American Barbarians to Judgment!

Communist catalclysmic strategies in “top form” — a menacing, aggressive and perfidious accusation of the Western enemy, rendered by the Czech graphic artist, caricaturist and painter Lev Haas (1901–1983). The criminals in this case are the USA, which according to pro-Soviet propaganda in the early 1950s had committed an exceptionally vicious attack with biological weapons. It was alleged that American planes had scattered insects contaminated with the most virulent infectious diseases over North Korea and China.

The hullabaloo this hoax created (principally) in the eastern bloc generated agitation on various levels — from media campaigns to the incitement of mass indignation, resulting for example in commitments by the working people, who expressed “their outrage at the criminal use of biological weapons by the American imperialists” by making a commitment of honour, unpaid and outside of normal working time, to produce injection needles, syringes and other health materials for their Chinese and North Korean friends.

The story of Lev Haas fits precisely, like a diamond in a jewel box, into these “paranormal” Stalinist times. During the Second World War, as a Jew he made the frightful journey from the Terezin ghetto (there, incidentally, they accused him of spreading horror propaganda for sketches he had made from real life), through Auschwitz, where he was a sketch artist for Dr. Mengele, to “engagement” in command of a forgery unit in Sachsenhausen.

Despite all this, or precisely because of it (?), he quickly became a believer in communism, and his impressive sketches, caricatures and illustrations became an effective hammer of propaganda in the early exploitation of monopoly power. But the hoary old truth that revolution devours its children soon caught up with Haas. Antisemitic passions inspired by the trial of Rudolf Slanský in 1952 made his position as one of the regime’s prominent artists dangerously unstable. In 1955 he definitively left Czechoslovakia.

Viera Kleinová ● “Seven Things About…” propaganda in the Collection of Posters and Graphic Design (medium.com)