"6 million. Dear God, not again.": a 1968 New York appeal for Biafra

6 million: "Dear God, not again." is a 1968 advertisement by the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, a private New York group. Over a photograph of eight starving Biafran children, it calls Nigeria's war a genocide, compares it to the murder of six million Jews, and asks Americans to write to Congress and send money.

What it prints

Content note: the photograph shows emaciated, naked children, and the text compares their situation to the Holocaust.

The archive describes a black-and-white sheet. The number "6 million" heads it, over a photograph of eight starving Biafran children. Below, in two columns, the text makes its case and its request.

6 million

Dear God, not again.

Does this scene look familiar? It should. It was only twenty-five years ago that similar scenes scarred the face of Europe, while nations turned their heads and said they did not know. You don't have that excuse.

Today Nigeria is engaged in the genocide of eight million Biafrans, calling it an "internal problem" and a "political solution." [...]

The world stood silent while 6,000,000 Jews died. Are you going to stand by now?

[...] Write your senators and congressmen and insist on an immediate cease-fire and send contributions now to the American Committee To Keep Biafra Alive,Inc.

Who paid for it

The sponsor is named on the sheet: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, Inc., with an address at the Hotel Hudson on Broadway in New York and a telephone number. The archive codes it as an NGO advertisement for a domestic audience, with the purpose of fundraising, under the event "Nigerian Civil War," and as openly sourced. The image comes from Wikimedia Commons, retrieved 2 October 2026, with a PD-US no-notice tag. The record dates it about 1968 and gives no publication or print run.

How to read it

FRAME tags fear appeal and transfer. The children carry the fear; the headline number carries the transfer, borrowing the moral weight of the Holocaust for a different war. That comparison is the ad's strongest move and its most debatable one. The text also makes factual claims, including the charge of genocide and a claim about Russian MiGs flown by Egyptian pilots, which the record does not test and this page does not repeat as fact.

The form, though, is the one a free country is supposed to have. A private committee, under its own name, asks citizens to write to their own representatives and to give money if they choose. Nobody is ordered to do anything. Compare government sheets of the same decade that spoke abroad without a signature, such as the USIA's Santo Domingo poster. Private appeals on another war from the same year are on the Vietnam War messaging hub, among them Liberated by the Viet Cong.