Red Star Over Asia (PO-24-E) is an English poster filed with U.S. Information Agency posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 3 October 1951. A uniformed brute with a hammer-and-sickle armband kneels on a bleeding man; two columns set "Slave World Facts" against "Free World Facts" (NAID 6949070).
The picture and the two columns
Content note: the drawing shows a man bleeding under an attacker.
A caricatured figure in uniform, a hammer and sickle on his armband, kneels on a bleeding man and lifts a red star dripping blood as if it were a knife. Two panels flank him. The left column lists what the poster calls slave-world facts, the right column free-world facts, and a banner sums up.
Since World War II the Red Imperialists have added more than 2,166,009 square miles of Asian territory to the Soviet Slave Empire. At the same time the Free World has given full independence to 3,074,551 square miles of Asian territory!
This is not idle talk! These are facts!
The Free World has nothing to hide! These are facts!
COMMUNISTS SEEK MORE SLAVES!
Who issued it
The poster carries a series number, PO-24-E, and no American name. The National Archives files it in Record Group 306 with the posters the U.S. Information Agency distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East; the maker line gives the State Department's International Information and Educational Exchange Program as the agency's predecessor. FRAME classes the source as blurred.
How to read it
FRAME tags fear appeal, name-calling, card stacking, and glittering generalities. All four are on the surface. The drawing makes the enemy a beast. The columns are a ledger in which one side has only debits. The free-world column is a list of beliefs ("all nations are equal," "peace and prosperity for all"), which are hard to check and easy to print.
The figures to the square mile are the sheet's bid for credibility, and they are offered with no source. This page does not test them, and neither does the archive. A reader in 1951 had the same problem: the poster says twice that it is giving facts, and once that its side has nothing to hide, while not saying whose poster it is. A government confident in its numbers could have signed them.
Sheets from the same file in the same year, The World's Largest Prison and a Burmese list of liberties, use the same two-world frame for other audiences.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Red Star Over Asia PO-24-E (English poster distributed in Manila), catalog date 3 October 1951.
- U.S. National Archives, Record Group 306, Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and Middle East, NAID 6949070 (306-PPB-169), catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
