The Red Menace: Anti-Communist Propaganda of the Cold War

Every age has its bogeyman.  If you grew up in 1950s and 60s America you would have been bombarded with anti-communist propaganda. In hindsight it is perhaps easy to raise a wry eyebrow.  Yet at the time the threat was taken very seriously indeed. Here, hysteria intact, are a few of the stranger messages delivered to the American people.

“Employees lose their respect for a company that fails to provide decent facilities for their comfort” goes the by-line for this advertisement.  Yes, quite possibly, but does that really mean that they are going to turn into rampaging Bolsheviks because the paper towels at work are rough on their hands?  This apparently was a real danger back in the fifties and sixties.  Fortunately the introduction of soft tissues on a massive scale helped to avoid the commie takeover of the western world. 

Motherland

In a totalitarian regime a young girl experiences the brutality of politics first hand.  Yet, through her memories and her fortitude perhaps the idea of personal freedom will persist.  Motherland harkens back all the way to Metropolis and features stereotypic characters and motifs that are plentiful in the propaganda art of the 1920s and 1930s as well as later – Orwell’s 1984 looms large here.

What is remarkable about Motherland is that it is a diploma project produced at The Institute of Animation Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg – in other words, it’s a student project.  It was directed by Hannes Appell with DOP Stevo Arendt and producers Libor Tesacek and Felix Vollmar.

Veggie Propaganda

I have to point out here and now that I am not a vegetarian so the inclusion of this animation by Kristen Palana is not my attempt to convert you to vegetarianism. However, it does ask some interesting questions which are worth considering.  Even if animal welfare is not at the top of your agenda, perhaps the environment and living longer are. Veggie Propaganda makes the point (very well) that by cutting down on meat (or, of course, cutting it out altogether) you are probably going to live a healthier, longer life.

So, by all means throw your weight in to the debate by making reasoned comments below – no abuse please!  I like to think I give voice to all sorts of opinions here at Kuriositas, so if you have made an animated short about the wonders of eating meat, please send me the link and I will consider putting it on the site too!

Kristen Palana is an American/Portuguese multimedia artist based in Rome, Italy. Her work has been exhibited internationally and online and has won a number of awards. She has taught undergraduate and graduate college students for over eleven years, as well as offered art and multimedia courses in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Kristen is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Digital Media at The American University of Rome.

McDonald's Propaganda

Image Credit Flickr User oak37

All things considered, perhaps McDonalds could have given it a little more thought before setting up shop along the Via di Propaganda in Rome, Italy. Ahem.

In fact, this is spitting distance from The Palazzo di Propaganda Fide (which in English means Palace of the Propagation of the Faith) For almost four hundred years it has housed the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and now belongs to the Vatican City.  Ah, the blessed irony of these two global forces cheek by jowl.

"When two tribes go to war,
One is all that you can score"
(thanks, Frankie, you still have your uses).