Selling War Like Margarine

The modern poster saw the light during "La Belle Époque" in France. The best artists became involved in creating advertisements for bicycles, chocolate, theatre performances, detergents and liquor. Government offices could quickly fathom how effective these posters were, and soon tasked these artists with the job of mobilising the masses for war and sacrifice. Thus began the era of "Selling War Like Margarine". During their extensive travels in Europe and beyond, the radical and iconic Swedish writer Jan Myrdal (1927-2020) and his wife Gun Kessle (1926-2007) collected propaganda and war posters from the twentieth century's world wars, most of them French and Italian in origin. The book "Selling War Like Margarine" is Myrdal's own commentary to their huge collection of war posters, before it was donated in 2005 to the National Library of Sweden. The son of two Nobel Prize laureates - Gunnar Myrdal, best known for "Asian Drama", and Alva Myrdal, Sweden's first Ambassador to India - Jan Myrdal qualifies as one of the most important leftist European intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over 75 years of active participation in Sweden's political and intellectual debate, he inspired both admiration and great controversy. With India, Jan Myrdal had a relationship of more than five decades. A dozen longer and shorter visits throughout the sixties and seventies bore fruit in the volume "India Waits", published in 1980. His final trip to India took place in 2012 in connection with Setu Prakashani's publication of Myrdal's second book on India that focuses on the Naxalite movement. With this, the first English-language edition of "Selling War Like Margarine", Kolkata-based Setu Prakashani realizes the mission given directly by the author. "Selling War Like Margarine" belongs to Myrdal's most universal texts and can be read with equal interest regardless of the reader's political views.