At 4 p.m. on 22 July 1955, the Palace of Culture named after Joseph Stalin was officially opened and presented to the Polish people.This year's fiftieth anniversary of that event inspires discussions about the attempts to tame the Palace over the years - first by the communist authorities who propagated the image of Palace as a symbol of friendship among nations and by dressing it in mock Polish details. Then, it was tamed by being covered and finally by culture which blossomed inside. The Palace, however, was tamed most intensely during the last 15 years in free Poland when the city authorities, Palace management and private citizens expressed their wish to do something with Palace. The process of exorcism was successfully initiated by the Millennium Clock, new multi-hall cinema, remodelled coffee shop 'Trzydziestka' (Thirty), skate ring, basketball courts and outdoor events around it.
Looking at events from the perspective of the “official” US Government during the specific historical “era of imperial rivalry” – it seems that the US recognized the political potential of Central European refugees, who made a very remarkable contribution to keeping the ideological Cold War alive. The present study focuses on the issue of how the US Government looked at and treated Central (or East) European political emigres during the Cold War period. Looking through historical glasses at these processes, we can identify a gradually declining influence of Central European emigres in the West and in especially in the USA. With the passing of time, Central European emigres gradually lost their political bases first at home (in their respective home countries) then in their “shelter“ countries.
This article presents cultural problem of an activist woman in USSR on the basis of the novel Monumental Propaganda (Polish: Spizowa milośc Aglai) written by Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich. Aglaia is shown as a woman, who remained faithful to Stalin and his communist ideology during the changing times and circumstances. The main topic discussed in the novel is Stalin’s monument, the source of troubles and inspirations not only for Aglaja, but also for the city – Dolgowo, where the action of the story takes place.
The article deals with the image of celebrations of Slovak National Uprising in the daily Pravda in the years 1945 – 1948. It deals with the analysis of propaganda in post war Czechoslovakia on the example of commemorating important historical event in Slovak history – Slovak National Uprising. It provides an overview and concept of celebration of the Slovak National Uprising in the early post war years. There is an analysis of the relationship of the German and Hungarian minorities in that period on the occasion of commemorating the Slovak National Uprising and the removal of democratic leaders from the Uprising image associated with preventing Democrats to participate in power. The aim of this article is to trace changes in the presentation of the Slovak National Uprising celebrations on the pages of the daily Pravda in the after war period, which were related to current political and social conditions and to bring information on how socialist propaganda used historical event Slovak National Uprising and its celebrations for extruding communist ideology.
Recent scholarship on mass mobilization and totalism has approached propaganda as a solution to political cooperation, whereby inflammatory speeches, mis- or dis-information, and rumours function not to persuade audiences but rather to coordinate coalitions. Propaganda, it has been argued, aligns the attention of individuals already disposed to conflict. However, propaganda does not operate in a vacuum. Here we argue that movements and regimes that contend for total political power do so by employing a combination of propaganda and ritual. Rituals function to sanctify, connect individuals, and signal commitments. Further, rituals bind individuals into emerging social orders that enable the very communication of propaganda as a means of coordinating coalitions and instantiating methods for coercing behaviours. By examining historical case studies of totalism, we provide an exploration of ritual in totalist regimes and thereby argue that totalism is a quasi-religious system that employs elements of religion in an attempt to regulate social behaviour. In describing totalism as a quasi-religious system, we outline five phases in the life course of totalist movements: preformation, cadre formation, coalitional building, collective power, and breakdown. Totalism ultimately results in considerable negative effects on the population, such as loss of health, material resources, and social trust, and closes important channels for socioecological feedback, which are essential for the proper functioning of any system. Accordingly, unlike most religious systems, totalism over-sanctifies power, overregulates meanings, and fails to achieve cooperation and coordination beyond cadres or coalitions of enthusiasts. Consequently, totalist movements are relatively short-lived compared to successful religions.
In the first post-war decade the doctrine of socialist realism was mandatory in literature and all spheres of art — including book illustrations. Literature was to educate advocates of the new system. New tasks were also set for illustrations. They were to represent the most important issues and problems in Poland at the time, and present workers — the builders of socialism. Such postulates were present in articles dealing with book graphics published in the press at the time. They were successfully implemented in popular editions of literature published in the “Biblioteka Żołnierza” (“A Soldier’s Library”) and “Książka Nowego Czytelnika” (“New Readers’ Books”) series, and in some special editions. Drawings included in those publications illustrated operating factories and agricultural cooperatives, workers and farmers and work, bricklayers rebuilding the country after the havoc wreaked by war, fight against class enemies, peace demonstrations, as well as happy families and happy children. These were typical and unequivocal representations, imposing preconceived interpretations on the readers. The illustrations, closely linked to the literary text, were to strengthen its impact. The book functioned as a whole, as a new form of transmission of ideas promoted by the authorities at the time.
