaging, “Buy war bonds to prevent this possible future.”  

Conservation and Production 

Some posters employed  comedy  as a way to break through, while at the same time tapping into the overarching fear of the enemy.  For example, one poster, seemingly in an attempt to encourage carpooling, depicts an outline of Adolf Hitler riding shotgun with a commuter with the messaging, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” Others encouraged high production outputs by likening slacking off with aiding and abetting America’s foreign enemies. At the same time, others were more positivist in nature such as the famous Rosie the Riveter “We can do it!,” poster,  encouraging women  in the workforce. 

Interestingly, many posters encouraged conservation and “victory gardens.” In an attempt to counterbalance rationing, the Department of Agriculture encouraged personal home gardens and small farms as a way to raise the production of fresh vegetables during the course of the war.  Some scholars, such as Stuart Kallen believe that victory gardens contributed up to a third of all domestic vegetable production in the country during the course of the war.  Posters espoused popular sentiments such as “our food is fighting,” “food is ammunition,” and “dig for victory.”  Coinciding with this, posters also espoused the benefits of canning with messages such as, “of course I CAN,” and “can all you can.”  

Loose Lips Sink Ships

Perhaps one of the most fascinating themes which were propagated on the home front is misinformation and “loose talk.” Some scholars have speculated that this theme emerged out of fear of domestic spies and foreign intelligence operations within the U.S. Others, however, maintain that the U.S. intelligence services had shut down any foreign intelligence networks even prior to America’s involvement in WWII. Their claim is that these types of messages merely aimed to dispel rumors and prevent a loss of morale at home and abroad. Whatever the case may be, the government asked illustrators to discourage the population at home from casual chatter about troop deployment, movement, and any other sensitive information which could be “picked up,” by enemy receptors or propagated on a large scale. The phrase, “ loose lips sink ships ,” emerged thanks in part to the work of Seymour Goff.  Goff’s poster depicts a U.S. boat on fire, sinking with the words, “Loose lips might sink ships.”  Similar messaging was also prevalent in Great Britain and Germany as well. 

Just as World War II was fought with bullets, boats, tanks and planes, the war at home was fought with information stemming from sources such as movies, radio, leaflets, and posters. Artists suddenly became soldiers on the front to win the hearts and minds of the American public.  Propaganda posters offer us an interesting insight into the objectives of the U.S. government and the war time aims of the mission to create consensus at home.

Humor and Horror: Printed Propaganda during World War I

«Propaganda in the form of posters, postcards, and trade cards flourished during World War I due to developments in print technology that had begun in the 19th century. Governments on both sides of the conflict invested in printed matter that rallied public sentiments of nationalism and support for the war while also encouraging animosity toward the enemy.»

Left: Harry Ryle Hopps (American, 1869–1937). Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist , 1917. Color lithograph, image: 38 3/4 x 25 5/8 in. (98.4 x 65.1 cm). Collection of Mary Ellen Meehan

During wartime, large-format, full-color posters plastered walls from city streets to classrooms. They mobilized support for the war effort, summoned donations to charities, encouraged participation in war bonds, and publicized victories in notable battles to a broad public. Illustrators of varying renown were called on to produce forceful images whose meaning could be quickly and easily grasped by a diverse audience.

Calling on American men to enlist, Harry Ryle Hopps's poster Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist (1917) casts Germany as a barbarian who has arrived on U.S. shores, leaving behind a destroyed Europe. The "mad brute" wears a spiked helmet emblazoned with the word "militarism" and dons a mustache suggestive of Kaiser Wilhelm II's whiskers. He has abducted an allegorical figure of Lady Liberty and clenches the bloodied club of German Kultur (culture). The motif of the barbarous enemy abounds in propaganda issued by the Allied forces, and the ape-like figure in particular—a precursor to the title character in the 1933 film King Kong —spoke to an audience familiar with Charles Darwin's theories of evolution.

Right: Fritz Erler (German, 1868–1940). Help Us Win! Buy War Bonds ( Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe ) , 1917. Color lithograph, image: 22 3/4 x 17 1/2 in. (57.8 x 44.5 cm). Collection of Mary Ellen Meehan

On the German side, Fritz Erler designed Help Us Win! Buy War Bonds (1917) after making studies of soldiers at the front. The man depicted in his poster wears a type of steel helmet introduced by the German army in 1916. The gas mask on his chest, the two "potato-masher" grenades in a pouch dangling from his left shoulder, and the barbed wire that surrounds him are all visual hallmarks of World War I. The artist formed the soldier's pupils into small crosses, harnessing Christian symbolism to cast him as a noble and timeless figure. The poster was produced in three sizes and was also issued as a postcard to promote war bonds to German citizens.

Paul Hadol (French, 1835–1875) and Walter Trier (Bohemian, 1890–1951). Map of Europe in 1870 / Map of Europe in 1914 , 1914. Commercial color lithograph, sheet: 14 5/16 x 37 3/16 in. (36.4 x 94.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. William O’D. Iselin, 1961 (61.681.9a, b)

Drawing on humor to sway public opinion, French artist Paul Hadol illustrated a satirical map of Europe at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), from which the Prussian army emerged victorious one year later. In response, German artist Walter Trier produced a map of the region at the outbreak of World War I, with each country similarly cast as a caricature. He depicts Germany and Austria-Hungary as heroic soldiers fending off surrounding nations, each represented by a negative stereotypical figure. A percentage of the proceeds from sales of his map supported the Red Cross.

November 10 , from the series Battles of August–November, 1914 , 1914. French. Color lithographs, sheet: 4 x 6 in. (10.2 x 15.2 cm). Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive. Promised gift, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Thanks to their diminutive size, postcards were another ideal tool for circulating propaganda and publicizing wartime events. Like Trier's poster, a series of postcards based on cartoons published in an English magazine uses caricature in comparing the opposing armies to a pair of "scientific wrestlers." The sequence in the spread, published on November 4, 1914, ends on October 26, at the height of the First Battle of Ypres. The postcard issuer included an additional scene (above): the November 10 Battle of Langemarck, represented as a knockout blow.

Left: Quarrels and Fights Are Unacceptable, as It Diminishes Individual Dignity , from the series Women Soldiers , ca. 1917. Color lithograph, sheet: 6 x 4 in. (15.2 x 10.2 cm). Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive. Promised gift, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The provisional government in place in Russia, which controlled the country following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and prior to the ascendance of the Bolsheviks in 1917, established all-female combat units in an attempt to inspire war-weary male soldiers and demonstrate the Bolshevik model of equality among citizens. Postcards featuring members of the women's battalions were paired with moralizing captions celebrating qualities such as bravery, unity, and good hygiene.

Carl Otto Czeschka (Austrian, 1878–1960). Central Power Aircraft in Flight , from the series German Armaments , 1915–16. Color lithograph, sheet: 4 x 6 in. (10.2 x 15.2 cm). Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive. Promised gift, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Other wartime postcards were considered objets d'art. Those designed by Carl Otto Czeschka, a member of the Wiener Werkstätte (a community of artists in Vienna established in 1903 devoted to restoring thoughtful craftsmanship to industrial production), extol German armaments like the aircraft pictured above. The Bahlsen cookie company issued the postcards for the German military postal service ( Feldpost ), which provided complimentary mail service to soldiers. Their streamlined compositions and color palette also appealed to collectors with a taste for modernist design.

Right: Issued by American Tobacco Company; original photograph by Underwood & Underwood (American). Card No. 74, Belgian Carrier Pigeon, with Its Message in Code , from the World War I Scenes series (T121) issued by Sweet Caporal Cigarettes, 1914–15. Photolithograph, sheet: 2 5/8 x 1 9/16 in. (6.7 x 3.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick (63.350.246.121.1–.250)

Trade cards—antecedents to today's business cards—were a popular means for companies to publicize their products, and often included captivating images to encourage customer loyalty. Trade cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection distributed in packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes illustrate the unprecedented convergence of modern technologies with traditional wartime tools, such as homing pigeons that deliver messages in code inscribed on their feathers. While such collectables were used for promotional purposes, they also had an educational component and aimed to spread knowledge about all facets of the war.

These posters, postcards, and trade cards may all be viewed through January 7, 2018, in the exhibition World War I and the Visual Arts ; many of these works are also discussed in the accompanying issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin .

Related Links

World War I and the Visual Arts , on view at The Met Fifth Avenue through January 7, 2018

Read more blog posts in this exhibition's Now at The Met series .

Allison Rudnick

Associate Curator Allison Rudnick manages the Study Room for Drawings and Prints and oversees the ephemera collection. She joined the department as a research assistant in 2012 and has held positions at the print shop Harlan & Weaver and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Active in the field of contemporary printmaking, she is a frequent contributor to Art in Print and serves as treasurer for the Association of Print Scholars. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and an MPhil from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is a PhD candidate.

World War I: 100 Years Later

A Smithsonian magazine special report

The Posters That Sold World War I to the American Public

A vehemently isolationist nation needed enticement to join the European war effort. These advertisements were part of the campaign to do just that

Jia-Rui Cook

On July 28, 1914, World War I officially began when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. In Europe and beyond, country after country was drawn into the war by a web of alliances. It took three years, but on April 2, 1917, the U.S. entered the fray when Congress declared war on Germany.

The government didn’t have time to waste while its citizens made up their minds about joining the fight. How could ordinary Americans be convinced to participate in the war “ Over There ,” as one of the most popular songs of the era described it?

Posters—which were so well designed and illustrated that people collected and displayed them in fine art galleries—possessed both visual appeal and ease of reproduction. They could be pasted on the sides of buildings, put in the windows of homes, tacked up in workplaces, and resized to appear above cable car windows and in magazines. And they could easily be reprinted in a variety of languages.

To merge this popular form of advertising with key messages about the war, the U.S. government’s public information committee formed a Division of Pictorial Publicity in 1917. The chairman, George Creel, asked Charles Dana Gibson, one of most famous American illustrators of the period, to be his partner in the effort. Gibson, who was president of the Society of Illustrators, reached out to the country’s best illustrators and encouraged them to volunteer their creativity to the war effort.

These illustrators produced some indelible images, including one of the most iconic American images ever made: James Montgomery Flagg’s stern image of Uncle Sam pointing to the viewer above the words, “I Want You for U.S. Army.” (Flagg’s inspiration came from an image of the British Secretary of State for War , Lord Kitchener, designed by Alfred Leete.) The illustrators used advertising strategies and graphic design to engage the casual passerby and elicit emotional responses. How could you avoid the pointing finger of Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty? How could you stand by and do nothing when you saw starving children and a (fictional) attack on New York City?

“Posters sold the war,” said David H. Mihaly, the curator of graphic arts and social history at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, where 55 of these posters will go on view August 2. “These posters inspired you to enlist, to pick up the flag and support your country. They made you in some cases fear an enemy or created a fear you didn’t know you had. Nations needed to convince their citizens that this war was just, and we needed to participate and not sit and watch.” There were certainly propaganda posters before 1917, but the organization and mass distribution of World War I posters distinguished them from previous printings, Mihaly said.

Despite the passage of 100 years—as well as many wars and disillusionment about them—these posters retain their power to make you stare. Good and evil are clearly delineated. The suffering is hard to ignore. The posters tell you how to help, and the look in the eyes of Uncle Sam makes sure you do.

“ Your Country Calls!: Posters of the First World War ” will be on view at the Huntington from August 2 to November 3, 2014. Jia-Rui Cook wrote this for  Zocalo Public Square .

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The Great War

Propaganda posters, increasing awareness and encouraging support.

The United States has been at war since 2001. While there is media coverage, it does not tend to hit the headlines very often, and there is very little impact on the day–to–day life of ordinary citizens. This was not the case with World War I. Citizens of the United States were acutely aware that they were at war and their lives changed dramatically because of it.

Probably the most significant aspect in which their lives changed dealt with food. Government posters encouraged people to eat less, grow gardens and make sure that there was sufficient food for the troops. Other posters were aimed at getting people to buy savings bonds — a method of financing a war.

While posters were a positive form of propaganda during World War I, they are no longer used today.

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A selection of World War I and II posters from the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division collections. Included are propaganda on purchasing war bonds, the importance of national security and posters from allied and axis powers.

The University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division houses many collections of regional and historical significance, notably specialized and scarce materials, such as these examples of World War I and World War II posters. World War I, known as the Great War, stimulated the transformation of this well-established advertising tool into an effective propaganda medium for war. Often designed by the leading artists and illustrators of the time, they were cheap to produce and easy to distribute. Their direct slogans and visual imagery appealed to a variety of cultural and nationalistic themes that served to muster public support for the war campaign. Many were illustrated with compelling images of heroes, sacrifice and family values. While some encouraged the purchase of war bonds and solicited donations for non-profit organizations such as the Red Cross, others promoted patriotism and warned against aiding the enemy with careless talk. The study of this medium leads us to a greater understanding of their effectiveness as tools for propaganda, aids in the analysis of national cultural and symbolic values, and helps define ideological differences between nations at war.

