Anti-Americana: Common Interests

Dating from the 1960s, when the Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea) was a little more self-identified with the socialist camp, this poster shows an armed Korean and and a very Che-looking armed Cuban bayoneting a cowering American figure in the corner who seems to look a lot like U.S. President Lyndon Baynes Johnson (LBJ). The flags are those of North Korea and Cuba, and sadly, once again my ignorance of Korean means I have no idea what the caption says. It's a classic distillation of the North Korean anti-American propaganda style.

North Korea and Cuba have of course both defied the presence of the strongest anti-Communist military power camped out right on their borders for decades. The threat to the Cuban and North Korean governments is evident every day still in 2013. Solidarity apparently actually helps!

In 1960, Che Guevara actually visited the DPRK on behalf of revolutionary Cuba, and here is a brief clip of him sitting down with DPRK leader Kim Il Sung. 

Anti-American Art: I Am The Manchurian Candidate

It's the armed peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America rising up against American imperialism again, in super-saturated colors and, well, some pretty imaginative "native dress." It's a Chinese cultural revolution poster from the 1960s, and I actually once owned this poster; I bought it as a young teen in the early 1970s, though my poster ended up ripped and ragged and didn't survive my youth.

We lived for a few years in Evanston, the first suburb just north of Chicago. The transition from Chicago to Evanston isn't really noticeable; the visual shift to suburb starts to happen part way through Evanston towards Skokie. It was not ranch houses and perfect lawns. Anyway the first actual house we lived in was right by Northwestern University, and in a row of shops nearby was the Peking Book House. It was a Chinese government propaganda outlet; I'm not sure how it operated since this was right before the post-Nixon normalization of relations and the lifting of the trade embargoes. In the days when any Chinese immigrant was presumed to be a refugee from Communism, Mr. Chen and his shop clearly bucked that trend. He had a huge selection of Chinese posters, pamphlets and books, plus Mao buttons and a whole rack of blue or green Mao jackets with matching caps. He had a wall of Little Red Books --the Quotations of Mao Zedong -- in shiny vinyl sleeves in dozens and dozens of languages. I imagine his intended audience was the very international student body of Northwestern and the associated student radical milieu (the Vietnam war was most definitely still on, remember). Though I don't actually recall seeing anyone else in his shop on my frequent visits. (Crazily a google search reveals that the shop and Mr. Chen are still around thirty-odd years later).

You may ask what kind of teenage boy spends his allowance on Mao buttons and revolutionary anti-American posters. Well, the kind who grows up to write a blog like this one! I bought 10-inch LP recordings of Revolutionary Peking Operas -- Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy now replaced by CDs is something I still enjoy listening to. I bought a couple little red books, and frankly the English version is mostly as indecipherable as the Lao version I used to own.

So put this idealized, racially questionable, boldly illustrated poster into the column of highly effective propaganda vehicles. Here I am some latter-day Manchurian candidate, reactivated by the hidden clues first exposed to my tender young brain.

But enough about me. Look at this poster....keep looking. Go ahead, click on it and see it larger. Pay attention to the sound of my voice.... See the pretty bright colors. See yourself in the poster... Feel the righteous wrath of the people around you... You are getting sleepy... you're drifting off into the poster. When I snap my fingers you will awaken and you will be resolutely determined to smash U.S. imperialism...

snap!

Anti-American Art: Outnumbered

This 1960s Chinese poster about the Vietnamese resistance to the US reminds me of those old cartoons where one character goes chasing another off screen to the right, and then suddenly runs back to the left with the original chasee now joined by a huge multitude chasing the original pursuer. Note the little American soldier hotly pursued by some pissed off heavily armed Vietnamese. Props to these propagandists of old for the gender balance.

Anti-American Art: All Together Now

Chinese cultural revolution-era propaganda poster from 1968: the peoples of the world have found their common enemy. Bearing quotes from Mao and even a placard in English saying "Down with US Imper-ialism" we have a baby-carrying Vietnamese revolutionary; a guy in a turban maybe and a Latin American guerrilla burning a US flag; a vanguard made up of an armed African woman, an Albanian peasant, Chinese guys in Mao jackets, and a Cambodian peasant with a bayonet; the right flank includes a caribbean cane worker and a half-naked African playing a drum (of course!) and a cheering Arab.

I don't know the translation of the banner across the bottom of the poster.

MLK's Birthday: Never Forget

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.
--the Reverent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, April 3, 1968, Memphis

Anti-American Art: 3 Nations United Against One

From Cultural Revolution-era China comes this poster depicting the peoples of Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia (3 Nations) united in their struggle against the U.S. That's not a rock these three smiling gentlemen are standing on, that's a miliary helmet labelled "US," and that's a downed plane in the background. Note the crowd of internationalists cheering them on in the monotone background: you can clearly pick out individuals meant to be Albanian and Arab.

Anti-American Art

Here's an early 1970s poster from OSPAAL, the Cuba-based Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The caption: "US IMPERIALIST TROOPS, GET OUT OF SOUTH KOREA AT ONCE!"

This is certainly not particularly subtle propaganda: as the US soldier falls backward, kicked off the globe by an armed Korean civilian, he even drops his UN olive branch. The requisite multi-national solidarity contingent looks on, bayonets fixed.

I'm fascinated by this kind of art, and will be posting examples of it here from time to time. Hopefully I'll find something meaningful to say about it. This kind of fantasy socialist realism is sort of the equivalent to sword & sorcery's Frank Frazetta, for the anti-imperialist set, of course.