At the end of 2018, I wrote a post on the Orbán government’s decision to recreate the memorial to the victims of the Hungarian Red Terror, originally erected in 1934 on a small square adjacent to Kossuth Square in front of the Hungarian Parliament. In the early days of the second Orbán government, it was decided that this area must be recreated in such a fashion that it would reflect the state of the square as it existed before March 19, 1944. Nothing was spared, not even a memorial to the 1956 revolution or the bust of Imre Nagy, the martyred prime minister of those revolutionary days.
On October 31, 2019, the gargantuan memorial was unveiled. One side depicts Lady Hungária, the symbol of the “resurrection” of Hungary, and the other shows a muscle-bound man delivering the final blow to a serpent-like monster. He is the symbol of the Hungarian people, and the defeated beast is bolshevism. So, the Orbán regime recreated a memorial that, on the one hand, sends an irredentist message in the form of Lady Hungária and, on the other, distorts the history of the 1918-1919 period, starting with the falsehood that the Hungarian people were responsible for the defeat of bolshevism in Hungary. It was in fact the attack of the Romanian army that sent Béla Kun and the other leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic fleeing across the Austro-Hungarian border. But that’s history, which is obviously not the strong suit of the keynote speaker, László Kövér, president of the Hungarian parliament.
László Kéri, the eminent political scientist, characterized the speech as “an echo of the speeches of Csurka from the early 1990s. He speaks the same language and he uses the same symbolism,” said Kéri. Without going into detail about István Csurka’s career, I will simply state that he was known to be an anti-Semite who championed the condemnation of Israel, didn’t want Hungary to join NATO, and was convinced that the West planned to colonize Hungary. As he put it, the Soviets used tanks while the West used banks to destroy Hungary. He refused to acknowledge the finality of the current Hungarian borders and was hoping for peaceful territorial revision.
Here is a telling passage from Csurka’s “Memento,” published posthumously in 2015.
The final goal is the destruction of Hungarians. Not with weapons, not with poison gas, but with economic policies and with the withdrawal of our life possibilities because the place is needed by others. The age we live in, especially the one waiting for us in the next century, will be the age of migration…. This migration is promoted by international capital and the banks because it is in their interest. The United States through NATO arrived in the center of Europe where it wants to create a deposit of different kinds of people, and at the moment Hungary is the best place for this plan because its governments betrayed it a long time ago. Within the Trianon borders about 20 million people could live comfortably, but soon out of that number only seven million will be Magyar and four million will be Gypsies while the other nine million will be a mixture, a kind a international depot in the middle of the Carpathian Basin led by the same international, cosmopolitan group that leads the country at the moment. It will be a bitter experience to be Hungarian then. Stigmatization, persecution, humiliation, and denial of all Hungarian history will be our lot. Instead of our native tongue, we will hear only quacking.
The reason I quoted Csurka at such length is that Csurka’s ideas not only permeate Kövér’s worldview, but, if we think back to Viktor Orbán’s various statements on Hungarian ethnonationalism, we will discover that all three — Csurka, Kövér, and Orbán — are cut from the same cloth. Therefore, let’s not kid ourselves by claiming that Kövér is an aberration, a madman who says crazy things. Yes, his delivery is different from Orbán’s, but the message is essentially the same.
I’m afraid it will be very difficult to summarize Kövér’s message succinctly. The only topic that is front and center is his rabid anti-Bolshevism. But even here we have to pause because Kövér’s Bolshevism has nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of Bolshevism as we know it. Strictly speaking, it was the Leninist political strategy employed between 1903 and 1917. More loosely, the term can be used to describe the Soviet communist system. For Kövér, however, those who don’t share his far-right ethnonationalism are Bolsheviks, the successors of the Lenin Boys who were responsible for the Red Terror in 1919.
For Kövér, the declaration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic on March 21, 1919 had little to do with the lost war or with ethnic strife. Instead, it was the result of a “civil war” between those who stood for God, homeland, nation, and family and the godless ones who believed only in themselves and always preferred the homelessness of the open world to their own birthplace.
On the surface, this isn’t exactly new, but there are a couple of features that deserve mention. One is the religious framework into which Kövér places this old story of the war between nationalists and internationalists. I assume that Orbán’s decision to create a Christian Hungary has something to with Kövér’s revelation. The second novelty is that the civil war between the god-fearing and the godless, nationalist and internationalist already started, according to Kövér, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The final outcome was the bloody encounter in 1918-1919. That in itself took my breath away.
Clearly, Kövér’s hero is Lajos Kossuth. “After the bloody war of 1848-49,” he says, “the Hungarian nation became defenseless not only militarily, not only politically, but also spiritually. Our nation lost not only its physical and political self-defense capabilities, but also its intellectual ones.” Kövér hopes that one day historians of the press will discover how, after 1848, the teachings of socialism and communism penetrated the Hungarian consciousness and how, with it, came the foreign influences that led to the deterioration of the Hungarians’ immune system.
Kossuth apparently studied Marx but found that Hungary had no need for socialism and communism, which, given the agricultural nature of the economy, wouldn’t have been recommended even by Marx. Reading Kövér, I have the feeling that in his eyes even István Széchenyi would have been a “bolshevik” simply because he was a strong supporter of imitating and catching up with the West. And he also believed in progress.
There is still a lot of meat on these bones, but for sheer amusement I will relate Kövér’s way of demonstrating the weakened state of Hungarians intellectually. Without mentioning the name of the great Hungarian linguist József Budenz, a scholar of German origin, who demonstrated the Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language, he tells the following story. Hungarian intellectual strength was so damaged that a 22-year-old foreigner became a correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences within three years of his arrival and could become “the founder of the dogma” of the Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language. “Luckily, despite the strenuous efforts of the cultural agents sent to us, we haven’t lost our mother tongue nor our vim and vigor.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I am inclined to do the latter. And again, don’t just blame Kövér. Wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago that Viktor Orbán attended the Conference of the Turkic Council, telling his audience that every Hungarian has Kipchak blood in his veins?
A few days ago, Zoltán Kovács, editor of the weekly Élet és Irodalom, called Orbán “félművelt,” a man with only a veneer of culture. László Kálmán, a linguist who dislikes Orbán and his regime just as much as Kovács does, disagreed. He thinks that the prime minister is well read but that, as a politician, like all politicians, he is simply playing a role. I side with Kovács here. I don’t care if one is a politician, an educated man couldn’t help telling one of his best friends that his theories about Budenz and the Hungarian language are bonkers.
The rest of the half-truths and distortions must wait for a later time.