The present paper concerns an analysis of al-Qaeda’s propaganda techniques, which create a unified and stable structure of the organization. However, the research presented in the paper is based on al-Qaeda’s publications and statements, which have been appearing in the internet through the years of 2001 to 2010. The analyses refer to theories of Arabic classic rhetoric and modern indoctrination methods such as application of precise words and persuasive arguments as well as different rhetorical figures and tropes. The first part of the research regards al-Qaeda’s the supreme division of propaganda. The second part is concerned with the presentation of local propaganda units. Additionally, the last part points out recent media campaigns, which became an evaluated step of al-Qaeda’s indoctrination policy.
The article deals with the peculiarities of the process of Sovietization of the western regions of Ukraine during the period of the late Stalinism. Given the totalitarian nature of the Stalinist regime, it is emphasized that the informational space was one of the most important spheres of life, control over which by the ruling Communist Party was complete and inseparable. The scientific novelty is that the author defines the organization and holding of meetings of various categories of the population as one of the active forms of Stalin’s propaganda. They were an instrument of forcing the local population to trust the Soviet government, to legitimize it. It is noted that such events systematically repeated, gradually became part of Soviet everyday life. The task of Stalin’s propaganda was to construct a new type of man – „homo Sovieticus“, for whom communist ideology is not just a set of slogans, but an inner conviction.
This paper states that propaganda, whether it is commercial or political, capitalizes on the hidden contents of texts. Advertisers hide their claims discrediting their competitors or praising their own services in presuppositions that are represented as shared background knowledge. The receivers are normally aware of the attempts at influencing them. Political propaganda produces an effect by the help of hidden contents found in news items, too. The receivers are unaware of the attempts of influencing them or of the fact that they come to know the speaker's model of reality rather than the actual facts. The paper analyses specimens of conversational implicatures produced by bridging, found in news items taken from political daily papers, that can be classified pragmatically as cases of deceit.
The aim of the article is to uniquely summarize the findings of long-term research to point out that the instrumentalization of the history of post-war migration is influenced by the effort to recodify historical events in the interest of new political goals and the needs of political practice. In the article were used several methodological approaches. Long-term archival research findings were compared with monitoring of Slovak and Hungarian daily press after 1989. Based on the obtained documents by comparing them and by generalizing the knowledge gained in previous periods, which has been presented in several works, the author tries to take a look at the instrumentalization of post-war national policy and migratory population movements in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The author concludes that the instrumentalization of the history of post-war migrations is influenced by the desire to recodify historical events in the interest of new political aims and the needs of political practice.
The process of collectivization and modernization of the Czech and Slovak village, which took place at the turn of the 40th and 50th years of the twentieth century, in official propaganda was presented as a success story. He had to ensure the welfare of the Czechoslovak farmers to teach them modern farming, and also to realize them politically. Propaganda films from this period presents satisfied farmers who voluntarily and with a smile sticking with agricultural cooperatives. However the reality was significantly different from the picture presented to the public. This reality – of persecution, displacements, and very skeptical approach of rural residents to the communist ideologues perpetuated three literary texts, which are the basis of my reflection – these are novel of Ivan Klima Godzina ciszy, Ludvík Vaculík Sekyra and Jiří Hájíček Selský baroko. The date of their establishment is divided over 50 years and this by itself is of great importance – they stand on two poles in terms of distance in time to the events described in them. The aim of the article is therefore an attempt to confront the two images and determine whether over time the vision of those events subject to some transformations and corrections.
The article introduces into the Polish scholarly discourse some basic information about the origins and evolution of the Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda and constitutes the first attempt to interpret and assess the paper's cultural and linguistic profile. Komsomolskaya Pravda was established by the communist authorities as the party's propaganda tool to be used to influence young people in the Soviet Union; during the transformation period in Russia (1992) IT TRANSFORMED ITSELF INTO A SOCIAL-POLITICAL DAILY PAPER FOCUSED ON THE YOUNG GENERATION OF Russians and on the entire post-Soviet region. The transformation of the political and social formula of Komsomolskaya Pravda also led to profound changes in direct communication, especially with regard to new genres, and, first of all, the language of the publication. However, the increasing tabloidisation of the paper does not remove from its image and from its attitude to the external )global) reality and to the Russian political elite the old elements that have their roots in the “good old” Soviet days.
In 357 Philip of Macedon took Amphipolis against Athens who aided the polis. The scholars remarked only the strategic and economic purposes of the conquest, not the propagandistic use of Amphipolis-topic by anti-Macedonians and pro-Macedonians after Philocrates’ peace. This paper follows this debate and investigates how Philip’s opponents and supporters employed Amphipolis-topic in order to attack or defend the Macedonian king.
