One of the things that interests me is propaganda posters. You can tell quite a bit about a culture and what their aims and prejudices are by the lovely treatment they give themselves and their enemies. Though I tend to find the dichotimy between Soviet and American posters a bit more interesting here are some WWII posters for your enjoyment.
Two of the posters really stuck out to me as an interesting example.
Now I don’t know about you, but for a Japanese person he seems to be awfully dark. The mouth structure and ears also seem to look a little bit like the sterotypical portrayal of blacks. So while this may be an anti-Japanese poster they’re banking on actual racial prejudices of the time to generate animosity towards the Japanese.
It tries to get across the idea that the Nazis are atheists or some other sort of religion that isn’t Christian who are coming to destroy our Christian heritage. After all, what better way to rally a bunch of Americans than to promote the idea that not only is their country under attack, but their faith is as well. This would be wonderful, if it was at all true.
Hitler was a Christian. He wasn’t a big fan of the pacificity of the religion and tended to prefer a much more militant view of Christianity. One could even make the case in light of the fact that Hitler included atheists (some rather prominent) and Muslims in his ranks that he was much more tolerant of other religions (aside from the use of Jews as scapegoats) than many Americans are today. Hitler was even against State Atheism.
Nazi Germany was also a rather Christian nation anyways. They had a tax to support the churches. So the idea that German soldiers were coming to subvert Christianity is absolutely absurd as most of those soldiers were themselves Christians. Yet this exposes one of America’s greatest propaganda ideas, cast your enemies as un-Christian. It’s kind of sad that even in this day America gets away with it.