About the Database

The information for the Posters Database was researched and prepared by the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division and Cataloging staff in 2000. Not all the posters from the collection were included in this database. The images were scanned in RGB color using a Olympus C-2000 Zoom digital camera and saved in .jpg format. Some manipulation of the images was done to present the clearest possible digital image. The scanned images were then linked with descriptive data using OCLC's CONTENTdm software. The original collection resides in the UW Libraries Special Collections Division as the Posters Collection.

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Section Two: Propaganda Posters

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Posters were a common form of propaganda during World War I. While propaganda is often associated with dishonesty, effective propagandists recognize the danger of lying; if even one mistruth is revealed, it throws the whole campaign into question. Primarily visual, the propaganda poster was a safe mode of delivery for emotional appeals, referencing ominous potentialities and general circumstances rather than specific events. The feelings elicited, whether righteous anger or fear or empathy, were intended to provoke the viewer to action, to purchase Liberty Bonds or to enlist in the Armed Forces. As William W. Biddle wrote in Propaganda and Education (1932), “any emotion may be ‘drained off’ into any activity by skillful manipulation.”

Propaganda posters also legitimized the war effort. By referencing atrocities committed by the Germans in Belgium and at sea, they implied that only the enemy practiced brutality in war; American soldiers were the heroes who stood between the Kaiser’s thugs and their victims. The visual representations of German soldiers often took the form of a bloodthirsty, grotesque caricature, reinforcing the demonization of the “Hun,” a derogatory nickname for a German soldier.

One of the more haunting propaganda posters of WWI, Enlist shows a woman dressed in white and cradling an infant as she drifts to the ocean floor. Rather than portray her imminent drowning as a fait accompli , the artist includes bubbles rising from her mouth to show she is still alive, compelling the viewer to see the tragedy in the midst of its unfolding. Far above her is the still-sinking wreck of a ship. The poster uses only one word, "Enlist." No additional words were necessary, because the American public of 1915 would immediately recognize the event to which the image referred. This poster was drawn by Fred Spear and produced by the Boston Committee of Public Safety only one month after the sinking of the British Passenger Liner, Lusitania .

While German U-Boats had already attacked many vessels in British waters, including two American ships, none of those sinkings resulted in the carnage of the Lusitania . The U-Boat was only 400 yards away from the ship when it fired a torpedo in its side, damaging the passenger liner so severely that it sank completely in just 18 minutes. The death total horrified the American public, with over 1,200 people killed, including 128 U.S. citizens.

Despite the public outcry, it would be almost two more years before the United States joined the war, making the message of this poster a bit premature. Its explicit call to action relies on its implicit appeal to the viewer's empathy and outrage. The depiction of the victims as a Madonna and child transforms the message into an almost religious call for justice.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.50552/

  6. Enlist Fred Spear, 1915 Library of Congress Collection URL: www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.50552

7. Remember Belgium

"Remember Belgium" was a common message of Allied propaganda during World War I. This poster asks the viewer to recall the cruelties of the German forces during the invasion and occupation of Belgium, including the slaughter of thousands of civilians, many of them children. It is estimated that by the end of the war, well over 20,000 Belgian civilians had died at the hands of the Germans. The bulk of the atrocities occurred in the first few months of the war, when invading troops burnt about 25,000 homes. The Allied press, however, was more dogged in its publicization of numerous otherwise unconfirmed incidents of sexual assault and grotesque mutilations of Belgian women and children. These series of real and alleged crimes became known as the "Rape of Belgium." Allied illustrations and posters used the figure of a brutalized woman to symbolize Belgium throughout the war.

Ellsworth Young's poster was produced after the U.S. joined the war in 1917, making it a few years out-of-date. It's disturbing imagery was nonetheless compelling, making it one of the most well-known American posters of the war. By referencing the lurid reports circulating throughout Allied press of German troops brutalizing children, this image solicits the viewer's outrage and pity. A screaming girl, silhouetted against the burning Belgian landscape, is being forcibly dragged off by a German soldier with a spiked helmet and large mustache. The girl is quite young, her size suggesting that she is only around nine or ten years old. This picture also appeared in an 1918 edition of the Ladies' Home Journal , with the caption, "Somebody's little girl. Suppose she were yours. Buy Liberty Bonds to save her."

  7. Remember Belgium Ellsworth Young, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/43049

8. Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty

The U.S. Food Administration's Education Division produced this poster several months after the country entered the war. Unlike many of its contemporaries, this poster relies on the viewer's sense of duty rather than outrage at injustices committed by the enemy. Below the image of immigrants passing the Statue of Liberty on their way to Ellis Island, the phrase "Your Duty" appears in large capitalized letters. Targeted specifically at immigrants, this poster was distributed in Yiddish and Italian as well as English. The colors used—red, white, and blue—were intended to appeal to the patriotic pride of the new citizens, who are urged to "Remember [their] First Thrill of American Liberty."

  8. Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty Sackett & Wilhelms Co., 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42932

9. That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth

A bleak contrast to the previous poster (#8), this scene portrays the Statue of Liberty, not gazed on with excitement by newly arrived immigrants, but enveloped in flames. Lady Liberty's torch lies in rubble at her base, and nearby, her head is partially submerged in the waters of New York Harbor. The skyscrapers of the city are discernable in the distance, all subsumed in a massive conflagration. Silhouetted against the fiery sky are bomber planes.

The message of this poster is clear; without victory over the enemy in Europe, war could come home to America. The text below the scene implies that, should the Allied forces fail, liberty may "perish from the Earth." The viewer can help prevent this outcome simply by purchasing Liberty Bonds.

This poster is markedly similar to a set of drawings that appeared in the August 10, 1916 edition of Life Magazine . The first illustration shows the Statue of Liberty and New York City with an ominous caption, "The Unready Nation." The following illustration, titled "The Grave of Liberty," shows a post-destruction scene of the city and statue, in which the buildings are immolated ruins and only the torch of the Statue of Liberty remains, peeking out from the water.

  9. That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth Joseph Pennell, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42943

10. The Time Has Come to Conquer or Submit

Woodrow Wilson's round portrait in a bronze decorative border, reminiscent of currency, is the central image of this poster. Presented in large print below the portrait is Wilson's quote regarding the U.S. entrance into World War I: "The time has come to conquer or submit… For us there is but one choice. We have made it." A powerful quote, it employs the viewer's pride and sense of duty and justice.

This quote would soon be appropriated by the Silent Sentinels, a women's suffrage organization created by the famous suffragist, Alice Paul. For two and a half years, beginning before the U.S. entry into the war and ending well after the Armistice, Paul and her fellow suffragists protested in silence outside the White House. The use of silence as a form of protest was strategically effective; their arguments were not presented in the voices of women, so routinely ignored, but in the form of banners, often quoting powerful men. The rhetoric of the Allied officials typically characterized the war as a fight for freedom, for their own countries and for the smaller nations under the German Alliance, while ignoring their own violations of the right to self-determination in their imperial possessions and at home, with the lack of suffrage for the female half of their own citizenry. The banners of the Silent Sentinels called attention to the politicians' hypocrisy, a practice that elicited strong reactions from officials.

On October 20, 1917, Paul carried a banner quoting Woodrow Wilson: "The time has come to conquer or submit, for us there is but one choice. We have made it." She and her compatriots were arrested and sentenced to seven months in prison. This act was later declared unconstitutional by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, although not until the suffragists had spent their time in the Occoquan Workhouse. The women were abused throughout their incarceration, the most famous incident occurring on November 14, 1917, when the prison superintendent ordered the guards to torture the suffragist inmates. The incident became known as the "Night of Terror," with the severe beating of many women, some of whom were then suspended with their hands in chains over their heads, knocked unconscious against iron objects, and choked. One woman, Alice Cosu, suffered a heart attack; Alice Paul herself had already been rendered unable to walk from a long solitary confinement without adequate sustenance. When news of the Night of Terror reached the American public, the resulting outrage caused support for the Suffrage Movement to swell. The women were released two weeks after the Night of Terror and returned to protesting, not stopping until the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress a year and a half later.

  10. The Time Has Come to Conquer or Submit American Lithographic Company, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42747

11. Must Children Die and Mothers Plead in Vain

Must Children Die and Mothers Plead in Vain? depicts a mother and her two young children crouching amongst ruins. With her left hand raised upward in a pose suggesting supplication, the woman cradles one of her babies in her right arm while another child grasps at her waist. Only a few of the items in the rubble are discernible, including an empty pan and jug to the far right, a reminder of the widespread food shortages and hunger in Europe. In the darker rubble at the left of the poster, an oval shape appears behind the woman's back; although unclear, the shape could be the head of another child, possibly dead.

Like many of the posters featuring women and children, this image aims to elicits pity and, to a lesser degree, guilt from the viewer. It implies that the viewer has a responsibility to provide whatever resources they are able to contribute to bring the war to an earlier end, because the longer the conflict continues, the more women and children will suffer.

  11. Must Children Die and Mothers Plead in Vain Sackett & Wilhelms Co., 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/43059

12. Clear the Way

Created by Howard Chandler Christy, a well known illustrator of the early twentieth century, this poster is one of three similar posters each featuring branches of the military. "If you want to fight, join the Marines" and "Fight or Buy War Bonds," which depicts a marching group of Army soldiers (www.oshermaps.org/map/42927), are the other two in the series. Each poster includes a beautiful woman, likely allegorical representations of liberty or America. The personification of liberty in this poster appears to be emerging from the ocean, dressed in white, possibly suggesting innocence, and wearing a laurel wreath, a classical symbol of victory in war. Behind her is an American flag and below her are members of the U.S. Navy in a sea battle, preparing to fire on an unseen enemy target. Barefoot, tattooed, heavily muscled, and universally white and blond, the men are figures of an idealized masculinity. While the explicit message of this poster is "Buy Bonds," another intention, like in Chandler's other two military posters, is to inspire the male viewer to enlist and prove himself to be one of these heroic figures.

  12. Clear the Way Howard Chandler Christy, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42748

  See also: Fight or Buy Bonds Howard Chandler Christy, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42927

13. Halt the Hun

This poster uses a dramatic scene of a victim, villain, and hero to capture the viewer's attention. A German soldier looms menacingly over a terrified woman on the ground. With her hair in disarray and her shirt seemingly torn, it is clear that she has already been victimized in some way. In her arms, she cradles a naked, possibly lifeless, child. The villain of the scene wears a spiked helmet and iron cross, one bloody hand holding a bayonet-fitted rifle and the other grabbing the woman's shoulder. The flames in the background give evidence to additional crimes committed by the German. The hero of the scene is an American soldier, who requires only one arm to restrain the villain. Unlike the German soldier, who is hunched and squat with a short neck and protruding jaw, the American stands tall, his chiseled features and confident bearing contrasting sharply with the appearance of the villain. Instead of a rifle, the hero wields a sword more suited to a medieval knight.

The text of the poster uses concise but strong language. "Halt" is also a German word, and "Hun" was the pejorative nickname given to the Germans during World War I. The Huns of the fourth and fifth centuries were a nomadic people in Europe and were considered uncivilized, aggressive, and barbaric. Typically shown with a spiked helmet, bayonet, and bloody hands, the figure of the Hun is prevalent in the Allied propaganda of World War I.

  13. Halt the Hun Henry Raleigh, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42752

14. Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds

Fred Strathmann's poster features one of the more chilling iterations of the Hun figure. Blood drips from his bayonet and hands as he peers with green greedy eyes across the ocean, presumably towards America. Mirroring the frequently used trope of the "skulking Indian" in American print culture at the time, the Hun's hunched posture and black skin can be interpreted as a racial statement. The smoldering ruins of Europe, splattered with blood from the Hun's hands, seem to imply that this could be the America's future if the "Hun" is not defeated. This poster aims to elicit fear and hatred of the enemy, and in doing so, to inspire the viewer to "Beat Back the Hun" and preserve the safety of the nation by buying Liberty Bonds.

  14. Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds Fred Strothman, 1917 Robert & Frank Neikirk Collection URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/42751

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During the "Great War," the lithographed poster was the harbinger, reporter, and arbiter of news, opinion, and sentiment on both the frontlines and the home front. This evocative form of public communication had the advantage of being able both to go and to remain everywhere. When the United States of America entered the conflict in April 1917, the poster as a medium of expression was not new. In the decades preceding the First World War, not only had many formal artists been drawn to the medium, but the poster, with its graphic appeal, had also become a tool of advertising, commerce, and industry. Innovations in color lithography and the development of larger and faster printing presses in the second half of the nineteenth century greatly facilitated the emergence of the modern, mass-produced poster defined by its powerful integration of emotionally evocative graphic images with brief, but direct and effective, textual messages.