The writing Grande piaculum by cardinal Rainer of Viterbo from 1248 is an important element in the propaganda war of the Roman Curia against Emperor Frederick II. It reports in legendary manner the martyrdom of Bishop Marcellinus of Arezzo. The Hohenstaufen is thereby conventionalised as agent of the devil and precursor of Antichrist, against whom a crusade should be waged in Italy. This letter is known in three textual attestors, among them one in the Prague manuskript III.G.3, which is subject to a codicological analysis. An appendix is the first critical edition of Grande piaculum.
Our time has become a time of many fascinating but also disquieting culture conflicts. It is an era of instantaneous transformations of mental maps. This is especially due to such metamorphoses of means of communication that had been inconceivable until recently and yet that ultimately challenge the very essence of communication. New modes of dissemination of information have emerged whose sources or anchoring in time and space trigger numerous culture-political reflections such as those of a danger of new ways of enslavement of man or at least menace to individual freedom through new forms of mass-media propaganda, or of the risks of homogenization of different civilizations, or of waging wars by means whose primary implementation is not lethal and which in some sense are even intangible though ubiquitous, which, however, have potential tantamount to arms of mass destruction.
The study explores a specific film form, i.e., compilation film in Slovakia after the Second World War. The author analyses the creation and means of expression of the film Nikdy viac [Never Again] (1958) by director Ctibor Kováč, while taking account of its period propaganda use. Historically, it is the first feature-length compilation film in Slovakia that consciously renounces staging techniques and reenactments, while placing emphasis mainly on the clippings of authentic news footage. These are combined with the reportages from the trials of the members of the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions, which took place in April 1958 in Bratislava and in Banská Bystrica in the presence of the general public. By fabricating an image of shame, the representatives of the communist regime, backed by the media, ventured to reckon with the remnants of “clerofascism” that persisted in socialist society from the time of the Slovak Republic in 1939 – 1945. During the cold war, the politically motivated image was intended to demonstrate the determination of the representatives of power to take action against any internal or external enemy of the socialist establishment.
The Korean War was a crucial event at the beginning of Czechoslovakian Cold War ideology and propaganda, when, in the duel between the two worlds, culture was involved. The present article focuses on the formative era of the Korean War narrative through Cold War fictions and nonfictions in 1950s Czechoslovakia. It presents the most influential books in the Czechoslovakia of the time: Han Hǔngsu’s Korea včera a dnes (Korea Yesterday and Today), the Soviet publication Viděli jsme Koreu (We Saw Korea), and the North Korean anthology of pamphlets Jak byla připravena válka v Koreji (How the Korean War was prepared). The article then analyses two anthologies of poetry written by the famous Soviet Korean poet Cho Kich’ŏn, the novel Sešit nalezený v Sunčchonu (The Notebook Found in Sunchŏn) by Roman Kim, and the booklet Čeští spisovatelé korejským dětem (Czech Writers to Korean Children). The conclusion summarises the ways in which the Korean War was depicted and the pivots of its narrative.
The aim of this study is to outline the process of the extinction of Ukrainian culture in south-eastern Poland as a result of Polish resettlement actions and the activities of the Ukrainian underground movement (i.e., the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) in the post-war period (1944–1947). Concurrently, the study offers an analysis of the image of the “Ukrainian Banderite”, created by propaganda in Polish and Czechoslovak literature, journalism, and cinematography in the period from the mid-1940s to the end of the 1980s. The authors state that both in Poland and in Czechoslovakia the analysed topic has been subject to certain cyclical waves of interest, or current political demand or usefulness, but always according to an established and politically accepted template. The black-and-white reception of the issue, propaganda fictions, the concealment of facts, and the disproportionate highlighting of others, which were applied in the literary and film production of the real-socialist period, only distorted the historical objectivity of the issue and created a complicated stereotype in the collective memory.
The article deals with the peculiarities of the process of Sovietization of the western regions of Ukraine in the first postwar years. The problem of using the political symbols as tools of propaganda by the authorities is particularly emphasized. The scientific novelty is that the process of symbolizing the living space of the population of the Western Ukrainian region in the period of restoration / establishment of Soviet power there is disclosed in the article. The authors indicate what The main promoters of the spread of "Soviet" were the propaganda and agitation departments of regional and district committees of the CP(b)U in Western Ukraine. The change of symbolic space occurred through the creation and implantation into the public consciousness of a new narrative of the historical uniqueness of the Soviet state of the Stalinist format.
The model image of Czechoslovak frontier guards and its evolution from 1948 to 1956 is discussed in the study. It was important for the Communist power to separate the country from the outer world by means of the Iron Curtain. The state frontier was protected by the Frontier Guard Corps. No less important was the role of propaganda, particularly in creating a picture of outer enemies allegedly threatening the country and, on the other hand, that of frontier guards heroically defending Motherland. The author deals with the main features of the frontier guard´s image and of the propaganda tools used.
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