Awake—shake dreams from your hair, my pretty child
You might be thinking, "What the hell does this have to do with stamps and propaganda?"
Greetings, fellow wanderers through the labyrinthine world of philately, our all-encompassing, all-embracing and everlasting “king of hobbies and hobby of kings.”1
We’re so back. Philately and history and polity—oh my!
And what a miracle we’re here together to enjoy this brief comeback story. Our hairless-ape bodies and technologically augmented brains sometimes struggle to appreciate the miraculous moment as the latest sequel to our past glories. Our terrestrial rock turned mega smelter and geomagnetic field proved special enough to develop the organic matter necessary for our precious physical forms, as well as all other life as we know it, but we know not what it means.
Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky.2 Consider how many of your ancestors needed to meet, network, navigate the social power dynamics of their times and successfully birth offspring for us to be here now. To those stalwart survivors, age-old fighters and tireless breeders who navigated the vicissitudes of history to deliver us to this juncture, we owe an inestimable gratitude.
It’s unlikely any of it would’ve happened if it weren’t for our cohesion and foresight. Yet it’s not these neutral and amoral characteristics that matter but the people who express them. These traits also gave us all of history’s blood feuds, war-time battles and genocidal sieges as the impetus for the administration of – and the resistance against – power in its many forms. As we grow larger communities, we require more complex power structures in which coercive hierarchies can use influence, power and dominance to gain control over the relational dynamics of the people beneath them.
As one present-day philosopher and political theorist recently wrote, “Power convinces you that it belongs to you. Actually, you belong to it.”3
A TALE AS OLD AS TIME
You might be thinking, “What the hell does this have to do with stamps and propaganda?”
And you’d be wrong.4
Here enters propaganda, which dates to ancient times but more recently rose to prominence on the backs of mass media and global communication technologies, including the postage stamp, which spurred a first-of-its-kind communication revolution in the mid-19th century.
Propaganda evolves, but its underlying goals of influencing public opinion and shaping individual and collective attitudes remain a common thread. Communities grow and settle, empires rise and fall, and propaganda emerges as the eternal handmaiden of power, shaping minds and histories with a deft blend of subterfuge and overt assertion.
And what better canvas for such machinations than the humble postage stamp? Those diminutive masterpieces of both design and deceit wield influence far beyond their apparent simplicity as a tax on letter writers.
Nay, stamps serve as more than mere postage. Once among the most potent nation-building and myth-making tools, they are history’s subtle narrators, the paper-based propagandists who shape our perceptions of national and sometimes individual identity. Whether it’s the glorification of leaders, the celebration of national achievements or the dissemination of state ideologies, stamps continue to play a role in constructing these myths and perpetuating power structures.
For collectors the most interesting medium through which we can understand the power of propaganda – and the idealized image of its issuing nation – is not a Nazi poster, a Cold War film or a flashy al-Qaeda magazine; it’s the humble postage stamp, those miniature manifestos of myth-made identity.
Our study of philatelic propaganda – something akin to a stamp-styled panopticon5 through which we can see the past, the present and perhaps even the future – may prove more fruitful than the passive pastime of hinging stamps into an album. With history in our hands, we’re uncovering the powers that be and have been, turning an occasionally solitary pursuit into a communal affair.
As history, power and politics collide on these adhesive-backed billboards for the state’s grand narratives, the boundaries begin to blur, uncovering my favourite peculiarity about philately—namely the postage stamp’s role as a purveyor of nation-building and myth-making propaganda.
So let’s take a look.
BUT FIRST…
Thank you for patiently waiting while my body exploited its healing factor like a story from Dr. Jeffrey Rediger’s book Cured.
It’s been a minute, eh?
The spell of silence, a hiatus punctuated by the ominous hum of anticipation, ends todays as I return from the depths of injury-induced exile to reclaim my rightful place at the helm of the Internet’s favourite prolix periodical.
Perhaps my eagle-eyed readers are asking themselves, “If it's so damn beloved, why did he leave Power & Philately sitting on the shelf for the past year and a half? We’ve lived so many lives since Q1 2023; COVID-19 was still a ‘global health emergency,’ Hamas had yet to kick off the biggest military engagement of the Gaza-Israel conflict this century, and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 was just a few months old. Surely, his thoughts and opinions are now obsolete.”
