War on the Visual Front

further this global war progresses the harder it is for even the generally well informed and earnestly interested citizen to keep track of all its rapidly changing aspects and the more difficult grows the task incumbent upon the various media of information. This is true of military operations, scattered over several continents, in the air, and above, on and below the seas. Even experts are confused by a multitude of new weapons, revolutionary strategies and surprising tactics. The political, economic, social and psychological implications of this war are even more bewildering. To the totalitarian powers, who want to direct a maximum response from their peoples to the momentary center of the war effort, this puzzling complexity of events and issues has posed merely the problem of concentrating propaganda on one specific issue at a time. And since the totalitarian nations have trained their populations to use words as weapons rather than as "food for thought" they have been successful even in such sudden shifts in the propaganda barrage as that compelled by Hitler's invasion of Russia. The fighting democracies, however, while they are under equal compulsion to use all the techniques of propaganda, of political and psychological warfare at their disposal, are at the same time faced with the no less important task of giving adequate information both to their own citizens and to the people of neutral or enemy-held territories as an indispensable incentive to gearing the forces of democracy for total victory and total peace. The use of maps, charts and diagrams for purposes of propaganda is not unique to the 20th century. There was, for instance, the "Beatus" map, drawn in 776, which divided the world among the Twelve Apostles. Similarly, as Edna Kenton 465