We may find László Kövér’s linguistic and historical theories laughable, but his latest speech at the unveiling of a reincarnation of a 1934 irredentist statue commemorating the martyrs of the 1919 Red Terror was anything but amusing. In fact, most anti-Orbán public figures interpreted Kövér’s message as a threat against those who stand in the regime’s way.
On this occasion, Kövér unabashedly presented himself as a follower of the extreme right. Even his outfit was designed to show that he was speaking on behalf of those who share the fascistoid worldview of the regime. Kövér wore a “bocskai,” a suit that imitates the national fashion of the earlier nineteenth century, which became fashionable between the two world wars. In recent years, the “bocskai” became synonymous with a political view that is decidedly right-wing. For example, when MIÉP, István Csurka’s party, became a parliamentary party for the first time in 1998, all of the members of the delegation showed up in bocskais. So, wearing a bocskai sends a clear political message.
Kövér’s speech frightened a fair number of people with its militant tone and its inflammatory message. Most opposition commentators found the speech to be a call to destroy the enemy, which is still very much alive not just at home but also abroad. The current regime can feel safe only if the enemies abroad are also eliminated because, according to Kövér, the recent electoral losses were the result of foreign machinations by “the successors of the Lenin Boys.” The godless Hungarian liberals and socialists were prodded from abroad to rise up against the Fidesz regime. But one has to be ruthless and not hesitate to deliver the final blow against the nation’s enemies. Those who stand against Fidesz will have to experience firsthand that “never again can they achieve a majority with godless treason, with a denial of the nation financed from abroad.”
Péter Németh, the former editor-in-chief of Népszava, wrote a piece in Hírklikk that bears the title “Kövér’s intellectual violence. Will the physical follow?” Németh points out that the hatred that animates Kövér has an effect on society as a whole, in which intellectual violence has become commonplace. There might come a time when it will morph into physical violence, which Kövér no longer can control. In brief, some people who listened to the speech are looking with trepidation toward the future, fearing that the municipal electoral losses will make the far right, in which I include most of the Fidesz leaders, even more dangerous. Some hotheads within the party’s leadership are apparently talking quite freely about keeping the opposition on a tighter leash. The first response to Kövér’s call to action was that the statue of Mihály Károlyi, which was moved from Budapest to Siófok, was painted red.
An interesting thread runs through Kövér’s speech on which, I believe, we ought to spend more time. Recalling the dreadful history of Bolshevik plots against the nation, he invoked individuals who contributed substantially to the intellectual degradation of Hungarians. He refused to reveal their names because “it would be blasphemous to name them in front of the memorial of the nation’s martyrs.” Identifying them, however, is a relatively easy task for anyone who is familiar with twentieth-century Hungarian history.
The first is a legal scholar, Gyula Pikler (1864-1937), who, according to Kövér, “told his Hungarian students that his goal was the eradication of such petty notions as homeland and nation.” The alleged sentence was most likely never uttered, as Miklós Szabó’s article in Történelmi Szemle (1970/4) pointed out. It was a far-right anti-Semitic group active at the law school, which launched a “movement of the cross,” that most likely concocted the story. Pikler’s students, 400 strong, stood by their favorite professor.
Another “intellectual terrorist” Kövér highlighted was Ignotus (Hugó Veigelsberg, 1869-1949), the editor-in-chief of the famed and influential literary magazine Nyugat, which Mihály Takaró, the regime’s favorite literary historian, recently called “a little Jewish publication without a wider audience.”
The third “intellectual terrorist” was George Lukács, the noted Marxist philosopher. The fourth was Zoltán Rónai (1880-1940), a lawyer and a social democratic politician who indeed was commissioner for justice during the Soviet Republic. When it comes to the last nameless person, it is difficult to decide whom Kövér has in mind when he talks about another “1919 terrorist.” I suspect that Kövér is thinking of József Révai (1898-1959), a hard-core communist politician who was mostly involved with culture and literature between 1945 and 1953. It was he who in his early years tried his hand at poetry, including some really shocking lines about his wish for his father’s death. Interestingly enough, the youthful Sándor Márai found Révai’s lyrics noteworthy. But the problem is that Révai was not a minister of the interior either in 1953 or at any other time, as Kövér claims. The minister of interior in 1953 was actually Ernő Gerő (1898-1980).
What do these people have in common? All of them came from middle- or upper-middle-class Jewish families. Can this be a coincidence? Perhaps, since many Jews at the turn of the century and after were attracted to leftist or liberal causes. Still, I can’t escape the feeling that the list of names he so diligently gathered was not happenstance.
In light of Kövér’s choice of intellectual terrorists, it might have been considered tasteless for the organizers to invite Slomó Köves, the rabbi of EMIH, an affiliate of Chabad Lubavitch, to join the other representatives of accepted churches for the unveiling. But Köves is the regime’s designated face of its warm relations with Hungarian Jews, even though EMIH is essentially a foreign religious group representing practically nobody in Hungary. Meanwhile, MAZSIHISZ, the umbrella organization of Hungarian Jewish communities, didn’t even receive an invitation.
Köves knew perfectly well why he was invited and what he was expected to say. He talked about the “frightening specter” of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was a unique event in Hungarian history because the Hungarian communists, who had little political sense and were a radical bunch, openly declared that there was no God. Köves drew far-reaching conclusions based on the atheist nature of the regime, which in turn led to the liquidation of individual responsibility, a message that, for our purposes here, is immaterial. The point is that Köves had no compunctions about giving a supportive speech after Kövér’s keynote address, which identified Hungarian Jews as terrorists, responsible for the decline of Hungarians’ intellectual immunity against the evil spirits of liberalism and socialism.