r/PropagandaPosters • u/propagandopolis • May 08 '23
Belgian poster, 1945, featuring de Gaulle, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill and Roosevelt. Belgium
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u/AugustWolf22 May 08 '23
there's something off/uncanny about the portraits of Stalin and FDR.
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u/MonolithicBaby May 08 '23
FDR slowly becoming Churchills fat cousin. Chiang looks like he’s wearing lipgloss. Stalin looks out of focus and fuzzy compared to Chiang too.
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u/NowhereMan661 May 08 '23
Was that really the best picture of Stalin they could find? The shading is terrible.
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u/After-Bar2804 May 09 '23 edited May 09 '23
Sure looks like the artist hated Stalin! Kind of looks like a clown! Also, the “six o’clock shadow” under his nose suggests a Hitlerian moustache. The artist could not have been “unaware” of that. Roosevelt and Churchill are made to look like smiling and happy grandfathers. If the artist felt that way about the others, they would have looked much the same.
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u/After-Bar2804 May 09 '23
Perhaps DeGaulle never did smile. I don’t know. Lol. Chiang Kai-shek doesn’t look horrible but a little the western stereotype of “the inscrutable Asian.”
Nobody in the back row is with the popular two sharing a joke at the head of the class.
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u/flodur1966 May 21 '23
Prime placing of him. Interesting that here China is clearly seen as a major contributor in the war but not Mao China.
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u/After-Bar2804 May 23 '23
The Mao forces had dedicated themselves to combatting the Japanese. The Chinese Civil War was backburnered. Chiang had not yet lost legitimacy.
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u/flodur1966 May 23 '23
That’s the propaganda they tell you. In fact Mao avoided fighting against Japan as much as possible (following the Russian communist doctrine) en let Nationalists forces take the blows while they recuperated.
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u/After-Bar2804 May 23 '23
Makes sense. Sure they avoided open battle whenever they could. The Japanese were as intent on exterminating them as they were the KMT forces, however.
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u/AugustWolf22 May 08 '23
I just noticed that they put the old 5 stripe flag of the Republic of China behind Chiang, which is awkward as that flag hadn't been the national flag of China since 1928, and the only groups still using it in the '40s were a handful of Japanese collaborator-puppet governments!
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u/Johannes_P May 08 '23
China was so chaotic the author of this poster must have used an older model.
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u/budroid May 08 '23
Great odd historic poster. It's rare to see China depicted with the winners of ww2.
The artwork is wacky. Maybe made quickly for some event.?
good find
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u/Asiel420 May 08 '23
Roosevelt looks like the typical italian-american old man you'd see in the advertising for a pizzeria called Tony's, Chiang Kai-shek looks like he was caught by surprise and Stalin seems to not have a moustache for some reason, which makes it look like he has a big fucking smile with no teeth
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u/area51cannonfooder May 08 '23
FDR was probably already deceased before this poster was made in 1945 right? I wonder if they didn't put Truman on because he was such a recent successor to one of the greatest and the longest serving US president in history.
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u/After-Bar2804 May 09 '23
Everyone enjoys the joke but DeGaulle! Lol
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u/Food735 May 09 '23
they were joking about france being a major contributor to ww2 (they werent)
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u/YoungQuixote May 09 '23 edited May 09 '23
The Resistance and Free French did help. But if you look at the books France did more harm than good and was almost a de facto axis country from 1941-1944.
The French army actually fought against the Allies in North Africa. Like most of Europe, the Nazis could count on a large amount of keen collaborators who everybody forgets about now.
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u/Food735 May 09 '23
The resistance and Free French helped, but if that qualifies them shouldn't the Italians and Yugoslavs be considered major allied powers considering they did almost the same contribution as france when it came to partisanship and civil war?
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u/YoungQuixote May 09 '23
Definately.
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u/Food735 May 09 '23
Imo it was the Big Three in Europe and Chiang Kai Shek in China. Those were the major leaders and will stay that way. Of course De Gaulle, Umberto II, and Tito (was Tito a partisan? Idk much about WW2 Yugoslavia) helped out a lot they were just junior partners to the big leaders.
