End the genocide in Gaza

The original poster

Several years ago, I stumbled on a database of vintage Zionist propaganda posters (I can’t find it anymore, or I’d link to it). I was struck by the optimism and innocence of those brightly coloured seventies’ designs – they looked like the pages from any number of classic children’s books – and by how it contrasted with Israel’s terrible actions against the Palestinians.

This one on the right caught my attention especially, probably because the big story at that time was the wall that Israel built, seizing yet more land and turning Gaza into a giant prison. So I made this updated version. I don’t know if it’s really worthwhile – I suppose it’s a very design-nerdy response to the murder of thousands of people – but it was on my mind for a long time, so I finally just did it. The line was originally going to be “End apartheid in Israel,” but given recent events, it didn’t seem strong enough anymore.

Feel free to take this image if you want it. If you want to do something, here are some links:

• The United States gives Israel over $8 million in military aid every day. Send a letter to Barack Obama to ask the US to stop arming Israel.
• Sign this petition asking corporations to pull their business out of Israel.
• Check out the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, and stop buying Israeli products.

Arbeit Macht Fries

Here’s a rather sillier poster than the last one, to protest the brutal suppression of chips by McDonald’s in the London Olympics.

I fear it may have missed its ideal cultural moment, but it was a special request, so I couldn’t abandon it. Especially not after my wife came up with the amazing pun.

Tax the Rich

Download in colour
Download in black and white

To celebrate the UK financial industry’s £92 million of lobbying last year, how about some political messaging? Anyone who follows me on twitter knows that I’m tiresomely interested in politics. For some time now I’ve been thinking about combining that interest with design by making some freely available political posters.

Anyone remember UK Uncut? I loved the simplicity of their message: don’t cut public services. Every other important principle for the Left right now follows logically from that. Austerity solves nothing. The government creates value. Firing people makes things worse, not better.

Any suggestions in that direction are shouted down with incomprehensible gibberish about bond yields. But there is a simple alternative to both cutting and borrowing. Tax the rich, you idiots. You say they’ll leave? What good are they doing here anyway if they don’t pay tax? It looks like the only thing approaching an economic plan that the Tories have is to convert Britain into a tax haven, where the idle rich can live in luxury, but the council can’t afford to collect the rubbish.

So here you are. Take my pig poster, and do what you will with it. It’s A3 size, in either colour or black and white.


Tax the Rich by Stephen Crowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.