Harry A. Garfield, head of the wartime United States Fuel Administration, said, "I can get the authority to write a column or a page about fuel —but I cannot make everybody or even anybody read it. But if I can get a striking drawing with or without a legend of a few lines, everyone who runs by must see it." Continuing in this vein, Joseph Pennell wrote: "That is the whole secret of the appeal of the poster—and by the poster the governments of the world have appealed to the people, who need not know how to read in order to understand, if the design is effective and explanatory." American Artists were working with and for the government of their country, working to communicate with the people at home , at work , and in the camps overseas .

As America went to war, officials in the United States, like those in Europe, quickly found the poster to be what the Publicity Bureau termed "a silent and powerful recruiter." Agencies, public and private, rushed to engage artists to create war posters. In just two years, America printed more than twenty million copies of perhaps 2,500 posters in support of the war effort, more posters than all the other belligerents combined. The purpose of this government-sponsored art was to communicate essential information rapidly and efficiently (in the era that preceded radio broadcasting). By all accounts these propaganda posters excelled in conveying the right message to their intended audience. In his Liberty Loan poster book, artist Joseph Pennell explained: "When the United States wished to make public its wants, whether of men or money, it found art—as the European countries had found—was the best medium."

The demands of war challenged American artists to create posters in aid of propaganda, recruiting, relief, and conservation with the same energy that had previously been reserved for the creation of great exhibition pictures. World War One poster artists would range from some of the best-known painters and illustrators of the day—Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, and Howard Chandler Christy—to commercial artists, even students and other amateurs. The war efforts led these artists to inquire, perhaps for the first time, into the nature and possibilities of the medium. The most successful war poster artists generally came from the ranks of popular magazine and book illustrators who were trained not to simplify and eliminate but to be realistic, detailed, and, above all, evocative. James Montgomery Flagg's "Uncle Sam," originally produced as a cover for Leslie's Illustrated , became the prototype for all posters with a central figure pointing a finger at the viewer, and his "I Want You for the U. S. Army" was and remains one of the most famous posters of all time.

Flagg and the other posters artists worked for the Division of Pictorial Publicity, a branch of the Committee of Public Information. Formed just one week after America declared war on Germany, the CPI coordinated the federal government's broad-based effort to mold public opinion in support of the war. (For more on the propaganda campaign, see the Introduction to "The Home Front", especially the Mobilizing Resources and Patriotism & Politics sections.) The DPI was organized in New York under the direction of Charles Dana Gibson. Joseph Pennell served as an associate chairman of the Pictorial Division while continuing to produce designs and writing Joseph Pennell's Liberty Loan Poster , a short work describing the essential elements of the war poster. Division branches in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco soon followed. The New York group met weekly to select designs that were forwarded to Washington, D. C. where government bureaucrats made choices based on social, economic, or cultural characteristics rather than artistic quality. The Division accepted approximately 1,500 designs, about half of which were used for posters. Various government branches, the Shipping Board, the YMCA and many other organizations used these designs. Exceptionally, the Navy had its own poster bureau directed by Henry Reuterdahl.

The appeal of the war poster was direct and typically emotional rather than intellectual. The objective of the poster was to induce instantaneous comprehension of its message and to urge the viewer to act. The goals were to attract the attention of the target audience, make a clear and specific suggestion or impression, and provide a lasting influence. The qualities of effective poster design were breadth of appeal combined with strength, simplicity, and legibility of design. A well-designed poster was instantly comprehensible, leaving nothing to be studied, deciphered, or overlooked. Many finely crafted posters have continued to attract attention and to deliver their message long after the conclusion of the campaigns for which they were designed. Theoretically, the propaganda poster was capable of communicating its message graphically, without words. A choice phrase or ringing appeal, typically of ten words or less, usually served to double its value: "Lend As They Fight" , "Teamwork Wins" , or "Halt the Hun!" . A well-chosen phrase could draw attention to desired themes such as patriotism, heroism, or determination, while proving highly memorable.

Just as American government enrolled young men to fight the war overseas, so American artists drafted familiar symbols (patriotic, heroic, and sentimental) into the service of propaganda. Gibson's and Christy's American beauties appeared in their traditional role of the girl next door in aid of recruitment or assumed the heroic drapery of Liberty or Victory to urge participation in war work or liberty loans . While numerous appeals focused on traditional female roles of sweetheart, mother and housewife, the propaganda posters show how the war opened to young women the new public roles and responsibilities . "Uncle Sam" appealed not only for U. S. Army recruits but this patriotic icon also called for home front service to the National Industrial Conservation Movement , the United States Fuel Administration , the Liberty Loan , and War Savings Stamps .

While the majority of American war posters appealed to the ideals of unity, patriotism, service, sacrifice, and the higher values of humanity, certain propaganda posters were designed to evoke negative ethnic stereotypes and nativist sentiments. Posters with slogans such as "Civilization vs. Barbarism" , "Hun or Home" , "Help Us Make It Hot for the Kaiser" , and "Help Stop This: Buy W.S.S. & Keep Him Out of America" , tended to depict the German soldier as superhuman in size, brutal and fiendish in character, and the Kaiser as undersized, trifling, and ridiculous.

However we judge the message of the posters in hindsight, there is little doubt that they succeeded in their primary purpose of eliciting a strong response from Americans of their period. Making dramatic use of emotion-laden symbols such as the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and Uncle Sam, these posters served as a call to action when democracy was in peril and reinforced an American's pride in country and his or her innate patriotism and readiness for sacrifice. Such posters also had the psychological importance of bringing the war home to the civilians and suggesting relatively small but meaningful sacrifices on their part. In addition to the reminders of the soldiers at the front, posters showed the civilian population what they could do to aid those soldiers (enlist, buy bonds or war savings stamps) and win the war (conservation, relief). (For more on the civilian response to the war, see The Home Front/Mobilizing Resources .)

In North Carolina, as elsewhere in the United States, citizens would have seen locally produced and federally distributed posters on the streets and mounted in factories, businesses, and public buildings. Unfortunately for historians, posters were an ephemeral medium. Most of the millions of posters produced were soon pasted over or destroyed by the elements after they were read. The posters included in this site are among the relatively few copies that have survived intact and in good condition. They are a small part of the holdings of posters and other graphic materials from both world wars in the Bowman Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. This remarkable collection includes approximately 1,100 American posters from World War I, one of the largest and best preserved collections of such materials and one of the first for which online catalog records have been created for the individual posters.

As part of "North Carolinians and the Great War" project, the Academic Affairs Library has digitized one hundred U. S. World War I posters. The focus is on those that would have been widely distributed in North Carolina and would have been influential in helping to shape attitudes and behavior in support of the war and related efforts within the state. The sample chosen reflects (1) a range of governmental and private agency sponsorship of the posters, (2) an array of the artists involved in their design and production, and (3) the diversity of issues that the posters sought to address and influence (from military recruitment and war loans to the conservation of vital resources, medical aid, and refugee relief.)

The one hundred posters included in this site have been divided into broad subject categories that reflect how contemporaries might have thought of them: finance (including Liberty Loans, War Savings and Thrift Stamps), resources (involving both products that were raised or manufactured, or those that were conserved such as food and fuel), military service (from recruitment to camp life to postwar adjustment), propaganda, and war work. This classification provides a preliminary organizational scheme for viewing war posters, but viewers are invited to seek other ways of reading these complex visual documents. Propaganda posters of the First World War served as carriers of both open and covert messages about the war, the sponsoring agency, patriotism, politics, and identity. To attempt to limit these images to one scheme of classification is to underestimate and undervalue their symbolic and communicative role.

Sources: Walton Rawls, Wake up, America!: World War I and the American Poster .(New York: Abbeville Press, 1988) and Libby Chenault, Battlelines: World War I Posters from the Bowman Gray Collection . (Chapel Hill: Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1988). For additional published sources and web sites on World War I posters, see For Further Research section.

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American Propaganda in the Great War

• Students will analyze American propaganda posters from World War 1, the Great War.
• They will view examples of war American war propaganda, & determine what these posters are conveying.

Students will learn that propaganda is information, both biased & misleading to promote or publicize a certain political cause or point of view. They will then analyze examples of American propaganda.

• Examine & analyze WW1 era American propaganda posters to determine the poster’s message, audience it is supposed to reach & its effectiveness.

Massachusetts Content Standards:

• # 35: Analyze causes & course of America in WW1
• # 36: Analyze the rationale of America’s entering the conflict
• # 37: Analyze the role played by the USA in support of the Allied Powers

The student may view examples of propaganda posters on various websites, including the following:

• www.theworldwar.org
• www.ww1propaganda.com
• www.warhistoryonline.com
• www.smithosnianmag.com

The student will inspect & analyze three (#3) American WW1 posters: One should be geared to American men, calling on them to enlist in the war effort. A second poster should be geared toward the American people in general, illustrating the evilness of the ‘Hun” enemy. The third poster should reach out to the American people living on the “Home Front”. This one would ask all Americans to volunteer their time, donate to the war effort in any number of ways, or to conserve food/fuel, etc.

For each poster the student will:

• Identify which group of people the poster is aimed
• Explain in their own words what they believe the poster in attempting to convey to the reader
• C) Decide if the poster effectively reaches the reader> In other words, is the poster convincing? Why or why not?

Important! The student must include a picture/print of each poster, either attaching their evaluation of each poster to on the print/picture, or by writing their evaluation on the picture

• The exercise (homework grade) will be based on 40 possible points.
• Students will be graded on the originality of their poster choice (in other words, try to find one that another student is NOT also using) on a number basis from 5 to 10, with 10 being the highest grade.
• Student will also be graded on satisfactorily identifying the poster’s audience, explaining the meaning of the poster, as well as deciding the effectiveness of each poster. Each of these three will be graded on the same number system as above, 5 to 10.

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Propaganda posters

Propaganda is a form of communication that promotes a particular perspective or agenda by using text and images to provoke an emotional response and influence behaviour.

Can you think of some modern examples of propaganda?

1. During the First World War, propaganda was used around the world for fundraising, to build hatred of the enemy, and to encourage enlistment. Posters were an ideal method of communicating this propaganda, as they could be printed and distributed quickly in large quantities.

Here are two examples of Australian propaganda posters, which aimed to encourage enlistment by promoting a sense of comradery and duty:

Accession Number: ARTV05616

Sportsmens’ Recruiting Committee, Troedel and Cooper Pty. Ltd, Enlist in the Sportsmens’ 1000 , 1917, chromolithograph on paper, 98.7 x 73.2 cm

Accession Number: ARTV00141

David Souter, Win the War League, William Brooks and Co. Ltd, It is nice in the surf, but what about the men in the trenches? , 1915, lithograph printed in colour on paper, 76.2 x 51.4 cm

a. What messages are the posters presenting?

b. Who are those posters targeting? Who are they not targeting, and why?

c.What do these posters tell us about how the typical Australian man was percieved during the early 1900s?

d. Do you think these posters would have influenced people like Augusta Enberg , the Christensen family , or Peter Rados ? Why or why not?

2. The following propaganda posters also encouraged enlistment, but did this by building fear of the enemy.

Accession Number: ARTV00078

Norman Lindsay, Commonwealth Government of Australia Syd. Day, The Printer Ltd, ?, 1918, chromolithograph on paper, 99 x 74.4 cm

Accession Number: ARTV06030

B.E. Pike, VAP Service, Must it come to this? , 1914 – 1918, chromolithograph on paper, 57.7 x 46 cm

Accession Number: ARTV00079

Norman Lindsay, Commonwealth Government of Australia, W.E. Smith Ltd, Will you fight now or wait for this? , 1918, chromolithograph on paper, 98.3 x 74.6 cm

a. How is the enemy depicted, and what message is being presented?

b. How does the artist use text and images to convey this message?

c. What mood is being created?

d. What design elements (colour, typography, shape, space, and scale) have contributed to the mood of this poster?

e. Do you think the artist has been successful in getting their messages across? Why or why not?

f. How do you think these posters might have made Australians with German heritage feel?

3. Below are German propaganda posters that also focus on the notion of the enemy.

Accession Number: ARTV10343

Claus Berthold, Das Duetsche Scharfe Schwert [The German sharp sword], 1917, lithograph on paper, 90.8 x 58 cm

Accession Number: ARTV10346

Leopold von Kalckreuth, Hurrah, Alle Neune [Hurrah, all nine!], 1918, lithograph printed in colour, 75.4 x 57 cm

Accession Number: ARTV05099

Egon Tschirch Was England Will! [What England will do!...], 1918, lithograph printed in colour, 93 x 67cm

a. Translate the text on these posters using Google Translate . You can also find out more about the posters by searching with the image number (such as ARTV10346) at www.awm.gov.au

b. Compare and contrast these three German posters, to the three Australian posters that also focus on the enemy. Identify similarities and differences relating to message, tone, and the representation of the opposing side. Which posters do you think have the greatest impact? Why?

4. Design your own First World War propaganda poster. You might like to consider:

a. Will you use an Australian, British, German, French or other perspective?

b. What are you trying to get the viewer to think or feel?

c. Will your message be positive or negative?

d. What colours, font, size, and style will you use to get your message across?

