A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com

Category: Propaganda

RED in Black & White–Fringe Right-Wing Anti-Communist Groups and the Fascist Horse They Rode in On (1937)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

In a year when the political leader of the United States and his spokespeople have tried to make themselves responsible for defining language and veracity according to their own needs, the word “faked” jumped out to me from the cover of this pamphlet. This doesn’t have anything to do with the allegations of “fake news” today, when the presidential press person defines “fake news” as new that does not agree with the vision of the White House and the president himself s impossibly scourges entities like the New York Times as dealing in “fake news”, as this is of a particularly high height of an attack on reason and logic. This “fake” is far more localized, and accuses the CIO and John Lewis of sharp moves in extorting money from union members as well as trying to coerce the U.S. into becoming a Soviet America.

Most of the contents of this pamphlet is summed up nicely on its back wrapper in the advertisements for other pamphlets sold by the publisher, the Constitutional Educational League. “Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America”, “Communism’s Iron Grip on the CIO”, “Vote for John L. Lewis and Communism”, and “Battalions of Death” are all part and parcel of the Leagues ambitious attack on the CIO and unions. (Later, in 1949, the League would publish “Hitler was a Liberal” by Joseph Kamp–he was a very prolific guy, writing from an outpost in a watchtower on the very far right. “The Hell with G.I. Joe!”, printed in 1944, is another one–there must be three dozen little pamphlets that he wrote and published, warning against infiltration from the left, and even in the early 1950’s wondering about whether Dwight Eisenhower would succumb to Commie urges.)

The thing is, however, that in 1942, the Constitutional Educational League–in business at this point for about 20 years–was one of 28 organizations indicated as having conspired against the U.S. as an agent of the Axis Powers. So there’s that.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Propaganda
Public Instruction on Gas Attacks (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I have perhaps four or five pamphlets on gas attacks presented int eh manner of the one I’m displaying today–someone, somewhere did a good and thorough job of cataloging these instructions for a general population on what to do in the event of a poison gas attack. There are also 50 or so items that had once been in the library of the OSS that are similar in presentation/preservation to the gas attack pamphlets, though those all have at least two indications (a stamp and hand written cataloging) stating their point of origin, and the one below does not. The pamphlet is stapled into a manila folder,and opposite it is a worksheet with cataloging details and a fairly extensive abstract of the pamphlet (by hand) in English. Very curious, and interesting.

The pamphlet: Notice sur les Mesures a Appliquee en cas de Surprise par les Gaz, printed in France in January 1939 by the Ministere de la Defense National. There is still eight more months of peace to be waged and lost, Hitler already on the move in Czechoslovakia and Austria, and of course Japan already fighting their all-out war in China already for seven years.

[Images are very expandable.]

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Militaria — Propaganda
How to Deal with Female Traitors (1861)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I found this in the files this evening, a cartoon from Harper’s Weekly from October 26, 1861, from when the Civil War was but half a year old or so and there was still three and a half years of fighting to go. This was a modest suggestion on what to do with female traitors–the sections are pretty self-explanatory, and I’ve provided a transcription for them if difficult to read in the original:

The captions:
- “Let them See but not touch all the latest novelties
  in Hats, Dry Goods, etc.”
- “Send them to the Alms House to nurse refractory babies”
- “Have the fashionable intelligence read in their hearing to their intense aggravation”
- “Make them wear very unfashionable uniform as e.g. the above”
- “Let them do Housework under the Superintendence of Biddy”
·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Propaganda — Social History
Maps with a Message–WWI Advertisement with Map Propaganda

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This small ad for Sanitas (a non-poisonous”the disinfecting fluid”, composed of hydrogen peroxide and camphor as main ingredients) appeared in the quarter panel of the Illustrated London News on November 13, 1915, and told a definite story. Here we see a British soldier, sitting squarely on Germany, asking the reader “Did any one say that there was a GERM anywhere?” in a not-subtle connection between the German enemy and disease. I hadn’t noticed this before, and so thought I would share…

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Propaganda — World War I
Hitler as Leviathan of the German People; a Map of the Threat to Germany (1936)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2613

the following two images are found in a small pamphlet on the general election and single-question referendum held in Germany on March 29, 1936 (Des Deutschen Volkes Schicksalswende am 29. Marx). as it turns out the small pamphlet accordion-folded oput to about 2.5 feet, which was printed on both sides. Anyway the single question was whether the voter wanted a single-party representation by the NSDAP in the Reichstag–not surprisingly whatsoever the German population voted/”voted” 99% in favor of the proposal. The pamphlet was a gross propaganda instrument, as was the “election/referendum”, and it contained a number of striking images, though perhaps none so as near-unforgettable as that showing Hitler arising from a living-person map of Germany:

Hitler came to power via a number of elections–he didn’t just take it, or at least not until 1933; 44 million people voted in March 1933 (an 88% turnout), and 17 million voted for the NSDAP and Hitler giving him the popular vote and the most seats in the Reichstag. In the November 1933 (“Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer, Ein Ja”) elections, 39 million/92% voted for Hitler, which was another story. And here he is, rising from a sea of Germans, three years later, a leader restrictive of enemies and opposition, the whole thing looking horrible.

