# Where there are communists there is terror: a vulture poster for Saigon, 1954

A Vietnamese-language colour poster distributed in Saigon, catalog date 15 September 1954, in the U.S. Information Agency file. A vulture wearing a green cap with a red star stands over a skull in a pool of blood, under the line "Đâu có CỘNG-SẢN là có KHỦNG-BỐ, ÁM-SÁT" (NAID 6948996).

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- Where there are communists there is terror: a vulture poster for Saigon, 1954

      Communism Means Terrorism, Vietnamese (poster distributed in Saigon)

      Where there are communists there is terror: a vulture poster for Saigon, 1954
      A 1954 USIA poster for Saigon draws communists as a vulture over a skull: "Where there is Communism there is terror and assassination." NAID 6948996.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Fear appealName-calling
      DateSeptember 15, 1954Made byU.S. Information Agency, Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East seriesMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeEisenhower AdministrationNARANAID 6948996; Record Group 306SourceUnidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosureSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), RG 306, Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America, Middle East , retrieved October 4, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work; NARA RG 306) U.S. Information Agency / Department of State, September 15, 1954. National Archives, Record Group 306 (NAID 6948996, 306-PPB-124).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  A Vietnamese-language colour poster distributed in Saigon, catalog date 15 September 1954, in the U.S. Information Agency file. A vulture wearing a green cap with a red star stands over a skull in a pool of blood, under the line "Đâu có CỘNG-SẢN là có KHỦNG-BỐ, ÁM-SÁT" (NAID 6948996).

## Vulture and skull

Content note: the poster shows a skull in blood, described here as the archive records it.

The central figure is a carrion bird. It wears a green cap with a red star and stands over a human skull lying in a pool of blood. A hammer and sickle is printed on a splash of blood. The text is one sentence broken over three lines, with the key nouns set in capitals.

Đâu có CỘNG-SẢN

là có

KHỦNG-BỐ, ÁM-SÁT

[English, as given by the archive:] Where there is Communism there is terror and assassination.

Transcription and translation in the FRAME record. The archive notes that the first word is printed "Dâu có" and reads it as "Đâu có," and labels the English a machine translation not verified by a fluent reader. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NAID 6948996, local id 306-PPB-124.

## The file entry

FRAME credits the U.S. Information Agency and its series of posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The National Archives holds the sheet in Record Group 306 with a catalog date of 15 September 1954. As transcribed, the poster has no imprint, and the archive classes its source as blurred. The purpose field reads "Demonize," and the themes are war and the military and security and surveillance.

## A bird for a party

FRAME tags fear appeal and name-calling, and the poster leans hard on both. Communists become a vulture, and the vulture is placed over a death the poster does not identify. No victim is named, no town, no date. The sentence is a rule, stated as a law of nature: wherever one, always the other.

A poster could have named a killing, a place and a date. This one does not try. It reduces an entire movement to a scavenger and asks the reader to recoil, and it tells him nothing he can verify. The cost of that method is that it works just as well against any group a government decides to paint with the same brush. A free society keeps its sharpest words for acts it can prove.

The catalog date falls within weeks of two sheets in the same file about moving south. Come South, catalog date 5 August, split the country on a map, and Operation Freedom poster No. 2, catalog date 22 September, showed people leaving Hanoi. The Vietnam War messaging hub follows the official sheets from 1954, and the U.S. Information Agency hub describes the program behind them.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, Communism Means Terrorism, Vietnamese (poster distributed in Saigon), catalog date 15 September 1954. U.S. Information Agency, Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East series.

- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 306, NAID 6948996 (306-PPB-124), retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/communism-means-terrorism-vietnamese-1954/