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).

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.

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.