For more images and activities relating to propaganda posters from the First and Second World Wars, view the Hearts and Minds education kit.

Last updated: 19 January 2021

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World War II Propaganda Posters

Created by everyone from Norman Rockwell to the Stetson Hat Company, World War II propaganda posters played a crucial role in motivating Americans.

This article appears in: October 2002

By Eric H. Roth

Military posters played a crucial role in motivating Americans to do their best and make sacrifices—of all kinds—during World War II. The War Department, Red Cross, General Electric, Stetson Hat Company, and dozens of other organizations created thousands of patriotic posters to mobilize public support. Poignant, colorful images on paper were created and distributed to

build support for avenging Pearl Harbor, protecting American families, selling war bonds, conserving fuel, increasing factory production, promoting democratic ideals, growing vegetables, expanding the workforce, and keeping secrets.

The propaganda war, before television and the Internet, looked—and maybe worked—best on posters. Wartime posters, often printed in runs of 10,000, were designed to be used once, understood in 20 seconds, displayed for a few months, and thrown away. The few remaining posters, often created by skilled artists and illustrators, have become historical artifacts. Museums, scholars, collectors, veterans—and, increasingly, baby boomers—are celebrating these wartime images for their sociological, aesthetic, and historical value. World War II posters have become hot commodities and very collectible items.

“The Posters That Won the War,” a cyber exhibition at www. posterny. com by the Chisholm-Larsson Gallery, tells the story and highlights 50 original WWII posters: “The production, recruiting, and War Bond posters of WWII were ‘America’s weapons on the wall.’ Millions of posters of hundreds of unique designs cascaded off the presses and onto the American landscape, raising hopes in the dark days after Pearl Harbor and convincing folks on the homefront that their efforts were the key to victory. Today, the relatively few posters that remain are a colorful, nostalgic, and highly collectible snapshot of America at war.”

Robert Chisholm, the owner of Chisholm-Larsson Gallery in New York City, counts 627 different original WWII posters in his collection of 24,000-plus posters. “Whatever your budget, you can find a WWII poster,” says Chisholm. “Ninety percent are $400 or less.”

The gold standard for collectors’ WWII vintage posters, however, remains the Meehan Military Posters catalog. “The only organization in the world,” according to the company’s literature, “devoted to providing original, vintage posters of the two World Wars and Spanish Civil War to collectors, museums, decorators, and investors.” Meehan Military Posters divides WWII posters into nine distinct categories: pilots/planes, recruitment, conservation, espionage, nurses, foreign aid, war production, morale, and foreign on its searchable Web site.

Each color catalog, published twice a year, contains thumbnail-sized reproductions of hundreds of original military posters from “nearly all combatants in both World Wars.” A concise description gives the background of each poster, noting the artist, year of publication, size, condition, and price. The catalog costs $15, but many collectors and dealers consider it an essential investment. “His prices are very good, very fair,” observes a West Coast competitor, Burt Blum, owner of the Trading Post in Santa Monica and a lifelong dealer in vintage magazines and posters.

Fair should not be confused with cheap. “Today an expensive WWII poster can command as much as $4,000 or $5,000,” declares Meehan. “A German poster designed and drawn by the great German poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein could easily be in that range.” Meehan Catalog #36 features many rare, expensive, and fascinating posters. A pair designed by Melbourne Brindle graces the front and back covers. The first haunting image shows a sinking ship, printed by Stetson Hat Company. It warns: “Loose Talk Can Cost Lives! … Keep it under your STETSON.” The second dramatic poster of a sunken Merchant Marine ship beneath a German U-Boat, with the words “Careless talk did this … Keep it under Your Stetson,” sells for $2,750.

The pricey Stetson poster illuminates a common theme of many World War II posters: the dangers of espionage and careless talk. “Silence—means security. Be careful what you say or write,” by illustrator Jes Wilhelm Schlaikjer in 1945 shows a night-patrol infantryman walking somewhere in the Pacific. Meehan sells it for $325. Other military posters, more available and by less well-known artists, such as the 1943 “This Man May Die If You Talk Too Much,” featuring a handsome sailor looking through a porthole, and the 1944 “We Caught Hell!—someone must have talked” sell for $145 in the poster catalog. These poignant posters place clear responsibility for the safety of sailors and soldiers on the silence of civilians and fellow servicemen.

Almost the entire “Loose lips sink ships” poster series has become quite collectible. An excellent example, according to veteran poster dealer Gail Chisholm (Robert’s sister, neighbor, and friendly rival poster gallery owner), shows a hissing snake surrounded by the words “Less Dangerous Than Careless Talk”—she sells it for $330. The easy-to-use Chisholm Gallery Web site includes a wide selection of World War II posters. “There are also a lot of great and amusing posters against careless talk,” such as “Keep Mum, She’s Not So Dumb,” observes Robert Chisholm.

“Powers of Persuasion: Poster Art of World War II,” a popular exhibit at the National Archives Building in Washington DC from May 1994 to February 1995, emphasized the two psychological approaches used to motivate Americans: pride and fear. “Words are ammunition,” said a Government Information Manual issued by the Office of War Information in the exhibit. “Each word an American utters either helps or hurts the war effort. He must stop rumors. He must challenge the cynic and the appeaser. He must not speak recklessly. He must remember that the enemy is listening.” An online exhibit culled from the museum show features 33 posters, one sound file, and some background historical information.

Across the country at an outdoor flea market in Santa Monica, dealer Garrison Dover has found WWII military posters to be a hot topic. “When I get WWII posters, they tend to move fast,” said Dover, the owner of Pacific Posters International. “Sometimes a guy will ask if we have any WWII posters. You show him two or three, and he buys them all. Somebody who collects WWII posters will buy anything in stock … under the right circumstances.”

Price might be one of those circumstances. “Wartime posters go for $20 to $2,000,” continues Dover, with most posters going for around $200. “Anything selling for more than $2,000 is a one of a kind.” The significant price tag for those two Stetson Hat posters also reflects a general principle in collecting—the more unusual the item, the higher the price. “Most posters were government issues, but there are some from General Electric, General Motors, and other companies,” notes Robert Chisholm. “They are more collectible because they had a smaller circulation.”

“We are currently advertising posters printed in a series for the Kroger Baking Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, which they placed in their grocery store windows during the war,” says Meehan. “They are now selling for several thousand dollars each. Privately printed posters like these had very small print runs compared to government posters.” Yet some dealers consider it a mistake to confuse the initial print run with the number of surviving copies.

“People always want to know how many posters were printed, and you don’t know,” confesses Gail Chisholm. “The number printed has nothing to do with the number surviving. It wasn’t a successful (advertising) campaign if it wasn’t on the street.” Location can also be a factor in the perception of rarity and poster prices. Dover sells original vintage posters at antique malls, flea markets, and vintage poster shows, and only opens his Santa Barbara gallery for private appointments. His web site also leads to some sales.

Sometimes rarity and historical importance are not the most critical factors. Occasionally even relatively rare posters can be bought for under $250—especially if the image is something that few people would want to look at in their home. A somber 1942 poster of a dead sailor in the surf above the words “A Careless Word … A Needless Loss” is listed for $235 in the Meehan Military Posters Catalog #36.

A few posters have become celebrated American icons. James Montgomery Flagg’s 1941 version of Uncle Sam pointing, with the caption “I Want You for the U.S. Army,” consistently sells for well over $1,000. The Meehan Catalog lists the price as $1,500. This classic WWII poster, based on the infamous World War I poster, deliberately evokes the patriotic imagery from the “war to end all wars.”

Most WWII posters, however, look quite different from WWI propaganda posters. “WWI posters were primarily designed by illustrators who volunteered their efforts,” says Sarah Stocking, president of the Independent Vintage Poster Dealers Association and owner of Sarah Stocking Fine Vintage Posters. “They mostly appeal to patriotism.” Stocking specializes in commercial European posters from the 1920s and 1930s.

Gail Chisholm makes a related point. “World War I posters are from a more innocent and naive society,” she says. “Obviously, it’s called the Great War. It was enough to have a pretty woman with a furling flag to convince young men to enlist and risk their lives.”

“Perhaps more importantly,” concludes Stocking, “WWI posters are not brutal.” Stocking carries posters on WWI, WWII, the Spanish Civil War, and propaganda. She “prefers” WWI posters because there is less text.

By contrast, American posters from WWII were often realistic, intense, and evocative of both positive and negative emotions.

“WWII posters were often made about fear and the enemy,” says Stocking. “The world had really changed in 20 years, and had gotten smaller because the government was worried about spying.” Radio broadcasts, airplanes, and increased tourism brought Europe “closer” to the United States. “World War II posters are much more aggressive,” concurs Gail Chisholm. The widely distributed poster showing a bomb, labeled “War Production,” targeted at the Rising Sun and Nazi swastika is an example. “Some also have ugly caricatures of Japanese and Germans—but especially Japanese.” Institutional collectors tend to be the major purchasers of the more controversial and/or foreign posters. American propaganda posters, however, appear politically correct in comparison to the vicious images in Axis propaganda posters. “I have a phenomenal Italian one—even away from the perspective of the war,” says Gail Chisholm. “It has an ugly, leering, black American soldier pulling down a Venus De Milo sculpture.” The harsh image, designed to inflame Italian fears about an American invasion, emphasizes racial hatreds. “Some patrons have gotten very upset by the image,” she says. She considers the disturbing image “a peek into history.” The controversial Italian poster, designed by Gino Boccasile in 1944, brings up another aspect of collecting historical posters. “Taking things out of context changes your perception,” observes Gail Chisholm. “You can have different interpretations. At the time, everybody understood a poster’s context, but now it is less clear.”

A few American posters, among the most sought after by institutional collectors, attempted to build relations between racial groups. A widely distributed poster, “United We Win,” shows steelworkers, a black man and a white man, working together under a giant American flag. “Those posters tend to be quite valuable,” says Gail Chisholm.

Patriotic imagery pervades many WWII posters and draws upon the nation’s rich heritage of patriotic symbols. “Americans Will Always Fight for Freedom,” by George Perlin, shows “America’s well-equipped infantry troops of 1943 passing in review in front of the ragged Continental troops of Valley Forge who also fought for freedom during the bleak and desperate winter of 1777-1778 some 166 years earlier,” explains Meehan. Price? $385. “Perhaps what made the American posters of World War II unique was that they equated patriotism with democracy,” wrote scholar G.H. Gregory, editor and compiler of the book, Posters of World War II. “They rallied the nation’s pride by recalling the marvel of the country’s institutions and its great tradition of freedom and democracy—its flag, its enduring documents, its national monuments, its political heroes, its historic heritage of fighting for liberty.”

The condition of vintage posters, like most collectibles, also affects value. Almost all WWII posters were sent by mail. Says Gail Chisholm, “WWII posters have folds. It goes with the territory. Small irregularities are expected. A missing corner doesn’t really matter, but a hand missing is more problematic.”

What else adds value to a particular WWII image? Beyond rarity, condition, and subject matter, vintage poster experts emphasize the importance of the artist and artwork. The illustrator’s name and reputation certainly affect the price. Artists Norman Rockwell, Ben Shahn, Jes Wilhelm Schlaikjer, James Montgomery Flagg, Arthur Szyk, and N.C. Wyeth all contributed their skills, creativity, and intelligence to the war effort. Their wartime propaganda efforts are now collectible items. Some popular artists’ works continue to dominate sales. Rockwell remains the most famous American artist to create wartime posters. The great Saturday Evening Post illustrator’s “Four Freedoms” paintings, inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, were made into immensely popular posters during the war to sell war bonds and inspire patriotism. The most valuable poster, Rockwell’s 1943 “Freedom from Want,” showing three generations of a family eating a Thanksgiving meal, sells for $400 to $750. The other posters in the freedom series, “Freedom of Speech,” “Freedom of Worship,” and “Freedom from Fear” are slightly less expensive.

Schlaikjer, a Danish-born illustrator, developed a reputation for effective, inspiring posters. He created powerful recruitment posters for the U.S. War Department that feature heroic, handsome figures in dramatic poses in combat situations. A refugee from Denmark in 1940, Schlaikjer became America’s “official war artist” from 1942 to 1944. His 1942 recruitment posters for the Military Police, the Signal Corps, the Army Air Corps, Women’s Air Corps, and the Corps of Engineers sell for between $500 and $1,250.

Arthur Szyk, a Polish-born immigrant, also has loyal collectors. Szyk drew patriotic posters for U.S. Treasury war bonds, designed wartime postage stamps, and had his posters displayed by the USO at five hundred U.S. Army recreation centers. Szyk’s provocative caricatures, mocking cartoons, and biting satirical illustrations filled the magazine covers of Collier’s, Esquire, and Time. The U.S. Holocaust Museum is hosting an exhibit called “ The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk “, until October 14, 2002.

