Ryan Baker //
Produced by Walt Disney with the help of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this animated short goes to great lengths to demonstrate the enormity of the U.S.'s food output, from enough loaves of bread to line the Suez Canal to a can of tomatoes taller and wider than the Matterhorn.
I've not seen much in the way of Italian propaganda art - it's a category usually dominated by the United States, the USSR and the most despicable of Germany's checkered past - but this is a particularly brutal poster direct from Mussolini's Rome circa 1940.
Bit of an understatement to say this British Empire Union poster was intended to foment anti-German sentiment considering it depicts a German soldier bayoneting a baby.
The Germans were reviled leading up to and during the first World War, and this poster adroitly takes advantage of that; aside from the images recalling the execution of civilians in German-occupied Belgium and the targeting of civilian ships at sea, the grave shown is that of Edith Cavell, a young British nurse and humanitarian who was arrested by the Germans in Belgium while aiding the escape of 200 Allied soldiers. Tried for treason, Cavell was found guilty and executed by firing squad; her death became a major propaganda tool for the Allies throughout the war, meant to stir up anger over alleged German barbarism.This piece of propaganda was intended to dissuade British citizens from purchasing German goods or hiring Germans; given that riots, assaults and looting were not entirely uncommon acts of violent hysteria, it seems doubtful any would dare to do so in the first place. Again we see the repeated motif of enemy as brutish barbarian, unabashedly dehumanized and warranting permanent mistrust and suspicion.
Don't think such fervor was unique to the United Kingdom, however; the United States was similarly in the midst of frenzied anti-German madness, as "pro-German" and German-language books were publicly burned, newspapers published the names and addresses of German citizens as "Enemy Aliens," a bill in the House of Representatives proposed removing all German names from the map of the U.S. and, perhaps most telling of all, just as the European reaction to the second Iraq War encouraged the switch from "French fries" to "freedom fries," so, too, was sauerkraut dubbed "liberty cabbage" and hamburgers "liberty steaks."Originally titled "Donald Duck in Nutzi Land," this 8-minute Disney short received the 1943 Oscar for Best Animated Short. Cartoons of the time were regularly harnessed as propaganda pieces, but this one is particularly noteworthy in lacking the racist caricatures common amongst its contemporaneous brethren.
Laura Brey's recruitment poster is a web of dichotomous contrasts - light and dark, active and passive, soldier and civilian, masculine and feminine, unity and isolation.
