# Totalitarianism Is Your Enemy: a pointing villager on a 1954 Rangoon poster

A Burmese-language color poster distributed in Rangoon, PO-230-B, filed with U.S. Information Agency posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 19 February 1954. An older man in a head-cloth points straight at the viewer under two lines of red lettering (NAID 6949110).

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      Totalitarianism Is Your Enemy, PO-230-B (Burmese poster distributed in Rangoon)

      Totalitarianism Is Your Enemy: a pointing villager on a 1954 Rangoon poster
      PO-230-B, a 1954 Burmese poster from Rangoon: an older man points at the viewer under red lettering NARA titles "Totalitarianism Is Your Enemy." NAID

## Techniques named on the archive record

Name-callingPlain folks
      DateFebruary 19, 1954Made byU.S. Information Agency (predecessor: State Dept. IIE Program), Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East seriesMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeEisenhower AdministrationNARANAID 6949110; Record Group 306SourceUnidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosureSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), Record Group 306, Posters 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, February 19, 1954. National Archives, Record Group 306 (NAID 6949110, 306-PPB-202).
      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 Burmese-language color poster distributed in Rangoon, PO-230-B, filed with U.S. Information Agency posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 19 February 1954. An older man in a head-cloth points straight at the viewer under two lines of red lettering (NAID 6949110).

## What the sheet shows

One figure on a blue ground. An older man in a head-cloth, a white jacket and a striped longyi stands with his arm and finger pointed straight at whoever is looking. Two lines of red Burmese lettering run across his body. As transcribed, that lettering is the whole text.

အာဏာရှင်စနစ်သည် သင့်ရန်သူ

[Archive's English reading:] Totalitarianism [dictatorship] is your enemy (matched to NARA's English title).

Transcription and reading in the FRAME record. The archive marks the translation as a machine translation by Claude, not verified by a fluent reader, and says the reading of the stylized script is approximate and aligned to NARA's title. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NAID 6949110, local id 306-PPB-202.

## A title supplied by NARA

The English title comes from the National Archives, not from the sheet. NARA files the poster in Record Group 306, with the U.S. Information Agency's posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, under a catalog date of 19 February 1954; the archive's title carries the number PO-230-B. The creator field lists the agency and the State Department program that preceded it. The sheet itself, as transcribed, names no sender, and FRAME classes the source as blurred.

## A label in place of an argument

FRAME gives two tags. Name-calling: "totalitarianism" is an enemy label, and the poster does not say what it means or whom it points at. Plain folks: the figure is an ordinary villager, and he addresses the viewer directly. The archive files the theme as elections and party politics.

The message is one a free people can agree with. A system that claims the whole of a person's life is an enemy of liberty wherever it appears. The problem is the form. A word with no definition, delivered by a pointing finger, invites the reader to apply it to whoever is already disliked. A poster that names no party, no act and no sender asks for trust without giving the reader much to check.

An earlier sheet for Burma in the State Department's files did the opposite. We Want / We Do Not Want listed the freedoms of speech, writing, organizing and worship on one side, and the life of a gagged, blindfolded man on the other. That is an argument; this sheet is a label. The USIA posters abroad hub and its poster gallery hold the wider program.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, Totalitarianism Is Your Enemy, PO-230-B (Burmese poster distributed in Rangoon). Catalog date February 19, 1954.

- U.S. National Archives, Record Group 306, Posters in Asia, Latin America, Middle East, item NAID 6949110, 306-PPB-202, catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive October 4, 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/totalitarianism-is-your-enemy-po-230-b-burmese-rangoon-1954/