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Zassoursky (1998) Comments That The Two Posters Reflect A Major New Tendency ...

Zassoursky (1998) comments that The two posters reflect a major new tendency in military propaganda at the time its merger with advertising, which started during World War I. This trend indicates that military propaganda started to become commercialized (76). The effects and the ramifications of this tendency for propaganda to integrate more commercial efforts into its programme exposes to an extent the mesmerising effects that commercialisation can have in generating the illusion of press freedom. The imagery of patriotism, as Zassoursky points out, is largely the same on both sides of the war. The German poster equates the German sword to the taking out of a military loan, whereas the Russian model also appeals to patriotism, and features a worker shaking hands with a stern but friendly looking officer.
Indeed, the importance of the First World War upon shaping public opinion and the citizenry under a newly freed media machine was, in many ways, testament to the means by which ideology still functioned to control the media in certain, specific ways. The imagery of the enemy as Godless, lawless, without belief and barbaric in their origins can be seen as synchronous with the ideals of capitalism to individualize or, in Adorno's terms atomize the individual from one's community. While advertising provided certain illusions of choice, the subtle fires of consumerism and government conformity were being stoked here, while, if everything else failed, the old government methods of violent suppression of dissident voices would resume activity. An example of this was in the instance of Fenner Brockway, whose pacifist newspaper Labour Leader was suppressed and taken to court for publishing seditious material in August 1915. Similarly, in America, the first amendment was flagrantly disregarded in a series of lawsuits by the United States government that sought to quash any anti-war sentiment. Foerstel (1995) suggests that the xenophobia surrounding World War I revived the legacy of seditious libel, the common law notion that criticism of government was a crime. This wartime hysteria produced a trio of disturbing Supreme Court cases: Frohwerk v. United States ( 1919), Abrams v. United States ( 1919), and Schenck v. United States ( 1919). Frohwerk v. United States ( 1919) involved a series of articles published in a small German-language newspaper in Missouri (122). As such, traditional techniques beyond the free market were also being used liberally to crush any sentiment that differed from the status quo. Imagery that ran contrary to the mainstream, and was considered dangerous to the established ideology that the First World War was, in essence, a fight against a demonic, Godless, lawless force, was subjected to exclusion, incarceration and alienation from the free media machine.


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