A USIA poster for Saigon on the Viet Minh and the highland peoples

A Vietnamese-language U.S. Information Agency poster in National Archives Record Group 306 (NAID 6948899) shows a Viet Minh soldier whipping a chained highlander and labels the scene the Communists' policy of loving the highland compatriots.

What the sheet prints

A soldier in a helmet with a star badge, rifle slung across his back, drives a bare-chested man in chains past a hut in flames. The soldier is grimacing and holds a whip. The captive is drawn as a member of one of the upland peoples. Five short lines of Vietnamese supply the caption.

ĐÂY

CHÍNH-SÁCH YÊU

ĐỒNG-BÀO-THƯỢNG

của

VIỆT-MINH CỘNG-SẢN

Issuer and date

The National Archives files the poster in Record Group 306 among the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (series NAID 5051202, item NAID 6948899, 306-PPB-76). The title the archive gives it says it was distributed in Saigon. February 14, 1976 is the catalog date. The record does not say when the sheet was printed or put up. Nothing on the poster names the United States, so a reader could not tell from the sheet alone who made it.

How to read it

The trick is in the word "policy." The caption announces a policy of love toward the highlanders, and the picture shows the opposite. The sarcasm does the work. FRAME files it under name-calling and fear appeal: the enemy is reduced to one brutal soldier, and the reader is invited to picture the same treatment coming to his own village.

A charge of abuse against an armed movement can be true or false. The poster offers no place, date, or witness, so it cannot be checked from the sheet. That is the weakness of the form, and it would be the same weakness if the sides were reversed.

For a citizen of the country that paid for it, the harder point is the missing signature. A government may speak abroad. When it speaks without its name, its own voters have a harder time knowing what is said on their behalf. Compare Frontiers of Research, a gentler sheet from the same RG 306 series, which also prints no agency name.