After the Alexandre Vattemare exhibition at the Boston Public Library, I ambled up to the Wiggin Gallery to see "United We Will Win: World War II Posters of Victory."


There was a nice array of propaganda posters with various approaches to rallying support for "The Good War." (Which is also the name of great collection of oral histories from the World War II years by Studs Terkel, if you have not yet read it.)


The posters ran the gamut from wholesome...


To hunkadelic:


There were some butch-ass Rosie Riveters, of course. And your typical coy blond sailors, too, beckoning from over their shoulders, like they always do.

Representative, but pretty run of the mill. In fact, we are so accustomed to seeing these old posters that when they aren't kitsch, they're camp.

The poster that really got my attention was this one:


Visually, it brings the image of the hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib immediately to mind, for obvious reasons:


The World War II poster refers to the complete annihilation of a village called Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, at the hands of the Nazis in 1942. All of the village's 172 men and boys over the age of 16 were shot in "retaliation" for the assassination of an SS Commander. All of the women were shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. The village's children, ninety in all, were delivered to the concentration camp at Gneisenau. Only those few young children deemed suitable by the Central Race and Settlement branch of the SS for "Germanization" (there were seven, according to records) were spared. The village was then razed. Even the graves were emptied and the corpses destroyed. Every trace, even the name of Lidice was literally wiped off the map.

The atrocity at Lidice was one of the many perpetrated by the Nazis that are each and every one too horrific to imagine. And while Abu Ghraib is horrifying, it is crime of a different nature on a different scale. I would not equate Abu Ghraib with the events at Lidice.

But the images from Abu Ghraib are arguably more powerful as propaganda—"This is American Brutality," the poster could read—being photos of actual persons being terrorized for the amusement of the very U.S. military personnel entrusted with their humane treatment.

It's hard to believe that these posters from the World War II era, with their staged scenes and slogans were at all persuasive. We look at them with a kind of nostalgia for what we imagine to have been a simpler time (but it may actually be the case that the propaganda was simpler—nowadays it generally consists of actual photographs or video footage of violence being done to other people—our relationship to which is more problematic). 

The exhibition is not enough to spawn a full-scale conversation. But it does get you thinking about what such an exhibition focusing on the current era might look like fifty years from now, and whether or not we'll look back with nostalgia on these dark days.

"United We Will Win: World War II Posters of Victory" is showing through Sept. 15 at the Wiggin Gallery in the McKim Building of the Boston Public Library.