The Best Propaganda Ever

Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" is sometimes ranked as the most effective propaganda film of all time, although she claimed that it was simply an "art film."

The latest email bulletin from the USC Center on Public Diplomacy [1] called our attention to a list that someone has compiled of the "Top 10 Propaganda Videos [2]." Viewing the list in chronological order is like taking a trip through the social obsessions of yesteryear: a clip from Leni Riefenstahl [3]'s 1935 pro-Nazi film, "Triumph of the Will"; a 1943 anti-Nazi cartoon by The Walt Disney Company [4], and a pro-tax film from the same year featuring Donald Duck; a Communist propaganda film from Moscow in the 1940s; American anti-Communist and anti-homosexual films from the 1950s; anti-porn and anti-LSD films from the 1960s; an anti-software piracy film from the 1990s; and a recent anti-American film that denounces the war in Iraq and the Project for the New American Century [5].