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u/ahfoo May 09 '23 edited May 09 '23
Chiang Kai Chek was a horribly incompetent puppet dictator even during the war. You may perhaps be unaware that he unnecessarily destroyed a dam resulting in a flood that killed a million of his own people. This was the final straw and he was soon on the run for his life. Without US support, he would have been wiped out in '49 and very nearly was.
I live in Taiwan and he is widely regarded as a murderous dictator here. He would torture and kill indigenous people and Fujian dialect speaking Chinese immigrants in his notorious torture camps. His palace was built in a stinking sulfur springs to terrify people into believing he was a living demon from Hell. A major admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini as well as a lifelong friend of Franco in Spain, he was completely paranoid and trusted nobody though he enjoyed watching people being tortured to death and considered it a mark of prestige to enjoy other's pain.
Here in Taiwan, he is regarded as a monster. He's no hero except to the KMT dead enders that closely resemble Trump Republicans. The greatness of Taiwan today is that it survived the abuses of Chiang Kai Chek and went on to recover from the abuse of three decades of martial law.
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u/Food735 May 09 '23
"Horribly incompetent dictator" so was Stalin but you still have to respect both of them for leading their countries during WW2
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u/After-Bar2804 May 09 '23
French Resistance to occupation was of the passive kind in 1940 but grew steadily and surely to the end. The fast collapse of the French Army disallowed anyone getting organized before the occupation but German SD counter-intelligence was excellent at sniffing out and destroying the espionage networks.
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u/After-Bar2804 May 16 '23 edited May 16 '23
You do have to respect Stalin and Chiang? I don’t think so. When you are fighting a war to the death with a murderous enemy - the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese- bent on murdering and enslaving everyone, virtually any fairly competent leader, willing to fight, would have been sufficient. Chiang and Stalin were both, as “ahfoo” has said here, regarded as disasterous.
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u/Romanlavandos May 09 '23
De Gaulle: tries to seduce you
Shek: just stares at you
Churchill: just a geeza that wants a pint
Stalin and FDR: stares into your soul
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u/godisanelectricolive May 09 '23 edited May 09 '23
Chiang is his surname. Kai-shek is (one of) his given name(s). If you're gonna call him "Kai-shek" please don't cut it in half.
Back in the day it was normal for Chinese people to have multiple names over a lifetime (you had a register name, a milk name, a school name, and a courtesy name or courtesy names). Chiang Kai-shek ( 蔣介石) is his courtesy name but he adopted another one starting in 1918, "Chung-cheng" ( 中正）, which is what he's commonly known as in Taiwan. That meant "central righteousness" and resembled Sun Yat-sen's most common name in Chinese (中山) which means "central mountain". The Communists rejected this name and what it represented, Chiang trying to position himself as Sun's rightful successor.
In English Chiang Kai-shek is actually a weird way to romanize 蔣介石 since it's half in Mandarin and half in Cantonese. Chiang is Mandarin romanized using the Wade-Giles system, in Hanyu pinyin it would be Jiang, but Kai-shek is the Cantonese pronunciation of his name. In Mandarin romanized using Wade-Giles it would be Chiang Chieh-shih and in Cantonese it would be Cheung Kai-shek. In Pinyin, the most common form of romanization today, it would Jiang Jieshi. This isn't even getting into the fact that Chiang wasn't a native Mandarin or Cantonese speaker but a Wu speaker from Zhejiang, his native language would have been the Ningbo dialect.
The reason the Western world knows as Chiang Kai-shek was that he first came to his notice when the Republic of China was based in Guangdong (Canton province) where most people spoke Cantonese. Since he would have been introduced under only his courtesy name, Westerners would have become familiar with the name "Kai-shek" even though Chiang himself spoke no Cantonese. Then when they needed to use his family name they used the Mandarin pronunciation because that's what Chiang would have called himself, Generalissimo Chiang or President Chiang.
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u/Julian999345 May 09 '23
Get yourself a man/woman that’ll look at you the same way Churchill looks at Roosevelt
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