US propaganda posters from World War II at the National Maritime Museum

NO one would doubt the sincerity of the artists who made the works in the propaganda exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

A warning against idle chatter by Fred Siebel (1942). From the exhibition Persuasion: US Propaganda Posters from WWII, Austra...

THE word propaganda had relatively benign origins as part of the title of a bureau of the Catholic Church established in the early 17th century and concerned with the spreading of the faith through overseas missionary activity. The Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide - the Latin gerundive implying the obligation to spread the faith - is still, under a new name, housed in the same palace built by Borromini and set discreetly off Rome's Piazza di Spagna.

Today, in the wake of 20th-century totalitarianism and even the techniques of mass persuasion employed by governments of democracies, the term has acquired entirely negative connotations. To say something is now or was in the past an instance of propaganda is to dismiss it as manipulation and imposture. And yet we are chronically confused about what constitutes propaganda; many things are wrongly counted as propaganda, while much propaganda all around us is overlooked and thus assimilated uncritically.

What is propaganda in the modern world? On the face of it, it is any technique of mass persuasion, but that is not by itself an adequate definition. Crucially, it is also the attempt to persuade its audience of ideas that those who control the means of persuasion may or may not share, but undoubtedly do not share in the simplistic form in which they are presented.

Thus we often hear religious imagery described by those hostile to the church as propaganda, but that is not necessarily true. The gothic cathedrals, for example, are not propaganda, for although they attract the faithful, those who commissioned, designed and built the cathedrals were if anything more passionate believers than the congregations who would fill them. It is the reverse of the state of affairs that we can encounter from the Enlightenment, when an educated ruling class that may have a qualified view of the truth of traditional religious doctrine nonetheless builds churches for the uneducated masses, to satisfy their simple faith and maintain traditions that contribute to social order.

In the same way, it is not propaganda when a political leader convinces the people of a belief he holds - like Churchill during the war, speaking for as well as to the British people - but it is when he tries to make them adopt a belief he either does not hold or knows to be false, on the grounds this will serve some greater good. And even when the authors of the message believe in what they are saying to its audience, the matter is not always so clear in practice. A message can still be considered propaganda if it presents its case selectively, fails to disclose the truth, or deliberately sets out to manipulate the feelings of the audience.

This is why the works in the small but interesting exhibition of American wartime propaganda posters at the Australian National Maritime Museum are undoubtedly propaganda images, even though no one would doubt the sincerity and patriotic intent of the artists who made them. Very deliberately, and with skills developed in the advertising industry, they appeal to different groups and offer people different ways to think about their contribution to the war effort.

America entered World War II, after a period of helping Britain more or less unofficially, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The first poster at the opening of the exhibition, accordingly, has a figure shaking his fist in a threatening gesture, with the words "Avenge December 7". Without the need for explicit commentary, we can't help seeing in this work a prefiguration of American sentiment after the similarly unannounced and treacherous attacks on its soil on September 11, 2001.

A second poster with the title Remember December 7, looks back into American history to evoke a quieter sense of determination. The image shows a tattered Stars and Stripes flapping in the wind; any American would recall it was in September 1814, when the sun rose over the ruins of Fort McHenry reduced to rubble by British naval shelling, that Francis Scott Key saw the ragged standard flying, and composed the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.

At the outset of the war, America's armed forces were relatively few, so the immediate priority was recruitment. Such posters were intended to stir national pride and memory as well as resentment, but many were directly addressed to young men who were invited to join the armed forces; here, not surprisingly, naval posters predominate, and all the young sailors are unfailingly tall, slim and handsome in an American comic-book, square-jawed kind of way. They look straight out, making eye-contact with the viewer.

The logic of such images is double. On the one hand they challenge their intended audience of young men who may feel insignificant and inadequate when fixed by the gaze of these virile, handsome, heroic figures. On the other hand, they offer an immediate panacea for such feelings of inadequacy: join the navy and you too can be a fine, heroic young man like him. The real manipulation is of the viewer's imagination, making it easier for him to imagine the two alternative scenarios of humiliation and pride.