Here’s another bit from the same 12-panel accordion-fold pamphlet, a propaganda map showing the possibly-invasive weaknesses of the Versailles-dictated German army. AS in the case of several other maps posted to this blog on this 1934-1939 geographic creation of risk and threat, this one depicts a heavily-armed and populated French army looking at Germany, while the relatively-meagre 100,000-man German army quietly protects itself on the borders 50km away from the Rhine. I guess it might have been effective if people were actually voting in this election, for scared people to vote their scared conscience for the man who scared them. The writing however was on the proverbial wall, and the only thing left to do with the Versailles treaty at that point would be to scrap it. About four years later the Nazis would come sweeping down on France and by June 22 the French would be signing a humiliating surrender instrument.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Propaganda
Data Visualization in WWII Posters (1942)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Here’s a wonderful British-stiff-upper-lip poster, a play on the Alec Guinness The Mouse that Roared, replacing the “mouse ” part, and winding up with The Lion That Roared. The poster comes from 1942 and for all intents and purposes is correct, except that the lion was roaring at least since 1940–the difference is that the lion got bigger and roar-ier. The British navy was always far and away more powerful than Germany’s, and although out-numbered in aircraft for the first year and a half or so of the war, Germany was pretty much hopelessly behind by late 1941 and certainly 1942. In any event the poster tells a good and fairly accurate story to the passersby in London in 1942.

[Source: Z. Zeman, Selling the War, Art and Propaganda in World War II (1978).]

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Militaria — Propaganda
Wrong-Side French Art: Vichy Propaganda Posters, Dunkirk, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Michel Jacquot seems to have been a relatively busy graphic designer/artist and collaborator with the Nazis during WWII (and before). One very striking and damning poster that he created was this scene of Brits forcing French soldiers away from evacuation vessels at Dunkirk forcing them to satay behind and guard the rear and (2) get eaten alive by the approaching Nazis. All told, there were 338,226 soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk; the grim part of the miracle there was that 68,000 BEF were captured or killed and 40,000 French troops were captured–none of that happened because French troops were marauded by the Brits. Jacquot tried a hearts-and-minds with this one, though it is unknown what effect it had in creating a hatred-thread among the French.

[Source: illustration in Z. Zeman, Selling the war, Orbis Press, 1978.] “1940 Dunkerque. Les anglais s’opposent à l’embarquement des derniers français qui venaient de protéger leur retraite”, by Michel Jacquot.

Jacquot also cooked this one up, a grim anti-Communist poster in support of the extreme Nationalist/National Socialist Parti Populaire Francais (the PPF) in 1943. The leader of the PPF was a former outted Communist named Jacues Doriot (1898-1945) who was a National Socialist, a Nazi supporter, a collaborator, a traitor to his country who broadcast for the Nazis on Radio Paris, and a person who co-founded the Legion des Volontaires Francaise (LVF), which was a unit of French soldiers who fought with the Wehrmacht. There are some other posters, too, including some vile anti-Semitic ones, but you get a good-enough taste for where Jacquot was headed during the 1935-1945 period.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Propaganda
Map of the Communist Threat to Germany, 1933.

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Not long after Hitler’s election in 1933 this curious pamphlet appeared: Ein Kampf um Deutschland (1933), short and thin, is a work filled with anti-Communist photos and images portraying them in as harsh a bad light as you could muster in 32 pages.One of the images is this map showing in no uncertain terms threats to Germany from the west, but most importantly a gigantic threat coming from the Communist east, the arrow striking right through the heart of Germany, with the hammer and sickle (the symbol only about 16 years old at the time) coming to rest just about on top of Berlin.

For all of this Hitler would sign a Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union six years later (22 August 1939) with the plan of dividing some Eastern conquests with the Russians. Less than two years later came Operation Barbarossa, with Hitler launching a massive surprise invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Dozens of millions of lives later, it would all be over in four years.

And the opened cover for the pamphlet, or what is left of it:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Propaganda
Hope for POWs, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Even when this leaflet was issued in March 1944, so very deep in the war and so very close to the end of the war, there was an enlisted hope for humane treatment for Allied POWs–at least that is what the job of the Red Cross was at the time, to sustain that belief and enforce it wherever they could. (I’ve reproduced the entire pamphlet, below.)

The leaflet provided this hopeful template for addressing an envelope to your POW:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Militaria — Propaganda
“Swept Away”: Propaganda of the Beautiful Life of German Workers, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

La Vie en Allemagne, l’Habitation Allemande is a soft, no-edge piece of propaganda produced in Nazi Germany and meant for distribution in France. (The pamphlet has no place or date of publication, though WorldCat guesses 1941/2, which I’m inclined to agree with–in any event it is appropriate for it to not have identifiers like that as it is, after all, all made up.) I am pretty sure that pictures such as these printed during wartime for the population of an occupied country could not get any more vaseline-lens-coated or syrupy than these images. They are in the best tradition of a Lena Wertmueller movie, where the working class is perfect as are their homes and children. And if Ms. Wertmueller used for a background artist someone like Maxfield Parrish working in black & white, these images would no doubt seem familiar to him. That said, this is a propaganda vehicle showing the working and living condition of worker “colonists” in Germany and their supposed standard of living, which as good National Socialists would have been far away above that of blue collar worker in France. Anyway it was a dreadful piece of dangerous fluff to dangle in front of a captured population–no doubt this little publication found itself replacing paper conveniences in the toilet, and used as fire-starter, but no doubt some poor soul somewhere in France was confused by it, and wondered.

WorldCat/OCLC locates only five copies (three in France and two in Germany), and no copies in the U.S.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Militaria — Propaganda

Category: Propaganda

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post