Political and Propaganda Stamps
While it is common to find patriotic sentiments on official stamps, the term propaganda stamp is usually used to mean unofficial stamps produced to promote a particular ideology, or to create confusion within an enemy state. Stamps with encouraging slogans have been attached to letters for prisoners of war, or troops serving aboad.
Sometimes stamps are issued by breakaway governments, governments in exile or micronations in order to give themselves greater legitimacy; however, these stamps usually have no postal validity and are therefore cinderella items. The Indian National Army (Azad Hind) produced ten stamps as part of their campaign.
From 1951 to 1966, UNESCO issued a series of 41 "gift stamps." Considered to be cinderellas, they were produced to raise money for the organization. The series is unusual in being an international cooperative effort. Most are readily available from specialized dealers.
Illustrator and anarchist Clifford Harper, whose family had an occupational history in the postal service, designed stamps "for post-revolutionary post" bearing the image of anarchist figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ("property is theft"), Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Emiliano Zapata. Colin Ward, along with Harper, published a book in 1997 called Stamps: Designs For Anarchist Postage Stamps, containing an essay by Ward on the subject of anarchists and postage stamps. Fund-raising stamps with anti-state messages have appeared within labor unions such as the ones printed by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
Read more about this topic: Cinderella Stamp
Famous quotes containing the words political, propaganda and/or stamps:
“Men conceive themselves as morally superior to those with whom they differ in opinion. A Socialist who thinks that the opinions of Mr. Gladstone on Socialism are unsound and his own sound, is within his rights; but a Socialist who thinks that his opinions are virtuous and Mr. Gladstone’s vicious, violates the first rule of morals and manners in a Democratic country; namely, that you must not treat your political opponent as a moral delinquent.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)