We want you : a rhetorical analysis of propaganda from government posters to political memes

Abstract

By pairing images with slogans to develop persuasive posters, the US government effectively won over the public's support during WWI and WWII. Propaganda was effective because citizens were unaware of the existence of tactics that could persuade them without their knowledge. Recently, the public has begun to use the very same propaganda tactic to disseminate their own thoughts and ideas through a communication method known as political memes. Like war posters, political memes also pair emotion-evoking images with catchy slogans to persuade the viewer to see a situation, issue or an individual in a way the author desires. Memes are becoming an established form of communication and began making headlines for their possible impact on voters' opinions in the 2012 US presidential election. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the rhetorical devices that wartime posters and political memes use and determine why those devices are effective. The other main purpose is to examine the period between 1919 and the present to determine how the shift in propaganda usage took place, going from a government-used tactic to one used by the public to effectively disseminate ideas on a mass scale.