The Strange Propaganda Art That the U.S. Military Drops From the Sky

Long before fake news and AI slop, cascades of bullshit were falling from the sky in the physical form of printed propaganda leaflets. It’s a tradition with a long history—airborne propaganda was dropped from hot air balloons during the 1870 Franco-Prussian war—but its most eager modern proponents are the U.S. Army’s PSYOP divisions.

During the numerous wars waged in the Middle East, the U.S. military has dropped tens of millions of carefully crafted propaganda leaflets—or ‘paper bullets,’ as they are sometimes dubbed—littering the land with messages intended to forewarn, confuse, frighten, or demoralize local populations and opposition fighters.

Now, an archive of these almost forgotten forms of visual media has been created by the Pakistani filmmaker and preservationist, Saad Khan.

Based in New York, Khan runs Khajistan, a digital archival project that, in its own words, “aims to save art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, stretching from the Indus to the Maghreb… Many of these communities have faced centuries of Islamic rule and scars of European colonialism.”

Khan’s new book, American War Propaganda Leaflets, catalogs US military psyops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya from the years 1990 to 2022. The collection not only captures the strange, devious, and often amateurish nature of these leaflets, but also the evolution of their form, as the hand-drawn pictures of the early 90s gradually give way to crude Photoshop designs and even anime.

We caught up with Saad for a brief chat about the book.

VICE: What inspired you to begin the Khajistan archival project?
Saad: It came out of a documentary I made five years ago called Showgirls of Pakistan. During that process, I realized there was a lack of archives of countries like Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere, beyond the state-sanctioned archives. So I started gathering stuff. Now, Khajistan has the biggest archive of Pakistani showbiz ephemera in the world, as well as the biggest archive of pre-Revolution Iranian women’s magazines and lifestyle magazines.

We’re trying to make an online repository where you can click on the region, and read periodicals from the last 130 years. We’re interested in censored, sanctioned, suppressed, and banned materials, from propaganda to show business to smut.

Where do you get this stuff?
From collectors everywhere, often from the countries in question. For the propaganda book, we collected these leaflets from different sources across two years. The physical leaflets went to University of Pennsylvania, and we made this book out of it. We archive all kinds of propaganda from everywhere, not just America—from the Iranian and Pakistani governments, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood—but it just so happens that the U.S. has done a lot of it in this region. We’re now trying to make another book, temporarily titled Softcore Psyops, which is about gender and sex-related psyop leaflets dropped by the U.S. military in Japan.

When you were putting this book together, did you get a sense of the history of armies dropping propaganda from the air?
I was born and raised in Pakistan, so it’s normal. It’s just the Western world for whom this isn’t normal. We’ve known from the very beginning that there is propaganda around us all the time. In the U.S, I feel like that’s not a thing. Only now are they realizing the extent to which propaganda is being shoved down the throats of even its own citizens, especially in light of what’s happening in Palestine.

Do you know anything about how these leaflets were made? Some of them seem remarkably amateurish, as if drawn by a child, while others look like they were hashed together in five minutes by someone who wasn’t too familiar with Photoshop.
They’re pretty gonzo in how they’re created. They decide they’re going to bomb some place tomorrow, so it needs to be designed and printed overnight. A lot of the battalions had their own printing services. As for the leaflets themselves, they look different depending on who they are intended for. For the Iraq ones, there is more text because Iraqi society is more literate. Whereas the ones for Afghanistan feature a lot of MS Paint-like imagery.

I think there is a lot of ignorance and orientalism involved in this. They think they can sway someone with this kind of rudimentary marketing-style stuff, and maybe sometimes they do, but I’d bet that their impact is exaggerated. The art is very indicative of the time: the Gulf War ones are quite beautiful black and white drawings, whereas the ones about ISIS look like anime because they are from the 2010s.

Thanks, Saad.

See more of the leaflets collected in Saad’s book below.