Despite the near-universal recognition of his Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster, Flagg never really achieved the celebrity status that would guarantee top dollars. For example, Flagg created a few other World War II images, including a hatless, grim-faced Uncle Sam providing consumer advice: “You Can Lick Runaway Prices” by buying war bonds and paying taxes willingly. This Flagg poster sells for under $200.

The iconic Rosie the Riveter posters, which are practically impossible to buy these days, represent another common theme in WWII: the patriotic duties of women. These posters, sometimes exhorting women to join the workplace, have dramatically increased in value over the past 20 years. These “women do your part” posters have sociological significance that resonates with many contemporary consumers.

The U.S. Army Nurse Corps recruitment posters are equally distinctive, with photographs of wounded soldiers and concise testimonials. The kicker reads in large block letters: MORE NURSES ARE NEEDED—U.S. ARMY NURSE CORPS. “Sometimes people come in and say ‘I want such and such poster. My mom was the model,’” says Gail Chisholm. “‘Or my mom was a WAC.’ That’s always exciting.”

Many WWII posters told civilian Americans to sacrifice in everyday activities—save tin cans, recycle paper, eat leftovers, grow vegetables, drive less to save gasoline and rubber, and even conserve waste fats. “Food conservation posters are also popular,” says Stocking. “The themes are also timeless. ‘Grow Your Vegetables’ can go in anyone’s kitchen.” Conservation posters often made a direct link to the military effort. “Can All You Can—It’s a Real War Job” placed a jar against colorful vegetables. Another poster featured a smiling woman carrying a load of food, proclaiming, “Of Course I Can! I’m as patriotic as can be—and rationing won’t worry me.” “Do with less—so they’ll have enough!” urged another poster featuring a smiling soldier in a helmet sipping coffee.

War bond posters remain probably the most affordable, diverse, and prevalent type on the market today. “It’s much easier to find a war bond poster,” says Robert Chisholm. “Giving money is easier than actually signing up and joining the military,” Stocking adds.

“Recruiting posters printed in America are rarer than war bond ones.” Some collectors, often veterans, focus on one service. Haddon H. Sundblom’s pithy recruitment poster, “Ready—Join U.S. Marines,” showcases a marine officer with movie-star good looks. “Marines have been so gung-ho and enthusiastic,” says Robert Chisholm. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

“Marine recruiting posters are certainly the most heavily collected American recruiting posters of all,” says Meehan. “The Marines are an elite, all-volunteer force whose members are typically proud of their service and enjoy reminding themselves and others of it.”

All the dealers emphasize the importance of taking proper care of posters. Some tips include: never do anything to paper that can’t be undone (no permanent adhesion, no Scotch tape, no masking tape, no dry mounting); use archival linen backing with water soluble glue; use acid-free paper; keep them out of the sunlight; and “treat them as an investment.” The relative fragility of paper, ironically, makes posters increasingly collectible. “People are becoming more aware of posters’ rarity and value,” says Robert Chisholm. “But don’t buy a poster as an investment. Buy it for visual, historical, or aesthetic reasons—and usually it will increase in value.” His sibling, Gail, agrees. “Buy because you love it and it appeals to you. It’s a nice bonus if the poster goes up in value.”

“Prices have gone way up,” says Dover. “It used to be that nobody much appreciated WWII posters. Ten, 15, 20 years ago, most people just weren’t interested” unless it was of a national icon (Rosie the Riveter) or by a national icon (Rockwell). These days Dover credits the longing for national unity for the posters’ appreciation. “Do you remember that feeling after 9/11?” he asks. “We all felt we were Americans and in it together. The posters of WWII are a reflection of when America pulled together like never before.”

Eric Roth has written about media, history, and public education for several publications. He currently teaches English at Santa Monica College and UCLA Extension.

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Uncle sam wants you the propaganda posters of wwii.

When you think of the weapons of WWII, what comes to mind? Planes, tanks, money? Bullets, machine-guns, and grenade launchers? Yes, all of these were important tools in the effort to win the war. But so was information. In this case, government issued information. Over the course of the war the U.S. government waged a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the public. Persuading Americans to support the war effort became a wartime industry, just as important as producing bullets and planes. The U.S. government produced posters, pamphlets, newsreels, radio shows, and movies-all designed to create a public that was 100% behind the war effort.

In 1942 the Office of War Information (OWI) was created to both craft and disseminate the government’s message. This propaganda campaign included specific goals and strategies. Artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals were recruited to take the government’s agenda (objectives) and turn it into a propaganda campaign. This included posters found across American-from railway stations to post offices, from schools to apartment buildings.

During WWII the objectives of the U.S. government for the propaganda campaign were recruitment, financing the war effort, unifying the public behind the war effort and eliminating dissent of all kinds, resource conservation, and factory production of war materials. The most common themes found in the posters were the consequences of careless talk, conservation, civil defense, war bonds, victory gardens, “women power”, and anti-German and Japanese scenarios. It was imperative to have the American people behind the war effort. Victory over the Axis was not a given, and certainly would not be without the whole-hearted support of all men, women, and children.

To meet the government’s objectives the OWI (Office of War Information) used common propaganda tools (posters, radio, movies, etc.) and specific types of propaganda. The most common types used were fear, the bandwagon, name-calling, euphemism, glittering generalities, transfer, and the testimonial.

The posters pulled at emotions-both positive and negative. They used words as ammunition. “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” “Loose lips might sink ships.” Messages made the war personal-you can make a difference, the soldiers are counting on you. Some posters also tapped into people’s patriotic spirit-do this and be a good American. They were bright and happy, colorful and positive. Other posters showed the dark side of war. They were filled with shocking images of what had happened to other countries and what could still happen in America if everyone did not do their part.

“The principal battleground of the war is not the South Pacific. It is not the Middle East. It is not England, or Norway, or the Russian Steppes. It is American opinion.”

--Archibald MacLeish, Director of the Office of Facts and Figures, forerunner of the Office of War Administration

“The function of the war poster is to make coherent and acceptable a basically incoherent and irrational ordeal of killing, suffering, and destruction that violate every accepted principle of morality and decent living.”

--O.W. Riegal, propaganda analyst for the Office of War Information

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The New Propaganda War

Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.

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On June 4 , 1989 , the Polish Communist Party held partially free elections, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately removed the Communists from power. Not long afterward, street protests calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy brought about the end of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would no longer exist.

Also on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the military to remove thousands of students from Tiananmen Square. The students were calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy. Soldiers arrested and killed demonstrators in Beijing and around the country. Later, they systematically tracked down the leaders of the protest movement and forced them to confess and recant. Some spent years in jail. Others managed to elude their pursuers and flee the country forever.

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In the aftermath of these events, the Chinese concluded that the physical elimination of dissenters was insufficient. To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Central Europe from reaching East Asia, the Chinese Communist Party eventually set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests. In the years to come, this would require policing what the Chinese people could see online.

Nobody believed that this would work. In 2000, President Bill Clinton told an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that it was impossible. “In the knowledge economy,” he said, “economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.” The transcript records the audience reactions:

“Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.” ( Chuckles. ) “Good luck!” ( Laughter. ) “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” ( Laughter. )

While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China . That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. Among them, famously, are Tiananmen , 1989 , and June 4 , but there are many more. In 2000, a directive called “ Measures for Managing Internet Information Services ” prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities didn’t like.

From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order

The Chinese regime also combined online tracking methods with other tools of repression, including security cameras, police inspections, and arrests. In Xinjiang province, where China’s Uyghur Muslim population is concentrated, the state has forced people to install “nanny apps” that can scan phones for forbidden phrases and pick up unusual behavior: Anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays offline altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uyghurs walk, drive, and shop. With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China has gotten closer to its holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words democracy and Tiananmen from the internet, but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.

But along the way, the Chinese regime discovered a deeper problem: Surveillance, regardless of sophistication, provides no guarantees. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese government imposed controls more severe than most of its citizens had ever experienced. Millions of people were locked into their homes. Untold numbers entered government quarantine camps. Yet the lockdown also produced the angriest and most energetic Chinese protests in many years. Young people who had never attended a demonstration and had no memory of Tiananmen gathered in the streets of Beijing and Shanghai in the autumn of 2022 to talk about freedom. In Xinjiang, where lockdowns were the longest and harshest, and where repression is most complete, people came out in public and sang the Chinese national anthem , emphasizing one line: “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!” Clips of their performance circulated widely, presumably because the spyware and filters didn’t identify the national anthem as dissent.

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.

Like the demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia that began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela , and the 2019 Hong Kong protests , the 2022 protests in China help explain something else: why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.

On February 24, 2022, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fantastical tales of biological warfare began surging across the internet. Russian officials solemnly declared that secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine had been conducting experiments with bat viruses and claimed that U.S. officials had confessed to manipulating “dangerous pathogens.” The story was unfounded, not to say ridiculous, and was repeatedly debunked .

Nevertheless, an American Twitter account with links to the QAnon conspiracy network—@WarClandestine—began tweeting about the nonexistent biolabs , racking up thousands of retweets and views. The hashtag #biolab started trending on Twitter and reached more than 9 million views. Even after the account—later revealed to belong to a veteran of the Army National Guard—was suspended, people continued to post screenshots. A version of the story appeared on the Infowars website created by Alex Jones, best known for promoting conspiracy theories about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and harassing families of the victims. Tucker Carlson, then still hosting a show on Fox News, played clips of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesperson repeating the biolab fantasy and demanded that the Biden administration “stop lying and [tell] us what’s going on here.”

Chinese state media also leaned hard into the story. A foreign-ministry spokesperson declared that the U.S. controlled 26 biolabs in Ukraine: “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans.” Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, ran multiple headlines: “U.S.-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond,” “Russia Urges U.S. to Explain Purpose of Biological Labs in Ukraine,” and so on. U.S. diplomats publicly refuted these fabrications. Nevertheless, the Chinese continued to spread them. So did the scores of Asian, African, and Latin American media outlets that have content-sharing agreements with Chinese state media. So did Telesur, the Venezuelan network; Press TV, the Iranian network; and Russia Today, in Spanish and Arabic, as well as on many Russia Today–linked websites around the world.

This joint propaganda effort worked. Globally, it helped undermine the U.S.-led effort to create solidarity with Ukraine and enforce sanctions against Russia. Inside the U.S., it helped undermine the Biden administration’s effort to consolidate American public opinion in support of providing aid to Ukraine. According to one poll, a quarter of Americans believed the biolabs conspiracy theory to be true. After the invasion, Russia and China—with, again, help from Venezuela, Iran, and far-right Europeans and Americans—successfully created an international echo chamber. Anyone inside this echo chamber heard the biolab conspiracy theory many times, from different sources, each one repeating and building on the others to create the impression of veracity. They also heard false descriptions of Ukrainians as Nazis, along with claims that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA, and that NATO started the war.

Outside this echo chamber, few even know it exists. At a dinner in Munich in February 2023, I found myself seated across from a European diplomat who had just returned from Africa. He had met with some students there and had been shocked to discover how little they knew about the war in Ukraine, and how much of what they did know was wrong. They had repeated the Russian claims that the Ukrainians are Nazis, blamed NATO for the invasion, and generally used the same kind of language that can be heard every night on the Russian evening news. The diplomat was mystified. He grasped for explanations: Maybe the legacy of colonialism explained the spread of these conspiracy theories, or Western neglect of the global South, or the long shadow of the Cold War.

But the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language.

To be fair to the European diplomat, the convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.

Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes. Their own rhetoric makes this clear. In 2013, as Chinese President Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo, known enigmatically as Document No. 9 —or, more formally, as the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere—listed “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party. “Western constitutional democracy” led the list, followed by “universal human rights,” “media independence,” “judicial independence,” and “civic participation.” The document concluded that “Western forces hostile to China,” together with dissidents inside the country, “are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” and instructed party leaders to push back against these ideas wherever they found them, especially online, inside China and around the world.

From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning

Since at least 2004, the Russians have been focused on the same convergence of internal and external ideological threats. That was the year Ukrainians staged a popular revolt, known as the Orange Revolution —the name came from the orange T-shirts and flags of the protesters—against a clumsy attempt to steal a presidential election. The angry intervention of the Ukrainian public into what was meant to have been a carefully orchestrated victory for Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate directly supported by Putin himself, profoundly unnerved the Russians. This was especially the case because a similarly unruly protest movement in Georgia had brought a pro-European politician, Mikheil Saakashvili, to power the year before.

Shaken by those two events, Putin put the bogeyman of “color revolution” at the center of Russian propaganda. Civic protest movements are now always described as color revolutions in Russia, and as the work of outsiders. Popular opposition leaders are always said to be puppets of foreign governments. Anti-corruption and prodemocracy slogans are linked to chaos and instability wherever they are used, whether in Tunisia, Syria, or the United States. In 2011, a year of mass protest against a manipulated election in Russia itself, Putin bitterly described the Orange Revolution as a “well-tested scheme for destabilizing society,” and he accused the Russian opposition of “transferring this practice to Russian soil,” where he feared a similar popular uprising intended to remove him from power.

