We’re all familiar with political ads and Super PACs, but these aspects of campaigns are much worse.
As children and adults, we have all seen the iconic United States recruitment poster: An old man dressed in a patriot costume with a constipation-strain of a face pointing at the viewer, proclaiming proudly, “I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY!” Apparently, this poster was such a powerful representation of our patriotic passion that no one bothered to point out that the phrase is actually grammatically incorrect.
However, a grammatical error is not the most embarrassing of propaganda poster mistakes. Even more laughable are propaganda posters and videos that completely fail at convincing anyone of anything.
First off, let us examine Hitler’s “Perfect Aryan Baby.” After secretly burning down the German parliamentary building, ordering the shootings of the leaders of a paramilitary unit and naming himself the Führer, Adolf Hitler decided that he needed to revamp the Nazi Party’s image in order to make itself seem less bloodthirsty and aggressive. What better way to establish one’s own peaceful ties then by making posters with babies on them?
However, Hitler was somewhat of an anti-Semite and decided that the best thing to do would be to have a picture of an Aryan (blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned and un-Jewish) baby. The job was handed off to Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister.
Goebbels was known among his peers as the “Casanova of the Nazis” and is known to have documented his many liaisons with over 30,000 pages of notes and stories. He even had a passionate non-Aryan lover, a dark-haired actress with an unpronounceable Slavic name.
Perhaps that was the basis for his decision to go with a cuddly, little brown-haired baby that a photographer submitted to him. Goebbels got the poster approved and the baby’s face was scattered all over Germany on posters and magazine covers as proof that Nazis aren’t monsters.
Unfortunately for the Nazis, the baby (named Hessy Levinsons), was the daughter of two Jewish Germans living in Berlin, and it became something of a PR mess when she was the one named “the Perfect Aryan Child.”
It turns out that the photographer who submitted the photograph was an anti-Nazi German citizen and had turned in Hessy’s photograph to see if he could dupe the government.
Needless to say, the Nazis were thoroughly embarrassed.
The Nazis weren’t the only regime that was embarrassed by a failed propaganda event. The Chinese in January of 2011 boasted a new fighter jet that was supposed to be extraordinarily impressive. To prove Chinese dominance, the government posted a video with the new fighter jet blowing up an older and less impressive fighter jet in a spectacular display of fiery doom.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="7c7d0808-5b1d-11e5-b36c-0bc45d6cdb48"}}
However, thanks to a group of people we shall refer to as the Internet, the fighter jet video soon became a source of unintentional humiliation. With the advent of video-viewing websites such as YouTube, people now have the chance to pause videos to further examine various scenes, like that scene in Star Wars where the stormtrooper accidentally hits his head. It so happens that some people who have seen Top Gun realized that the shots leading up to the explosion followed the same succession of shots as Top Gun, as in, they were the exact same shots. As the hubbub on the Internet grew, the Chinese government reclassified the fighter-jet’s “footage” and censored it in a frantic attempt to escape ridicule.
They got ridiculed anyway.
As the 2016 election fires up, let’s hope that the political advertisements headed our way provide us with more gut-busting laughs (like the Herman Cain smile) and an escape from the seriousness of policy attacks and debates.
Richard Hwang is a student at Athens High School. What humorous political propaganda have you seen? Email him at rhwang999@gmail.com.
