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).

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).

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.