Abstract
The Korean War received a great deal of attention in the Czechoslovak press. The Korean conflict was not only closely watched but also served to mobilize the population of Czechoslovakia on the issue of further consolidation of the totalitarian system of the Czechoslovak communist state itself. After all, Czechoslovakia was involved through a diplomatic mission, a mobile hospital, economic and material aid, and not least by providing care and education for war orphans. These were all circumstances in which the subject of the Korean War was used as a means of strengthening the class struggle in Czechoslovakia itself and further inciting the population to fight even harder against the enemy, whatever that meant in the mindset of the government press of the time (the nature of the enemy was dynamically changing in the dependencies of various internal purges etc.).
The presentation will work through 2 major formal areas - the communist press and the propaganda prefaces of books. It will work through texts written from the beginning of the war to the signing of the armistice, and thematically it will deal with the image of the leader Kim Il-sung in a complex web of relations with other figures standing alongside the North Korean leader. Moreover, if sufficiently thematized, also to figures of South Korea, i.e., especially the South Korean president I Sung-man.
Methodologically, I will rely on historical discursive analysis coupled with the linguistic analysis of the valence relations and collocations of keywords and co-referential chains/sequences present in the language whose ideationally and propagandism I will thus examine. The result will be a de-constructed image of the leader(s) and ultimately of Korea as it was presented to the Czechoslovak reader.