Image credit: http://tjournal.ru/paper/1tv-team-fortress

A Russian television channel, Channel One, aired a documentary about World War I that used the above Team Fortress 2 poster as an example of United States military propaganda.

As any Team Fortress 2 player could tell you, that’s not a German soldier, it’s the Soldier class from the game. The documentary showed the Team Fortress 2 poster alongside other, real posters from the era calling Americans to enlist and support the war effort, and, according to International Business Times, said it depicted Germans as monsters “regardless of any logic or common sense.”

You’d think that the poster claiming that soldiers eat babies as a fact, or better yet, that it calls people to join Team Demoman (another class in the game), would make it obvious it’s not real, but if you weren’t able to read English, visually it’s not that far from the real thing. If nothing else, it’s a compliment to the DeviantArt user TankTaur who created this great parody as part of a Team Fortress 2 propaganda contest in 2009.

It’s unclear how the poster ended up in the documentary, but I think it’s safe to assume it involved a Google image search. You can see the part of the documentary that features the poster in this YouTube video (via PC Gamer), around the 9:50 mark.