Putin was wrong—no “scheme” had been “transferred.” Public discontent in Russia simply had no way to express itself except through street protest, and Putin’s opponents had no legal means to remove him from power. Like so many other people around the world, they talked about democracy and human rights because they recognized that these concepts represented their best hope for achieving justice, and freedom from autocratic power. The protests that led to democratic transitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, and Mexico; the “people’s revolutions” that washed across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989; the Arab Spring in 2011; and, yes, the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia—all were begun by those who had suffered injustice at the hands of the state, and who seized on the language of freedom and democracy to propose an alternative.

This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.

In the 20th century, Communist Party propaganda was overwhelming and inspiring, or at least it was meant to be. The future it portrayed was shiny and idealized, a vision of clean factories, abundant produce, and healthy tractor drivers with large muscles and square jaws. The architecture was designed to overpower, the music to intimidate, the public spectacles to awe. In theory, citizens were meant to feel enthusiasm, inspiration, and hope. In practice, this kind of propaganda backfired, because people could compare what they saw on posters and in movies with a far more impoverished reality.

A few autocracies still portray themselves to their citizens as model states. The North Koreans continue to hold colossal military parades with elaborate gymnastics displays and huge portraits of their leader, very much in the Stalinist style. But most modern authoritarians have learned from the mistakes of the previous century. Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy around the world, lists 56 countries as “not free.” Most don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, apathetic and afraid, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade their own people to stay out of politics, and above all to convince them that there is no democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong. The democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.

Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development, and to promote a Beijing model of progress through dictatorship and “order” that’s superior to the chaos and violence of democracy . Chinese media mocked the laxity of the American response to the pandemic with an animated film that ended with the Statue of Liberty on an intravenous drip . China’s Global Times wrote that Chinese people were mocking the January 6 insurrection as “karma” and “retribution”: “Seeing such scenarios,” the publication’s then-editor wrote in an op-ed , “many Chinese will naturally recall that Nancy Pelosi once praised the violence of Hong Kong protesters as ‘a beautiful sight to behold.’ ” (Pelosi, of course, had praised peaceful demonstrators , not violence.) The Chinese are told that these forces of chaos are out to disrupt their own lives, and they are encouraged to fight against them in a “people’s war” against foreign influence.

Read: I watched Russian TV so you don’t have to

Russians, although they hear very little about what happens in their own towns and cities, receive similar messages about the decline of places they don’t know and have mostly never visited: America, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland—countries apparently filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and Russophobia . A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state-controlled, an average of 18 times a day. Some of the stories were obviously invented ( European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples!  ), but even the true ones were cherry-picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, that Europeans are weak and immoral, and that the European Union is aggressive and interventionist. If anything, the portrayal of America has been more dramatic. Putin himself has displayed a surprisingly intimate acquaintance with American culture wars about transgender rights, and mockingly sympathized with people who he says have been “canceled.”

The goal is clear: to prevent Russians from identifying with Europe the way they once did, and to build alliances between Putin’s domestic audience and his supporters in Europe and North America, where some naive conservatives (or perhaps cynical, well-paid conservatives) seek to convince their followers that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens and migrants. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed, in practice, by elements of Sharia law . The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestantism. Nevertheless, among the slogans shouted by white nationalists marching in the infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstration in 2017 was “ Russia is our friend .” Putin sends periodic messages to this constituency: “I uphold the traditional approach that a woman is a woman, a man is a man, a mother is a mother, and a father is a father,” he told a press conference in December 2021, almost as if this “traditional approach” would be justification for invading Ukraine.

Michael Carpenter: Russia is co-opting angry young men

This manipulation of the strong emotions around gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world, often as a means of defending against criticism of the regime. Yoweri Museveni, who has been the president of Uganda for more than three decades, passed an “anti-homosexuality” bill in 2014, instituting a life sentence for gay people who have sex or marry and criminalizing the “promotion” of a homosexual lifestyle. By picking a fight over gay rights, he was able to consolidate his supporters at home while neutralizing foreign criticisms of his regime, describing them as “social imperialism”: “Outsiders cannot dictate to us; this is our country,” he declared. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war. He pretends that ongoing tension between his government and the U.S. ambassador to Hungary concerns religion and gender: During Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Hungary , Carlson declared that the Biden administration “hates” Hungary because “it’s a Christian country,” when in fact it is Orbán’s deep financial and political ties to Russia and China that have badly damaged American-Hungarian relations.

The new authoritarians also have a different attitude toward reality. When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. After Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: It blamed the Ukrainian army, and the CIA, and a nefarious plot in which dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.

Anne Applebaum: The American face of authoritarian propaganda

Fear, cynicism, nihilism, and apathy, coupled with disgust and disdain for democracy: This is the formula that modern autocrats, with some variations, sell to their citizens and to foreigners, all with the aim of destroying what they call “American hegemony.” In service of this idea, Russia, a colonial power, paints itself as a leader of the non-Western civilizations in what the analyst Ivan Klyszcz calls their struggle for “ messianic multipolarity ,” a battle against “the West’s imposition of ‘decadent,’ ‘globalist’ values.” In September 2022, when Putin held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he claimed that he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.” He did not speak of the people he had tortured or the Ukrainian children he had kidnapped. A year later, Putin told a gathering in Sochi: “We are now fighting not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world. We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit. We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous for others.” The language of “hegemony” and “multipolarity” is now part of Chinese, Iranian, and Venezuelan narratives too.

In truth, Russia is a genuine danger to its neighbors, which is why most of them are re-arming and preparing to fight against a new colonial occupation. The irony is even greater in African countries like Mali, where Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have helped keep a military dictatorship in power, reportedly by conducting summary executions, committing atrocities against civilians, and looting property. In Mali, as in Ukraine, the battle against Western decadence means that white Russian thugs brutally terrorize people with impunity.

And yet Mali Actu, a pro-Russian website in Mali, solemnly explains to its readers that “in a world that is more and more multipolar, Africa will play a more and more important role.” Mali Actu is not alone; it’s just a small part of a propaganda network, created by the autocracies, that is now visible all over the world.

The infrastructure of antidemocratic propaganda takes many forms, some overt and some covert, some aimed at the public and some aimed at elites. The United Front, the fulcrum of the Chinese Communist Party’s most important influence strategy, seeks to shape perceptions of China around the world by creating educational and exchange programs, controlling Chinese exile communities, building Chinese chambers of commerce, and courting anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. The Confucius Institutes are probably the best-known elite Chinese influence project. Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies not unlike the Goethe-Institut, run by the German government, and the Alliance Française, they were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion, policing Chinese students at American universities by restricting open discussions of Tibet and Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. They have now been mostly disbanded in the United States. But they are flourishing in many other places, including Africa, where there are several dozen.

These subtler operations are augmented by China’s enormous investment in international media. The Xinhua wire service, the China Global Television Network, China Radio International, and China Daily all receive significant state financing , have social-media accounts in multiple languages and regions, and sell, share, or otherwise promote their content. These Chinese outlets cover the entire world, and provide feeds of slickly produced news and video segments to their partners at low prices, sometimes for free, which makes them more than competitive with reputable Western newswires, such as Reuters and the Associated Press. Scores of news organizations in Europe and Asia use Chinese content, as do many in Africa, from Kenya and Nigeria to Egypt and Zambia. Chinese media maintain a regional hub in Nairobi, where they hire prominent local journalists and produce content in African languages. Building this media empire has been estimated to cost billions of dollars a year.

For the moment, viewership of many of these Chinese-owned channels remains low; their output can be predictable, even boring. But more popular forms of Chinese television are gradually becoming available. StarTimes, a satellite-television company that is tightly linked to the Chinese government, launched in Africa in 2008 and now has 13 million television subscribers in more than 30 African countries. StarTimes is cheap for consumers, costing just a few dollars a month. It prioritizes Chinese content—not just news but kung-fu movies, soap operas, and Chinese Super League football, with the dialogue and commentary all translated into Hausa, Swahili, and other African languages. In this way, even entertainment can carry China-positive messages.

This subtler shift is the real goal: to have the Chinese point of view appear in the local press, with local bylines. Chinese propagandists call this strategy “borrowing boats to reach the sea,” and it can be achieved in many ways. Unlike Western governments, China doesn’t think of propaganda, censorship, diplomacy, and media as separate activities. Legal pressure on news organizations, online trolling operations aimed at journalists, cyberattacks—all of these can be deployed as part of a single operation designed to promulgate or undermine a given narrative. China also offers training courses or stipends for local journalists across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, sometimes providing phones and laptops in exchange for what the regime hopes will be favorable coverage.

The Chinese also cooperate, both openly and discreetly, with the media outlets of other autocracies. Telesur, a Hugo Chávez project launched in 2005, is headquartered in Caracas and led by Venezuela in partnership with Cuba and Nicaragua. Selectively culled bits of foreign news make it onto Telesur from its partners, including headlines that presumably have limited appeal in Latin America: “US-Armenia Joint Military Drills Undermine Regional Stability,” for example, and “Russia Has No Expansionist Plans in Europe.” Both of these stories, from 2023, were lifted directly from the Xinhua wire.

Iran, for its part, offers HispanTV, the Spanish-language version of Press TV, the Iranian international service. HispanTV leans heavily into open anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial: One March 2020 headline declared that the “New Coronavirus Is the Result of a Zionist Plot.” Spain banned HispanTV and Google blocked it from its YouTube and Gmail accounts, but the service is easily available across Latin America, just as Al-Alam, the Arabic version of Press TV, is widely available in the Middle East. After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international group dedicated to fighting disinformation, found that Iran was creating additional hacking groups to target digital, physical, and electoral infrastructure in Israel (where it went after electoral rolls) and the United States. In the future, these hacking operations may be combined with propaganda campaigns.

RT—Russia Today—has a bigger profile than either Telesur or Press TV; in Africa, it has close links to China . Following the invasion of Ukraine, some satellite networks dropped RT. But China’s StarTimes satellite picked it up, and RT immediately began building offices and relationships across Africa, especially in countries run by autocrats who echo its anti-Western, anti-LGBTQ messages, and who appreciate its lack of critical or investigative reporting.

RT—like Press TV, Telesur, and even CGTN—also functions as a production facility, a source of video clips that can be spread online, repurposed and reused in targeted campaigns. Americans got a firsthand view of how the clandestine versions work in 2016, when the Internet Research Agency—now disbanded but based then in St. Petersburg and led by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, more famous as the mercenary boss of the Wagner Group who staged an aborted march on Moscow—pumped out fake material via fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, designed to confuse American voters. Examples ranged from virulently anti-immigration accounts aimed at benefiting Donald Trump to fake Black Lives Matter accounts that attacked Hillary Clinton from the left.

Since 2016, these tactics have been applied across the globe. The Xinhua and RT offices in Africa and around the world—along with Telesur and HispanTV—create stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies; these, in turn, are repeated and amplified in many countries, translated into many languages, and reshaped for many local markets. The material produced is mostly unsophisticated, but it is inexpensive and can change quickly, according to the needs of the moment. After the October 7 Hamas attack, for example, official and unofficial Russian sources immediately began putting out both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material, and messages calling American and Western support for Ukraine hypocritical in light of the Gaza conflict. The data-analytics company Alto Intelligence found posts smearing both Ukrainians and Israelis as “Nazis,” part of what appears to be a campaign to bring far-left and far-right communities closer together in opposition to U.S.-allied democracies. Anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages also increased inside China, as well as on Chinese-linked accounts around the world. Joshua Eisenman, a professor at Notre Dame and the author of a new book on China’s relations with Africa, told me that during a recent trip to Beijing, he was astonished by how quickly the previous Chinese line on the Middle East—“China-Israel relations are stronger than ever”—changed. “It was a complete 180 in just a few days.”

Not that everyone hearing these messages will necessarily know where they come from, because they often appear in forums that conceal their origins. Most people probably did not hear the American-biolabs conspiracy theory on a television news program, for example. Instead, they heard it thanks to organizations like Pressenza and Yala News. Pressenza, a website founded in Milan and relocated to Ecuador in 2014, publishes in eight languages, describes itself as “an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence,” and featured an article on biolabs in Ukraine. According to the U.S. State Department, Pressenza is part of a project, run by three Russian companies, that planned to create articles in Moscow and then translate them for these “native” sites, following Chinese practice, to make them seem “local.” Pressenza denied the allegations; one of its journalists, Oleg Yasinsky, who says he is of Ukrainian origin, responded by denouncing America’s “planetary propaganda machine” and quoting Che Guevara.

Like Pressenza, Yala News also markets itself as independent. This U.K.-registered, Arabic-language news operation provides slickly produced videos, including celebrity interviews, to its 3 million followers every day. In March 2022, as the biolabs allegation was being promoted by other outlets, the site posted a video that echoed one of the most sensational versions: Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery vehicle for bioweapons, infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread disease.

