World War 2 Vintage Poster

"Your Liberty Bond will help stop this - Sus bonos de la libertad ayudarán á dar fin con esto" 1917. In World War II propaganda, one of the main goals of American propagandists was to portray the Germans and Japanese as anything but human. By attributing animalistic and demonic characteristics to their appearance, propagandists attempted to dehumanize wartime enemies and galvanize the public against them. Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels." —Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996 The English term is an 18th century coinage, from the Latin feminine gerund of propagare "to propagate", originally in Congregatio de Propaganda Fide "Congregation for Propagating the Faith," a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV. In its turn, the word propagare is related to the word propages, "a slip, a cutting of a vine" and refers to the gardener's practice to disseminate plants by planting shoots.The term is not pejorative in origin and its political sense dates back to World War I.