Since the late 9th century the genre of “the letter of invitation” has enjoyed an uncanny status in Czech political discourse. Great Moravia’s incorporation into Slavia orthodoxa ensued from Prince Rastislav’s request for Christian missionaries addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III. Consonantly, the eastward political orientation of Czechoslovakia after WW2 was, in part, the result of František Palacký’s refusal to accept the “Committee of Fifty’s” invitation extended in its missive of April 6, 1848 (attributed by K. H. Borovský to Franz Schusselka) to represent his people at the German Parliament convening in Frankfurt. My paper juxtaposes the two most recent variations on the said epistolary genre: 1) the letter authored by Vasil Biľak together with four other top CPC functionaries in mid- 1968 asking Leonid Brezhnev for “a brotherly assistance,” that is, a military intervention thwarting the imminent counterrevolution in their homeland; and 2) the letter “United We Stand” (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 30, 2003) co-signed by Václav Havel and an assorted septet of European prime ministers urging its implied addressee, George W. Bush, to dispatch the military that would “rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” Th e compelling need to compare these two texts was highlighted by Havel himself in his speech of November 20, 2002 insisting that “it is necessary […] to weigh again and again on the fi nest scales whether we are truly helping people against a criminal regime and defending humankind against its weapons, or whether perchance this is not another– understandably more sophisticated than the Soviet one of 1968–version of ‘the brotherly assistance.’” My analysis demonstrates that the latter is the case and that the US invasion of Iraq solicited by Havel’s letter was as unjustifi ed and unsophisticated as the earlier Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that Biľak’s epistle legitimized.
This work deals with the changes of rhetorical education and emotional orders in the second half of the 18th century. The aim of the research is to assess the relations among language education, funtions of medias, anthropological models and expression of emotions on the Threshold of enlightenment. The background of the research shapes the transformation of rhetorical tradition. The research of the broad field of pedagogical, rhetorical and moral discurs is focused on the collegium of Karl Heinrich Seibt., Václav Smyčka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy