Driving the Message Home, Anti-Spy Propaganda

Cinima was a new and important method of Propaganda.

This famous poster tried to fill the viewer with dread and paranoia about the enemy.

An example of what would happen if the warning was not followed.

Showing how despicable the enemy was is as old as propaganda itself.

Propaganda had gotten it’s big start in the United States during the First World War a a way to dehumanize the enemy and to raise public morale. During the Second World War it did do both of those things, but they also heavily stressed the importance of anti espionage work being the job of everyone, as opposed to something that the people who made the tanks or planes needed to think. The most famous of these posters are well known today, from “Somebody Talked” to loose lips sink ships, to any of those which extolled the dangers of speaking on the war effort loudly enough for a German agent to overhear. The posters and other aspects of the campaign focused on making the war effort a daily part of everyone’s life, not just something done in battlefields and factories. In the United States the War Information department was responsible for much of the propaganda we can still see today.