The Art of Protest

Online Chapter: Peace Symbols: Posters in Movements against the Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

Post(er) War Views

In the twenty-first century, posters are more important than ever to antiwar/peace movements. They also, however, face more difficult obstacles than ever in getting their messages across. And both the importance and the difficulties stem from the same source: the increasingly media-saturated, image-and-sound-bite culture in the United States and around much of the globe. The visual power and sound-bite-sized written texts of posters mean they are well-suited to this mass-mediated environment. But the intensive and extensive proliferation of images and sound bites via advertising, television, and the Internet has created a field where antiwar posters face massive amounts of competition in their battle to win the attention, let alone the hearts and minds, of the public.

The peace movement directed against the war in Vietnam began when the number of television networks could be counted on one hand. The first televised presidential debates—Kennedy versus Nixon—occurred only a few years before the movement began, and Vietnam itself was the first war watched on television in homes. That meant that the rules of coverage of both the war and the antiwar movement had not yet been fully set.15

By contrast, by the time of the war in Iraq, five hundred television channels, plus billions of Internet sites, were available. This plethora of information, however, needs to be set against growing sophistication of presidential administrations in “handling” the media and directing their own war show. The invention of “embedded” reporters during the Iraq invasion is only the most obvious of many efforts to shape what was and was not reported during the war. Embeddedness gave the illusion of direct coverage but was designed, and for the most part served, to bring show viewers to see only one side of the conflict. Virtually all images of enemy casualties, especially civilians killed by so-called collateral damage, were omitted in order to emphasize the humanity of U.S. forces while keeping the enemy abstract and distanced.

In such a context, posters played a crucial role in trying to bring the face of Iraqis into focus, as, for example, in Figures 37 and 40. These counterimages and sound bites are essential in the face of the omissions in administration and mainstream press images and sound bites. The differences in eras and in wars are apparent also in the far greater number of parodies and media-related posters in the contemporary period. While as noted at the beginning, movie poster parodies and parody ads occurred in both periods, they are much more prevalent in the Iraq war era. This is clearly a response to the more intense media environment and the need to critique other media sources in order to get antiwar messages across. As the first televised war, Vietnam was a far more directly real experience than was the war in Iraq, coming as the latter did in the era of deeply unreal “reality television” and of audiences saturated with various kinds of mass-mediated violence—not only television and movies, but also video and computer games and the World Wide Web.

But if this twenty-first-century environment presents peace movements with a tough space in which to get their messages across, it also presents far more venues for post(er)ing messages than ever before. The speed with which words and images can be spread through a host of communication outlets around the globe helps account for the much more rapid growth of the Iraq antiwar movement. While contemporary activists are deeply frustrated that they were unable to head off the invasion and have as yet been unable to end the occupation, comparison with the Vietnam War era is illuminating in this regard as well. This is all the more remarkable given that the situation in Iraq in many ways contains more ambiguities than did the war in Indochina. Most important, the initial enemy, Saddam Hussain, was an utterly irredeemable figure far different from the nationalist hero of Vietnam, Ho Chih Minh. Similarly, the forces arrayed against the United States were far more united in Vietnam than in Iraq. While almost no one, apart from a view businessmen and politicians who stand to gain directly from U.S. influence in Iraq, wants the occupation forces to remain there, the reasons for desiring an American departure are far more complicated. While at bottom a general Iraq nationalism and sense of pride in independence and tradition is a predominant sentiment, vast religious, ethnic, and ideological differences about the meaning of the insurgency complicate the Iraqi terrain. Still, all the rest of the world apart from Israel, and as of 2005 including most U.S. citizens, see American presence there as a mistake.16

To begin with, a massive antiwar movement arising before the first bombs were dropped and shots were fired is an extraordinary thing. It took more than six years into the Vietnam conflict before the majority U.S. public opinion turned against the war, but that majority viewpoint was achieved less than two years into the Iraq conflict. Clearly, posters and other mediated messages did find a way through the fog of pro-war sound bites, despite an image war waged far more effectively by administration public relations managers. This is cold comfort to the dead and dying, but it is also cause for hope. In Vietnam, close to 50,000 U.S. soldiers had died before most Americans saw the futility of the war, as opposed to 1,500 deaths by the time majority opinion turned against the Iraq occupation.

At the same time, casualty figures for Vietnam show an ominous parallel that provides a note of caution. By 1965, roughly two years into the Vietnam War, about 1,800 U.S. soldiers had died. In the following year, casualties tripled, then doubled again the next year, then returned to the previous level, accounting for the bulk of the 58,000 Americans killed. Two years into the war in Iraq, U.S. casualties stood at about 1,700. That suggests a parallel no one can wish to follow. Whether it is followed will depend in good large part on how well peace forces succeed in posting their messages and rallying their growing constituencies.

15 Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), offers a good survey of war coverage. The classic treatment of media coverage of the social movements of the sixties is Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 [1980]).

16 Polling data from a variety of major sources as of May 2005 include the following: 64 percent “disapprove” of Bush’s handling of the occupation; 51 percent say the war was a “mistake”; 57 percent say it was “not worth going to war”; 50 percent believe the Bush administration “deliberately misled” the country into war via the false issue of “weapons of mass destruction”; and only 6 percent think the war was “going well” as of that date. See pollingreport.com; visited May 31, 2005.

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