Content note: Cartoon of an elderly man forced to carry a heavy load by a caricatured leader figure. This object is shown as it was published. Why
공산당도배들이 한국에 들어오기전에는... (Before the Communists Came to Korea...), leaflet 1321
Two panels of a Korean-language leaflet. One shows a bearded scholar in a horsehair hat teaching students beneath hanging scrolls of Confucian virtue words (courtesy, benevolence and righteousness); the other shows the same old man without his hat, bent under a huge A-frame load while a stout, cigarette-smoking man orders him to work and his books lie discarded. The tell is the virtue-word backdrop set against a before-and-after scene that assigns the loss to one party.
- Date
- 1952
- Period
- Cold War
- Made by
- United Nations Command psychological warfare (U.S. Army), serial 1321; issuer not named on the leaflet
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Leaflet
- Issuer type
- Military
- Regime
- Truman Administration
- Leader
- Harry S. Truman
- Audience
- Enemy civilians
- Purpose
- Demonize
- Event
- Korean War
- Techniques
- Glittering generalitiesScapegoating
- Source
- Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- Source
- NDSU Archives (hosted PDF of Jin K. Kim, 'Themes in Korean War-Era Leaflets'); leaflet held by the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum, Fort Bragg, retrieved October 2, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (U.S. federal government work, 17 U.S.C. 105: U.S. military leaflet, 1950-53)
U.S. Army / UN Command leaflet no. 1321, John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum; Figure 4 in Jin K. Kim, 'Themes in Korean War-Era Leaflets' (1993), PDF at NDSU Archives. Only the scan is hosted.
Text on the object
[Left panel, speech bubble:] 일이나 해, 지금세상에는 인도니 예의니 은거생할같은 한수작은 소용없어 알겠지? [Left panel, lower margin:] 1321 [Right panel, caption above:] 공산당도배들이 한국에 들어오기전에는 한국은 동방예의지국으로 알려진 나라다. 우리는 잃었든 우리 선조의 예의와 도덕을 회복시켜 자손만대에 물려주자 [Right panel, hanging scrolls, left to right:] 三綱 / 禮 / 仁義 [Right panel, lower margin:] 1321
[Left] Get to work. In today's world, talk of humanity and courtesy and that sort of hermit-life [unclear] nonsense is no use. Understood? [Right] Before the Communist gang came into Korea, Korea was a country known as the courteous nation of the East. Let us recover the courtesy and morals of our ancestors that we lost, and hand them down to our descendants for ten thousand generations. [Scrolls] Three bonds / Courtesy / Benevolence and righteousness.
Photocopy-quality scan. 은거생할같은 and 한수작은 are transcribed as printed or as best seen; 한수작 is probably 헛수작 ('nonsense') and 생할 probably 생활, so the translation of the left bubble is tentative. The first scroll character pair is read as 三綱 with moderate confidence. The right panel is described in the cited paper as the front of the leaflet.
