The Aretons met in 1969 at the International Center in New York, married, and moved to Northern California in 1970. Tom studied film at NYU and later law and economics in San Francisco. Lilka earned a PhD from San Francisco's Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Together, they established a nonprofit student exchange organization in 1977, sending American students abroad and hosting international visitors -- work that took them repeatedly behind the Iron Curtain and into countries where state-controlled art was not an aesthetic choice but a survival requirement. Their collection grew informally at first, acquired during trips and exchanges. Then the Berlin Wall fell. In 1989 and the years that followed, as communism collapsed across Eastern Europe, people began throwing out the posters, busts, medals, and paintings that had decorated their public spaces for decades. The Aretons collected what others discarded, recognizing that these objects -- designed to manipulate -- were also historical documents that would be difficult to find once the revulsion passed.

The museum's permanent collection spans more than 25 countries, and the range is the point. Side by side, propaganda from North Korea, Cuba, Nazi Germany, China, Iran, and the Soviet Union reveals how different regimes reach for the same visual playbook. Leaders are idealized -- shown with children, surrounded by soldiers, their faces looming over city squares. Workers, women, peasants, and students are cast as heroes in bold colors and heroic poses. Enemies are identified and caricatured: political opponents, religious minorities, ethnic groups, anyone who can serve as a target for collective anger. The military is venerated through statues, uniforms, medals, and posters that recall past wars as righteous struggles. And everywhere, the nation is glorified -- its prosperity exaggerated, its people depicted in states of ecstatic happiness that the actual population rarely experienced. Walking through the gallery, the patterns become almost formulaic. That is the lesson: propaganda works not because it is clever but because it is relentless.

One of the museum's most distinctive sections addresses what happens to propaganda after the regime that produced it collapses. In the years following 1989, the visual language of communist authority became raw material for ridicule, criticism, and commercialization. The stern faces of party leaders appeared on ironic T-shirts and kitschy souvenirs. The heroic worker posters were reprinted as dorm room decor, their original meaning inverted by context. Statues were toppled, warehoused, or relocated to open-air parks where tourists could pose with the remnants of a dismantled ideology. The Aretons' collection captures this transformation -- from instruments of control to objects of dark humor to historical artifacts. The shift is not purely comic. For people like Tom's mother, who spent six decades living under the reality those posters depicted, the commercialization of propaganda carries its own complicated weight. A hammer-and-sickle refrigerator magnet means something different when your family's freedom was the price of the original.

The Museum of International Propaganda occupies a modest space in San Rafael, a quiet city in Marin County better known for its proximity to Mount Tamalpais and the Golden Gate Bridge than for its cultural institutions. The museum is small -- not a grand national institution but a focused, personal collection shaped by two people's lifetime of travel and experience. That intimacy is part of its power. There are no audio guides or interactive exhibits competing for attention. The objects speak with the directness that their creators intended, though now the context has shifted. A North Korean painting of a smiling family in a workers' paradise hangs a few feet from a Nazi poster identifying the enemies of the Volk. The visual grammar is strikingly similar. The museum does not editorialize heavily -- it lets the patterns do the work, trusting visitors to notice that authoritarian regimes, regardless of their stated ideology, tend to produce eerily similar art. In a media-saturated age when persuasion techniques have migrated from posters to algorithms, the collection feels less like a history lesson and more like a field guide.