> The real scary part is that they are scared of what will happen if they don't do something
In the context of these posters, the implied "what will happen" is mostly worldwide Communist revolution with the U.S. losing the Cold War. You can see that for example in the poster depicting the edited version of the Gettysburg Address, which someone commented on elsewhere in this thread. The concern is worldwide totalitarianism on the Soviet model, and that's mostly the danger that these posters are meant to allude to and frighten the NSA staff with. If you say the wrong thing at Christmas dinner, Communism may win.
That sounds like a joke nowadays, but I'm sure it didn't sound like a joke to the people who created the posters or the people who saw them every day. Both sides of the Cold War fought it super-hard.
One problem that the people making the posters left out is that the Cold War also led to vastly bigger, stronger, more secretive states—including on the NATO side. It led to creative people being given billions upon billions of dollars to dream ever-bigger dreams about military and intelligence capabilities. We still don't even know what some of those dreams were, partly because generations of classification holders brought up on these posters and other versions of them have taken them to heart so strongly. So, we've got states that continue to be extraordinarily ambitious and capable in some ways that they don't really want anybody to talk about. To me, that's a tragic legacy of the Cold War. If the people who made the Gettysburg Address poster were serious in their concern for the state's apotheosis, they might have done well to also consider how "war is the health of the state"—evidently, whether it runs hot or cold.
We kind of know about some parts of the nuclear side of that, and we kind of know about some parts of the espionage and covert action side of that, but these parts all kind of hurt to think about and the people who've dreamt and are still dreaming those billion-dollar dreams would mostly just as soon that we didn't go too far down the rabbit holes.
In the context of these posters, the implied "what will happen" is mostly worldwide Communist revolution with the U.S. losing the Cold War. You can see that for example in the poster depicting the edited version of the Gettysburg Address, which someone commented on elsewhere in this thread. The concern is worldwide totalitarianism on the Soviet model, and that's mostly the danger that these posters are meant to allude to and frighten the NSA staff with. If you say the wrong thing at Christmas dinner, Communism may win.
That sounds like a joke nowadays, but I'm sure it didn't sound like a joke to the people who created the posters or the people who saw them every day. Both sides of the Cold War fought it super-hard.
One problem that the people making the posters left out is that the Cold War also led to vastly bigger, stronger, more secretive states—including on the NATO side. It led to creative people being given billions upon billions of dollars to dream ever-bigger dreams about military and intelligence capabilities. We still don't even know what some of those dreams were, partly because generations of classification holders brought up on these posters and other versions of them have taken them to heart so strongly. So, we've got states that continue to be extraordinarily ambitious and capable in some ways that they don't really want anybody to talk about. To me, that's a tragic legacy of the Cold War. If the people who made the Gettysburg Address poster were serious in their concern for the state's apotheosis, they might have done well to also consider how "war is the health of the state"—evidently, whether it runs hot or cold.
We kind of know about some parts of the nuclear side of that, and we kind of know about some parts of the espionage and covert action side of that, but these parts all kind of hurt to think about and the people who've dreamt and are still dreaming those billion-dollar dreams would mostly just as soon that we didn't go too far down the rabbit holes.