Posters addressed to young women urge them either to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps or the nursing corps, or to go to work in the factories replacing male workers. A recruiting poster for the WAACs presents an idealised young woman officer profiled against the silhouette of Athena in her warrior's helmet, but still more interesting are two for the nursing corps, both incidentally among the only posters based on photographs.

In the first, a beautiful young woman looks up at us, radiant with silent beatitude, while the hands of Uncle Sam himself are seen placing her nurse's white headdress on her head like a crown or a wreath. In the other, in spite of a serious inscription about the need for nurses in theatres of war, we are shown another beautiful girl in a rather too intimate tete-a-tete with a handsome young soldier, bedridden but otherwise unscathed. Here the implication seems to be that the nursing service may well be a path to romance and a husband; what is studiously ignored - and what makes this an example of the falseness of propaganda - is any acknowledgment of blood, wounds and death. The most complex instance of manipulation is in a large horizontal-format poster with three figures, titled "I'm proud of you folks too!". On the left is a young sailor reaching out with both hands to shake that of an older man, a machinist, while between them is a young female worker, smiling in admiration at the sailor.

Evidently we are to take the young man's words as a reply to the older man's declaration that they are proud of him. The poster is thus not only a positive image of the idealised young serviceman, but above all is addressed to men like the older worker - just too old for active service - and allows such men to feel their contribution is highly valued by the most admired figures in society at the time. The look of almost pathetic gratitude on the worker's face shows the skill with which the makers of these images synthesise expression in a kitsch but effective manner.

Another set of images is designed to sell war bonds; these are less likely to focus on individual figures making eye contact with the viewer and tend, rather, to evoke scenes of warfare, emphasising the excitement, danger and drama of battle. Here there is no attempt, as in the recruiting posters, to make you feel that you may be failing in your duty, but rather the suggestion that by purchasing the bonds you can become part of the struggle.

Others urge us to keep quiet about military information. A young man lying dead on a beach helps us imagine graphically what the consequences of our idle chatter may be, and even more dramatically, in another poster a drowning sailor points an accusing finger at the viewer: "Someone talked!"

Another set of posters does not seem to address so specific an audience or have so precise a message. In one, the close-up face of a sailor - designed to be rather more realistic and working-class than the idealised features of the boys in the recruitment posters - looks out at us while pointing back at a group of his colleagues painting another Japanese flag on a gun-turret, and declares, "couldn't have done it without you". The fine print at the bottom of the poster says "Official Navy Poster, Industrial Incentives Division", so we can infer the intended audience is composed of workers in munitions factories and shipyards.

The same office produced another striking image in which a young searchlight operator looks out at us and asks, "Can I tell 'em you're still with us?" The year is 1945 and the tide of war has turned; the slogan at the bottom of the poster reads "Next stop Tokyo - let's go!" The poster is clearly designed to urge war workers not to slacken their effort, weary as they may be after several years of wartime production. As always, carrot and stick are combined: we want this young man to be our friend, but we feel he could turn that searchlight on us if we fail to live up to our duty.

These techniques of persuasion, born from advertising, are still pervasive in that industry, and the exhibition among other things is an opportunity to ponder the forms they take in today's media environment. Advertising still plays on the simultaneous stimulation of anxiety and offer of a panacea; and it still operates on the manipulation of imagination and the creation of associations in the viewer's mind. Thus a hamburger chain this summer had a television campaign in which pretty girls ogled the slim and tanned torsos of youths consuming burgers and thickshakes. A glance at the unfortunate clientele of these fast food establishments, of course, reveals a spectacle as different as the reality of wartime hospitals was from the smiling and sanitised posters for the recruitment of nurses.

Persuasion: US Propaganda Posters from WWII, Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, to March 20