Yala did not invent this ludicrous tale: Russian state media, such as the Sputnik news agency, published it in Russian first, followed by Sputnik’s Arabic website and RT Arabic. Russia’s United Nations ambassador addressed the UN Security Council about the biobird scandal, warning of the “real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bioagents from Ukraine.” In an April 2022 interview in Kyiv , Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told The Atlantic ’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and me that the biobirds story reminded him of a Monty Python sketch. If Yala were truly an “independent” publication, as it describes itself, it would have fact-checked this story, which, like the other biolab conspiracies, was widely debunked.

Read: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg interview Volodymyr Zelensky

But Yala News is not a news organization at all. As the BBC has reported , it’s an information laundromat, a site that exists to spread and propagate material produced by RT and other Russian facilities. Yala News has posted claims that the Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha was staged, that Zelensky appeared drunk on television, and that Ukrainian soldiers were running away from the front lines. Although the company is registered to an address in London—a mail drop shared by 65,000 other companies—its “news team” is based in a suburb of Damascus. The company’s CEO is a Syrian businessman based in Dubai who, when asked by the BBC, insisted on the organization’s “impartiality.”

Another strange actor in this field is RRN—the company’s name is an acronym, originally for Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (like Notre Pays , or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive. RRN is prolific. During its short existence, it has created more than 300 sites targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Links to these sites are then used to make Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media posts appear credible. When someone is quickly scrolling, they might not notice that a headline links to a fake Spiegel.pro website, say, rather than to the authentic German-magazine website Spiegel.de.

Doppelganger’s efforts, run by a clutch of companies in Russia, have varied widely, and seem to have included fake NATO press releases , with the same fonts and design as the genuine releases, “revealing” that NATO leaders were planning to deploy Ukrainian paramilitary troops to France to quell pension protests. In November, operatives who the French government believes are linked to Doppelganger spray-painted Stars of David around Paris and posted them on social media, hoping to amplify French divisions over the Gaza war. Russian operatives built a social-media network to spread the false stories and the photographs of anti-Semitic graffiti. The goal is to make sure that the people encountering this content have little clue as to who created it, or where or why.

Russia and China are not the only parties in this space. Both real and automated social-media accounts geolocated to Venezuela played a small role in the 2018 Mexican presidential election, for example, boosting the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Notable were two kinds of messages: those that promoted images of Mexican violence and chaos—images that might make people feel they need an autocrat to restore order—and those that were angrily opposed to NAFTA and the U.S. more broadly. This tiny social-media investment must have been deemed successful. After he became president, López Obrador engaged in the same kinds of smear campaigns as unelected politicians in autocracies, empowered and corrupted the military, undermined the independence of the judiciary, and otherwise degraded Mexican democracy. In office, he has promoted Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine along with Chinese narratives about the repression of the Uyghurs. Mexico’s relationship with the United States has become more difficult—and that, surely, was part of the point.

None of these efforts would succeed without local actors who share the autocratic world’s goals. Russia, China, and Venezuela did not invent anti-Americanism in Mexico. They did not invent Catalan separatism, to name another movement that both Russian and Venezuelan social-media accounts supported, or the German far right, or France’s Marine Le Pen. All they do is amplify existing people and movements—whether anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Ukrainian, or, above all, antidemocratic. Sometimes they provide a social-media echo. Sometimes they employ reporters and spokespeople. Sometimes they use the media networks they built for this purpose. And sometimes, they just rely on Americans to do it for them.

Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.

Given that both Russian and Chinese actors now blend in so easily with the MAGA messaging operation, it is hardly surprising that the American government has difficulty responding to the newly interlinked autocratic propaganda network. American-government-backed foreign broadcasters—Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Farda, Radio Martí—still exist, but neither their mandate nor their funding has changed much in recent years. The intelligence agencies continue to observe what happens—there is a Foreign Malign Influence Center under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—but they are by definition not part of the public debate. The only relatively new government institution fighting antidemocratic propaganda is the Global Engagement Center, but it is in the State Department, and its mandate is to focus on authoritarian propaganda outside the United States. Established in 2016, it replaced the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which sought to foil the Islamic State and other jihadist groups that were recruiting young people online. In 2014–15, as the scale of Russian disinformation campaigns in Europe were becoming better known, Congress designated the GEC to deal with Russian as well as Chinese, Iranian, and other propaganda campaigns around the world—although not, again, inside the United States. Throughout the Trump administration, the organization languished under the direction of a president who himself repeated Russian propaganda lines during the 2016 campaign—“Obama founded ISIS,” for example, and “Hillary will start World War III.”

Today the GEC is run by James Rubin, a former State Department spokesperson from the Bill Clinton era. It employs 125 people and has a budget of $61 million—hardly a match for the many billions that China and Russia spend building their media networks. But it is beginning to find its footing, handing out small grants to international groups that track and reveal foreign disinformation operations. It’s now specializing in identifying covert propaganda campaigns before they begin, with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies. Rubin calls this “prebunking” and describes it as a kind of “inoculation”: “If journalists and governments know that this is coming, then when it comes, they will recognize it.”

The revelation in November of the Russian ties to seemingly native left-wing websites in Latin America, including Pressenza, was one such effort. More recently, the GEC published a report on the African Initiative, an agency that had planned a huge campaign to discredit Western health philanthropy, starting with rumors about a new virus supposedly spread by mosquitoes. The idea was to smear Western doctors, clinics, and philanthropists, and to build a climate of distrust around Western medicine, much as Russian efforts helped build a climate of distrust around Western vaccines during the pandemic. The GEC identified the Russian leader of the project, Artem Sergeyevich Kureyev; noted that several employees had come to the African Initiative from the Wagner Group; and located two of its offices, in Mali and Burkina Faso. Rubin and others subsequently spent a lot of time talking with regional reporters about the African Initiative’s plans so that “people will recognize them” when they launch. Dozens of articles in English, Spanish, and other languages have described these operations, as have thousands of social-media posts. Eventually, the goal is to create an alliance of other nations who also want to share information about planned and ongoing information operations so that everyone knows they are coming.

It’s a great idea, but no equivalent agency functions inside the United States. Some social-media companies have made purely voluntary efforts to remove foreign-government propaganda, sometimes after being tipped off by the U.S. government but mostly on their own. In the U.S., Facebook created a security-policy unit that still regularly announces when it discovers “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—meaning accounts that are automated and/or evidently part of a planned operation from (usually) Russian, Iranian, or Chinese sources—and then takes down the posts. It is difficult for outsiders to monitor this activity, because the company restricts access to its data, and even controls the tools that can be used to examine the data. In March, Meta announced that by August, it would phase out CrowdTangle, a tool used to analyze Facebook data, and replace it with a tool that analysts fear will be harder to use.

X (formerly Twitter) also used to look for foreign propaganda activity, but under the ownership of Elon Musk, that voluntary effort has been badly weakened. The new blue-check “verification” process allows users—including anonymous, pro-Russian users—to pay to have their posts amplified; the old “safety team” no longer exists. The result: After the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine last summer, a major environmental and humanitarian disaster caused by Russian bombing over many weeks, the false narrative that Ukraine had destroyed it appeared hundreds of thousands of times on X. After the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March, David Sacks, the former PayPal entrepreneur and a close associate of Musk’s, posted on X, with no evidence, that “if the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it.” His completely unfounded post was viewed 2.5 million times. This spring, some Republican congressional leaders finally began speaking about the Russian propaganda that had “infected” their base and their colleagues. Most of that “Russian propaganda” is not coming from inside Russia.

Over the past several years, universities and think tanks have used their own data analytics to try to identify inauthentic networks on the largest websites—but they are also now meeting resistance from MAGA-affiliated Republican politicians. In 2020, teams at Stanford University and the University of Washington, together with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council and Graphika, a company that specializes in social-media analytics, decided to join forces to monitor false election information. Renée DiResta, one of the leaders of what became the Election Integrity Partnership, told me that an early concern was Russian and Chinese campaigns. DiResta assumed that these foreign interventions wouldn’t matter much, but she thought it would be useful and academically interesting to understand their scope. “Lo and behold,” she said, “the entity that becomes the most persistent in alleging that American elections are fraudulent, fake, rigged, and everything else turns out to be the president of the United States.” The Election Integrity Partnership tracked election rumors coming from across the political spectrum, but observed that the MAGA right was far more prolific and significant than any other source.

The Election Integrity Partnership was not organized or directed by the U.S. government. It occasionally reached out to platforms, but had no power to compel them to act, DiResta told me. Nevertheless, the project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation , and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.

Over time, the attack on the Election Integrity Partnership has itself acquired some of the characteristics of a classic information-laundering operation. The most notorious example concerns a reference, on page 183 of the project’s final post-2020-election report, to the 21,897,364 tweets gathered after the election, in an effort to catalog the most viral false rumors. That simple statement of the size of the database has been twisted into another false and yet constantly repeated rumor: the spurious claim that the Department of Homeland Security somehow conspired with the Election Integrity Partnership to censor 22 million tweets. This never happened, and yet DiResta said that “this nonsense about the 22 million tweets pops up constantly as evidence of the sheer volume of our duplicity”; it has even appeared in the Congressional Record .

The same tactics have been used against the Global Engagement Center. In 2021, the GEC gave a grant to another organization, the Global Disinformation Index, which helped develop a technical tool to track online campaigns in East Asia and Europe. For a completely unrelated, separately funded project, the Global Disinformation Index also conducted a study, aimed at advertisers, that identified websites at risk for publishing false stories. Two conservative organizations, finding their names on that latter list, sued the GEC, although it had nothing to do with creating the list. Musk posted, again without any evidence, “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” and that organization also became caught up in the endless whirlwind of conspiracy and congressional investigations.

As it happens, I was caught up in it too, because I was listed online as an “adviser” to the Global Disinformation Index, even though I had not spoken with anyone at the organization for several years and was not aware that it even had a website. A predictable, and wearisome, pattern followed: false accusations (no, I was not advising anyone to censor anyone) and the obligatory death threats. Of course, my experience was mild compared with the experience of DiResta, who has been accused of being, as she put it, “the head of a censorship-industrial complex that does not exist.”

These stories are symptomatic of a larger problem: Because the American extreme right and (more rarely) the extreme left benefit from the spread of antidemocratic narratives, they have an interest in silencing or hobbling any group that wants to stop, or even identify, foreign campaigns. Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me that “we are actually less prepared today than we were four years ago” for foreign attempts to influence the 2024 election. This is not only because authoritarian propaganda campaigns have become more sophisticated as they begin to use AI, or because “you obviously have a political environment here where there’s a lot more Americans who are more distrustful of all institutions.” It’s also because the lawsuits, threats, and smear tactics have chilled government, academic, and tech-company responses.

One could call this a secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface. Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War.” Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World , will be published in July.

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Biden’s speech at the Holocaust remembrance ceremony, annotated

By Zachary B. Wolf and Annette Choi , CNN

Published May 7, 2024

President Joe Biden talked about the documented increase of antisemitism in the United States during the annual US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance ceremony at the US Capitol building. Every recent president has made remarks at least once at the event, but Biden’s remarks came as pro-Palestinian protests have disrupted classes and commencements at multiple US universities . At times, rhetoric at those protests has veered into antisemitism, offended Jewish students and sparked a fierce debate about free speech.

Biden talked in-depth about the Hamas terror attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli hostages that remain in captivity . He did not mention Israel’s heavy-handed response, which has not only destroyed much of Gaza and cost tens of thousands of lives but has also driven a wedge between Biden and many progressives, particularly on college campuses. See below for what he said , along with context from CNN.

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Stu Eizenstat, for that introduction, for your leadership of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . You are a true scholar and statesman and a dear friend.

Speaker Johnson , Leader Jeffries, members of Congress and especially the survivors of the Holocaust. If my mother were here, she’d look at you and say, “God love you all. God love you all.”

Abe Foxman and all other survivors who embody absolute courage and dignity and grace are here as well.

During these sacred days of remembrance we grieve, we give voice to the 6 million Jews who were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. We honor the memory of victims, the pain of survivors, the bravery of heroes who stood up to Hitler's unspeakable evil. And we recommit to heading and heeding the lessons that one of the darkest chapters in human history to revitalize and realize the responsibility of never again.

The Days of Remembrance commemoration has been an annual event since 1982. Every US president since Bill Clinton has spoken at least once at a remembrance event.

House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke shortly before Biden and tried to compare the situation on college campuses today with that on college campuses in Germany in the 1930s.

Never again, simply translated for me, means never forget, never forget. Never forgetting means we must must keep telling the story, we must keep teaching the truth, we must keep teaching our children and our grandchildren. And the truth is we are at risk of people not knowing the truth.

That's why, growing up, my dad taught me and my siblings about the horrors of the Shoah at our family dinner table.

Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

That's why I visited Yad Vashem with my family as a senator, as vice president and as president. And that's why I took my grandchildren to Dachau , so they could see and bear witness to the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence in the face of evil that they knew was happening.

Biden visited Yad Vashem , Israel’s Holocaust remembrance site, in 2022 as president.

