In other words, visual images were sufficiently powerful to get 110,000 of us killed in someone else's war while handing victory to the Entente. Such images were also instrumental in starting the Spanish-American War, thus allowing Hearst and Pulitzer to sell more newspapers.

Omdurman.org has an extensive tutorial on military-grade propaganda and its history.

Key Principles of Propaganda

1. The human brain is designed to process images, not words.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" sounds trite, but it is accurate. Words are an artificial communication medium: symbols with meanings attached to them. The brain must decipher the words of an editorial or a speech, and convert them into images. Shakespeare had a lasting influence on the English language because of his talent for painting a picture with words.

Application to antismoking campaigns: Compare the statement, "Cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide and, if you are a pregnant woman, gets into your baby's bloodstream," and a picture of a baby smoking a cigarette.

2. Political cartoons are among the most effective means of communication.

The Yellow Press (Hearst and Pulitzer) used them to start the Spanish-American War (1898). No one ever proved that Spain blew up the battleship Maine, but the press published a cartoon of a semihuman ape wearing a Spanish uniform and holding a bloody knife.

Pro-English cartoonists used political cartoons to promote hatred of Germany, and to get the United States into the First World War. Germany failed to use similar methods to counteract this propaganda, which played a major role in losing the war. Hitler and Goebbels were, unfortunately, two Germans who took this lesson to heart.
In summary, effective cartoons (they sound so innocent, don't they?) have started wars, killed people, and changed history.

3. Joseph Goebbels was, unfortunately, right. Arguments that will not persuade (and may even alienate) an educated person are often effective in persuading the masses.

Pro-gun control cartoons often feature a stereotyped, beer-swilling, pickup truck-driving, grossly overweight, and uneducated "NRA Member" as a symbol of gun rights advocates. Go back forty years and replace him with a Negro with exaggerated lips and bestial features- or sixty years, and replace him with a Jew with an exaggerated nose and other Semitic features. The principle is the same, and the NRA's failure to use the same methods against its detractors is a serious omission.

If you tell a lie long enough and effectively enough, you can get the masses to believe it. For example, the Virginia Slims Tennis Tournament suggests to impressionable children and teenagers that tennis players actually smoke. Athletes have known for decades that "smoking cuts your wind." The tobacco propaganda machine is like the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984. If you work at it, you can convince the proles (proletariat) that war is peace, slavery is freedom, black is white, and two and two make five. Therefore, if you are going to tell the truth (and I do not advocate doing otherwise), you had better use the same methods or the Goebbels and Hitlers of the world will swamp you.

Grant Hamilton's The Spanish Brute shows us how it is done. The enemy is depicted as a bestial subhuman with whom reason and negotiation is clearly impossible. "Destroy This Mad Brute" was perhaps a modification of "The Spanish Brute" and it adds a second basic element of hate propaganda: the bestial enemy is depicted as abusing a helpless prisoner, preferably a woman or a child.

The following cartoon (you are free to COPY it to your Web site or blog but not to link it, as linking uses my bandwidth) is therefore the third of the series begun by "The Spanish Brute" and "Destroy This Mad Brute."

The following is payback (truth for falsehood and with compound interest) for the Islamofascists' "Crucified Palestine," in which hook-nosed Jews congregate around a cross on which a woman labeled "Palestine" has been crucified. "Crucified Palestine" combines the elements of (1) an enemy with exaggerated ethnic features (2) abusing a helpless prisoner, preferably a woman or child, and (3) "Jews are Christ Killers." Since Islamofascists and not Jews are killing Christians right and left, they will soon wish they had never gone near the "Christ Killer" concept.

Payback, truth for falsehood and with compound interest

This one combines the basic elements of a bestial enemy torturing or killing a female captive with "heroic image" propaganda that suggests what ought to be done with it.

Time for a CRUSADE?

This one depicts Palestine as a rabid dog (terrorism) that is menacing a little girl. Again, the enemy is depicted as a totally irrational subhuman whose behavior cannot even be modified by punishment, in the act of menacing women and children. (This one is another version, in which the rabid dog has bitten the girl's arm off and severed a man's head with a suicide bomb.)

Anyway, Ted asked for the most vicious possible cartoons in response to the upcoming Iranian Holocaust denial cartoons. This one relates to Palestinians but the Iranians can be treated similarly:

More public domain cartoons are available here. They are expressly designed to propagate as people copy them to Web sites and blogs. "To be effective, leaflets must scatter. Bundles of paper which fall intact make little impact on the enemy [or prospective audience, the general public in this case] unless they hit him on the head." (Linebarger, Psychological Warfare)