One of the weapons during World War II was propaganda—a powerful tool. The armies did not have to be persuaded to go to war, it was their job to follow the orders of their respective governments.
However, propaganda was used to persuade civilians of the merits of war. This was done by all sides.
World War II was different from any war before because it included the targeted mass murder of the civilian population. The Nazis were convincing the general population that they were not just fighting external enemies but also internal ones. They organized propaganda tools to sell their lies to market them as truth. It is a fact that there is an element of truth in every lie.
Lou Manche was a member of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party. He was also a member of the WA, the Dutch equivalent of the Stormtroopers, they called themselves a group who maintained order, but in fact, they were just a gang of thugs.
Lou Manche was also an artist and, by all means, a very talented artist, but rather than using his talents for good—he used them for evil.
Manche became a prominent propagandist for the NSB. The poster at the start of the blog is one of his posters. In the poster, he made clever use of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. There are a few symbols in the poster: The Star of David, the hammer and sickle, and a caricature of Winston Churchill sitting on someone, who I believe to be Stafford Cripps, who was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union by Churchill. He also used words like: retarded; dandy; millionaire communist; and gold trading Jews. The symbols and words were subliminal messages meant to slip past your mental radar and embed themselves deep into your subconscious mind. It focused on making Jews, English, Communists, and people with mental illness look to be the enemy of the state.
People who read the messages may have thought they were not so harmful because they didn’t call for aggression. They may have thought they were warnings of what could happen. The headline read, If England Wins the War, then listed all that could happen. In short, it implied that the Jews would exploit the Dutch, the English were retards, and the Soviets would destroy the country.
The poster also refers to a piece H.G Wells had written in a magazine called, Fortnightly.
Wells warns about the mistake the English government has made by going to war with Germany. To end Hitler’s regime, he warns about what may come after Hitler. He also says that they think that they can render Hitler powerless just so that can go back fishing and golfing, quoted on the poster of Lou Manche. This of course was one of those cherry-picking tactics of the Nazis, H.G. Wells had been one of the authors banned by the Nazi regime. His book “The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind” was one of the books, thrown into the flames, a the 1933 book burnings. But if it suited the Nazi agenda, they would be willing to overlook that fact.
Although many Dutch used their common sense and did not heed the propaganda of the NSB and Lou Manche, there were many who fell for it, and quite a few were well-educated. 75% of all Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, Lou Manche’s ‘art’ had a part to play in this.
Many of Lou Manche’s propaganda posters remind me of modern-day memes, which are often used in a similar way to get a political message across. Like then they are usually taken out of context.
After the war, Lou Manche was tried and jailed for a short time. In 1954, the Royal British Legion commissioned him for a stained glass piece, but after an assembly of protests, they decided against it and assigned it to another artist.
sources
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hg-wells
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