As vice president, he toured the Nazi concentration camp outside Munich in 2015 with his granddaughter during a trip for an annual security conference.

Germany, 1933, Hitler and his Nazi party rise to power by rekindling one of the world's oldest forms of prejudice and hate — antisemitism.

His rule didn't begin with mass murder. It started slowly across economic, political, social and cultural life — propaganda demonizing Jews, boycotts of Jewish businesses, synagogues defaced with swastikas, harassment of Jews in the street and in the schools, antisemitic demonstrations, pogroms, organized riots.

With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror by eliminating Jews from Germany, to annihilate Jews across Europe through genocide the Nazis called the final solution. Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass shootings. By the time the war ended, 6 million Jews, one out of every three Jews in the entire world, were murdered.

This ancient hatred of Jews didn't begin with the Holocaust. It didn't end with the Holocaust either, or after, even after our victory in World War II. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness.

The Holocaust survivor Irene Butter wrote for CNN Opinion in 2021 about Adolf Hitler’s rise and echoes of Nazism in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

That hatred was brought to life on October 7th in 2023. On the sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Read mo re about Hamas .

Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people — babies, parents, grandparents — slaughtered in their kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted .

Evidence of sexual violence has been documented. Here’s the account of one Israeli woman who has spoken publicly about her experience.

Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets and shrapnel from the memory of that terrible day they endured. Hundreds taken hostage, including survivors of the Shoah.

Now here we are, not 75 years later but just seven-and-a-half months later and people are already forgetting, are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. That it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you, and we will not forget.

On May 7, 1945, the German High Command agreed to an unconditional surrender in World War II, 79 years ago.

And as Jews around the world still cope with the atrocities and trauma of that day and its aftermath, we've seen a ferocious surge of anti s emitism in America and around the world.

In late October, FBI Director Christopher Wray said reports of antisemitism in the US were reaching “ historic ” levels.

Vicious propaganda on social media, Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts.

On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class . Antisemitism, antisemitic posters , slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world's only Jewish state.

Many Jewish students have described feeling intimidated and attacked on campuses. Others have said they support the protests , citing the situation in Gaza.

Last month, the dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School described antisemitic posters that targeted him.

Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas' appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It's absolutely despicable and it must stop.

Silence. Silence and denial can hide much but it can erase nothing.

Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous they cannot be married – buried, no matter how hard people try.

In my view, a major lesson of the Holocaust is, as mentioned earlier, is it not, was not inevitable.

We know hate never goes away. It only hides. And given a little oxygen, it comes out from under the rocks.

We also know what stops hate. One thing: All of us. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described antisemitism as a virus that has survived and mutated over time.

Together, we cannot continue to let that happen. We have to remember our basic principle as a nation. We have an obligation. We have an obligation to learn the lessons of history so we don't surrender our future to the horrors of the past. We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone. Anyone.

From the very founding, our very founding, Jewish Americans , who represented only about 2% of the US population , have helped lead the cause of freedom for everyone in our nation. From that experience we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.

As of 2020, Jewish Americans made up about 2.4% of the US population, according to the Pew Research Center , or about 5.8 million people.

So moments like this we have to put these principles that we're talking about into action.

I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world .

In America we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech, to debate and disagree, to protest peacefully and make our voices heard . I understand. That's America.

The complaint of many protesters is that Israel’s response to the terror attack has claimed more than 30,000 lives and destroyed much of Gaza .

But there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.

Whether against Jews or anyone else, violent attacks, destroying property is not peaceful protest. It's against the law and we are not a lawless country. We're a civil society. We uphold the rule of law and no one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.

To the Jewish community, I want you to know I see your fear, your hurt and your pain.

Let me reassure you as your president, you're not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will.

And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree.

My administration is working around the clock to free remaining hostages, just as we have freed hostages already, and will not rest until we bring them all home.

My administration, with our second gentleman's leadership, has launched our nation's first national strategy to counter antisemitism. That's mobilizing the full force of the federal government to protect Jewish communities.

But we know this is not the work of government alone or Jews alone. That's why I’m calling on all Americans to stand united against antisemitism and hate in all its forms.

My dear friend — and he became a friend — the late Elie Wiesel said, quote, “One person of integrity can make a difference.”

Elie Wiesel , the Holocaust survivor, writer and activist, died in 2016.

We have to remember that, now more than ever.

Here in Emancipation Hall in the US Capitol, among the towering statues of history is a bronze bust of Raoul Wallenberg . Born in Sweden as a Lutheran, he was a businessman and a diplomat. While stationed in Hungary during World War II, he used diplomatic cover to hide and rescue about 100,000 Jews over a six-month period.

Read more about Wallenberg , the Holocaust hero and Swedish diplomat who was formally declared dead in 2016, 71 years after he vanished.

Among them was a 16-year-old Jewish boy who escaped a Nazi labor camp. After the war ended, that boy received a scholarship from the Hillel Foundation to study in America. He came to New York City penniless but determined to turn his pain into purpose. Along with his wife, also a Holocaust survivor, he became a renowned economist and foreign policy thinker, eventually making his way to this very Capitol on the staff of a first-term senator.

That Jewish refugee was Tom Lantos and that senator was me. Tom and his wife and Annette and their family became dear friends to me and my family. Tom would go on to become the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, where he became a leading voice on civil rights and human rights around the world. Tom never met Raoul, who was taken prisoner by the Soviets, never to be heard from again.

Read more about Lantos , the longtime congressman and Holocaust survivor who died in 2008. Lantos worked for Biden early in his career.

But through Tom's efforts, Raoul’s bust is here in the Capitol. He was also given honorary US citizenship, only the second person ever after Winston Churchill. The Holocaust Museum here in Washington is located in a road in Raoul’s name.

The story of the power of a single person to put aside our differences, to see our common humanity, to stand up to hate and its ancient story of resilience from immense pain, persecution, to find hope, purpose and meaning in life, we try to live and share with one another. That story endures.

Let me close with this. I know these days of remembrance fall on difficult times. We all do well to remember these days also fall during the month we celebrate Jewish American heritage, a heritage that stretches from our earliest days to enrich every single part of American life today.

There are important topics Biden did not address. He referenced the October 7 attacks on Israel but not Israel’s controversial response, which has drawn furious protests. He failed to mention Gaza, where Israel’s military campaign has killed so many, and which has led the World Food Programme to warn of a “full-blown famine .”

A great American — a great Jewish American named Tom Lantos — used the phrase “the veneer of civilization is paper thin.” We are its guardians, and we can never rest.

My fellow Americans, we must, we must be those guardians. We must never rest. We must rise Against hate, meet across the divide, see our common humanity. And God bless the victims and survivors of the Shoah.

May the resilient hearts, the courageous spirit and the eternal flame of faith of the Jewish people forever shine their light on America and around the world, pray God.

Thank you all.

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Transcript: Read Biden’s Remarks at a Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony

Here is the president’s complete speech, which lasted about 16 minutes.

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By The New York Times

• May 7, 2024

President Biden delivered these remarks on Tuesday at the Capitol for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance.

Thank you, Stu, for that introduction, for your leadership of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. You’re a true scholar and statesman and a dear friend. Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, members of Congress and especially the survivors of the Holocaust. If my mother were here, she’d look at you and say, “God love you all. God love you all.”

Abe Foxman and all of the survivors who embody absolute courage and dignity and grace are here as well. During these sacred days of remembrance, we grieve. We give voice to the six million Jews who were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. We honor the memory of victims, the pain of survivors, the bravery of heroes who stood up to Hitler’s unspeakable evil. And we recommit to heading and heeding the lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history, to revitalize and realize the responsibility of never again.

Never again, simply translated for me, means never forget. Never forget. Never forgetting means we must keep telling the story, must keep teaching the truth, must keep teaching our children and our grandchildren. The truth is, we are at risk of people not knowing the truth. That’s why growing up, my dad taught me and my siblings about the horrors of the Shoah at our family dinner table. That’s why I visited Yad Vashem with my family as a senator, as vice president, as president. And that’s why I took my grandchildren to Dachau, so they could see and bear witness to the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence, in the face of evil they knew was happening.

Germany 1933, Hitler and his Nazi Party’s rise to power by rekindling one of the oldest forms of prejudice and hate: antisemitism. His role didn’t begin with mass murder; it started slowly across economic, political, social and cultural life. Propaganda demonizing Jews. Boycotts of Jewish businesses. Synagogues defaced with swastikas. Harassment of Jews in the street and the schools, antisemitic demonstrations, pogroms, organized riots. With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror by eliminating Jews from Germany, to annihilate Jews across Europe through genocide, the Nazis called the final solution. Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass shootings. By the time the war ended, six million Jews — one of every three Jews in the entire world — were murdered.

This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust. It didn’t end with the Holocaust either. Or after — even after our victory in World War II. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness. That hatred was brought to life on October 7th of 2023. On the sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in a kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted.

Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets and shrapnel from a memory of that terrible day they endured. Hundreds taken hostage, including survivors of the Shoah. Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and half months later and people are already forgetting. They are already forgetting. That Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten nor have you. And we will not forget.

As Jews around the world still cope with the atrocity and the trauma of that day and its aftermath, we have seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world. Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Antisemitism, antisemitic posters, slogans, calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.

Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop. Silence and denial can hide much, but it can erase nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be married — buried — no matter how hard people try.

In my view, a major lesson of the Holocaust is, as mentioned earlier, it is not — was not — inevitable. We know hate never goes away; it only hides. Given a little oxygen, it comes out from under the rocks. We also know what stops hate. One thing: All of us. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs described antisemitism as a virus that has survived and mutated over time. Together, we cannot continue to let that happen. We have to remember our basic principle as a nation.

We have an obligation, an obligation to learn the lessons of history so we don’t surrender our future to the horrors of the past. We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone. Anyone. From the very founding, our very founding, Jewish Americans represented only about 2 percent of the U.S. population and helped lead the cause of freedom for everyone in our nation. From that experience, we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.

It’s in moments like this we have to put these principles that we’re talking about into action. I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world. In America, we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech. To debate, disagree, to protest peacefully, make our voices heard. I understand, that’s America. But there is no place on any campus in America — any place in America — for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind. Whether against Jews or anyone else. Violent attacks, destroying property is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. And we are not a lawless country. We’re a civil society. We uphold the rule of law, and no one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.

The Jewish community, I want you to know: I see your fear, your hurt, your pain. Let me reassure you, as your president, you’re not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will. And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad even when we disagree.

My administration is working around the clock to free remaining hostages. Just so we have freed hostages already. And we will not rest until we bring them all home. My administration, with our second gentleman’s leadership, has launched our nation’s first national strategy to counter antisemitism that’s mobilizing the full force of the federal government to protect Jewish community, but we know it’s not the work of government alone or Jews alone.

That’s why I’m calling on all Americans to stand united against antisemitism and hate in all its forms. My dear friend, he became a friend, the late Elie Wiesel said, quote: “One person of integrity can make a difference.” We have to remember that now more than ever. Here in the Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol, among the towering statues of history, is a bronze bust of Raoul Wallenberg. Born in Sweden, as a Lutheran, he was a businessman and a diplomat. While stationed in Hungary during World War II, he used diplomatic cover to hide and rescue about 100,000 Jews over a six-month period.

Among them was a 16-year-old Jewish boy who escaped a Nazi labor camp. After the war ended, that boy received a scholarship from the Hillel Foundation to study in America. He came to New York City penniless but determined to turn his pain into purpose, along with his wife, also a Holocaust survivor. He became a renowned economist and foreign policy thinker, eventually making his way to this very Capitol on the staff of a first-term senator.

That Jewish refugee was Tom Lantos, and that senator was me. Tom and his wife, Annette, and their family became dear friends to me and my family. Tom would go on to become the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, where he became a leading voice on civil rights and human rights around the world. Tom never met Raoul, who was taken prisoner by the Soviets, never to be heard from again. But through Tom’s efforts, Raoul’s bust is here in the Capitol. He was also given honorary U.S. citizenship, only the second person ever after Winston Churchill.

The Holocaust Museum here in Washington is located on a roll — road — in Raoul’s name. The story of the power of a single person to put aside our differences, to see our common humanity, to stand up to hate and its ancient story of resilience from immense pain, persecution, to find hope, purpose and meaning in life we try to live and share with one another. That story endures.

Let me close with this. I know these days of remembrance fall on difficult times. We all do well to remember these days also fall during the month we celebrate Jewish American heritage. A heritage that stretches from our earliest days to enrich every single part of American life today. Great American — great Jewish American — Tom Lantos used the phrase the veneer of civilization is paper-thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.

My fellow Americans, we must, we must be those guardians. We must never rest. We must rise against hate, meet across the divide, see our common humanity. And God bless the victims and survivors of the Shoah. May the resilient hearts, courageous spirit and eternal flame of faith of the Jewish people shine their light on America and all around the world. Praise God. Thank you all.