Well, let me partake in my second favourite pastime after philatelic propaganda and complain a bit about the biblical-style trials upending my life at any given moment.
Picture this—a chaotic maelstrom, a collision of flesh and fate, an injury so profound it rendered my prose as limp as a stamp soaked in a clawfoot tub. My journey through the abyss was not unlike Dante’s descent into the inferno, where time warped and reality fragmented into kaleidoscopic shards of pain and uncertainty.
It was the hardest physical and mental challenge of my life.
But then came purgatory; did you know damaged nerves heal, if at all, at a rate of about a millimetre a day?
And now, 18 months and many millimetres later, I’m here in paradise, writing about postage stamps. The late stages of a hero’s journey never looked so good.
I’m sure we’ve all heard enough about my misadventures in the land of the infirm. Now, turn your gaze to the horizon, where the promise of future content shimmers like a mirage in the desert of our collective consciousness.
“Is it real? I mean, we’re 1,000 words into a ‘brief’ story—does this really mean he’s back?”
For those readers still lingering in the shadows, wondering if Power & Philately would ever rise from the ashes like a phoenix-themed cover with a postage stamp for wings, the answer is a resounding yes: we’re back, baby, and barring any further demyelinated nerves, we’re here for the long haul.6
COMING SOON
Sooner than mommy’s next kiss with Santa Claus, I’ll publish my next take on philatelic propaganda.
Prepare for a peek into the looking glass of history, where truth and fiction blur into a mess of meaning and madness, revealing the power hidden within the innocuous confines of those small bits of unassuming paper. We’ll dissect the propaganda machines of nations old and new, shining a light on the overt and covert agendas lurking behind the images adorning our mail for more than 180 years.
Let’s enjoy the majesty of philatelic propaganda together as we break from the “exciting times” in which we’ve been cursed to live.
After all, who knows when personal calamities may strike, leaving you without the use your hands, unable to bring fork to mouth, and with just enough willpower to carry on another day?
I, for one, couldn’t be more excited to recapture the handsy power of opinion. Join me on this grand adventure as we forge ahead into the unknown with curiosity as our compass and stamps as our companion.
P.S. Remember, subscriptions for Power & Philately are free. Subscribers receive an utterly luscious story in their inbox each week with full access to the archive of past stories plus Substack’s large reader community. While no payment is ever necessary to access Power & Philately, many righteous readers have opted to pay for donation subscriptions ($5 a month or $50 a year) or join the founding member plan ($100 a year) as “esteemed financiers.” Each of my esteemed financiers receives in the mail a special gift related to philately, propaganda or both.
The oft-repeated title served as the banner of a 1957 exhibition hosted by the Philatelic Specialists Society of Canada (PSSC). “Stamps: King of Hobbies and Hobby of Kings” ran on the third floor of the Royal Ontario Museum from Nov. 8-17, 1957, with 43 exhibits by PSSC members and more than 800 pages displaying some of the outstanding collections then owned by Canadian collectors. Altogether, the displays were valued at more than $1 million ($11 million in 2024).
You could be an organic molecule whose top prospect following three billion years locked inside a Martian rock is to brace the foundation for a self-sustaining colony of Elon Musk enthusiasts.
The philosopher king adds: “One of the exquisite intellectual torture points of the dissident is always knowing how easy it would be—how easy it is—for his country, any country, to throw off its masters. It is always easy for a horse to throw off a man. But generally, the man stays on top. … Every state claims it is special in some way. There is no such thing as ‘autocracy’ versus ‘democracy.’ All government is arbitrary, unlimited and contingent. There are only different versions of autocracy. I’m sorry if you’re learning this for the first time.”
Maybe lay off the TikTok videos, the ideal cogs of a “dopamine machine” designed to suck your attention like sap from a maple tree.
The panopticon, according to French philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 book Discipline & Punish, serves as a metaphor for modern “disciplinary” societies and their inclination to observe and normalize as a power mechanism.
Behold the confidence that comes with remyelination.