Hungarian Conservative

Just as some Christians had trouble accounting for their role in the 1918 Aster Revolution and the 1919 Communist coup d’état, some Jews also had difficulty facing their former position in terms of these events.

The majority of the refugees were intellectuals, mostly from Transylvania, followed by those from what is Slovakia, Serbia and Austria today, but there were also some who fled to Hungary from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A good politician comes to power with a ‘government of his friends’ already in his mind. The book emphasizes the concept of ‘friends’, because when you want to run a government, you have to appoint people to key positions, who have to be people that you as a leader trust.

Aversion to work was not unique to the leaders of the emigration. After a while, Mihály Révész, a social-democratic journalist in exile, had enough of living abroad and tried to get a job in Budapest. But when his left-wing friends found him a job as a manual worker, he turned it down, indignantly declaring ‘I won’t be a street sweeper’.

The gap between reality and the striving for a pure Christian social life angered many conservative public figures in the Horthy era. In his diary, Prohászka wrote that for Hungarian men, ‘using a prostitute is like drinking a cup of coffee’.

Although the official Hungarian propaganda constantly portrayed the ‘dark figures’ of the leftist emigration as plotting from abroad against Hungary, the surviving primary sources show a picture of ineffectual losers fighting among themselves.

While generational differences pushed one group of young men into the camp of the contemporary nationalist right, that did not necessarily determine their later life choices. Generational experiences did define men to some extent—but it was political and moral choices that had the final say.

According to an anti-Zionist pamphlet published during the Republic of Councils, Zionism ‘is nothing but a Jewish version of clerical reaction’ and was to be ‘fully eradicated.’

When Arrow Cross dictator Ferenc Szálasi took over on 15 October 1944, the new authorities required all civil servants to pledge allegiance to them. It was then that Mindszenty prepared a document entitled ‘Juramentum non’ (‘no oath’ in Latin.) The motto of the document was: ‘One cannot serve the [Arrow Cross] revolution and the Church at the same time.’

Budaváry’s biography needs to be amended to also include his actions during the Holocaust, which distinguish him from other antisemitic politicians.

The death rate in the French camps was horribly high: historian Tamás Stark estimates that 10,000 of the 40,000 Hungarian POWs died.

The scaremongering about the deterioration of US-Israeli relations is odd, since the relationship started to worsen first after Barack Obama threw the Middle East under the bus for Iran, and now Joe Biden wants to restore a nuclear deal whose only apparent purpose is to give Iran easy and quick access to nuclear weapons.

The approach of Weis to welfare, an attitude that in fact prevailed under the Teleki government, was not only sensitive to social issues, but also subscribed to the idea of an ‘anti-capitalist democracy’, and also to ‘progress’ and ‘social justice’.

Radnóti’s memory was soon hijacked by the Communist Party’s unsolicited worshippers. In a certain sense, of course, the poet was a natural choice for Communist memory politics.

The public discourse of the time, spearheaded by the left-wing press, was bloodthirstily demanding the holding accountable of those responsible for the horrors of WWII, forming an opinion first and only asking questions afterwards.

In the wake of the victory of the Italian right in the recent elections, much has been written in the international press about the return of ’fascism’.

From the spring of 1920, the regent travelled around the country in his private train to observe the results of his national leadership in all the important settlements.

It is important to point out that the anti-Semitic authorities were just as cruel to Jewish policemen as they were to any other Jew.

It must have been clear to everyone that a decision had to be made about whether they wanted to be on the side of the government, collaborating with the German invaders, or whether they would resign or perhaps join the resistance.

The ghettoisation of Jews and the establishment of Jewish police units took place in rural Hungary after the German occupation of 19 March 1944. The police was set up with the aim of maintaining the internal order of the ghettos and internment camps, as well as controlling entry and exit. In contemporary records, the police was variably referred to as ghetto police, auxiliary police, house police, internal police, but the most common name was Jewish police.

The picture of Horthy that emerges from the contemporary reports of Western ambassadors is hardly that of a gullible politician, but rather of a shrewd, albeit immoral manipulator. 

Objectively speaking, hundreds of unauthorized executions took place in the country, the victims of which were either ex-functionaries of the communist system or innocent Jewish traders and citizens.

This final piece deals with his even more chaotic relationship to the contemporary governing right, and his rocky road from Liebling-author to opposition prophet during the twenties and the rest of the Horthy-era.

The writer Dezső Szabó had many periods in his career—pro-Catholic, strongly protestant, bourgeoise radical, communist, anti-semitic and finally, anti-Nazi—, but in the early twenties, he was definitely going through a nationalist and anti-semitic phase. His contemporary speeches and articles provide much of the reason why contemporary historians label him an extremist.

Dezső Szabó was not only a nationalist, but also a strong opponent of capitalism during his entire life. The fact that this was hidden by socialist historiography only shows that many more myths have to be debunked by the Hungarian historians of today. 

In the articles of the years of transition, it was a basic guideline that the Roma are the people who avoid work and have a criminal tendency; who must be forcefully integrated into the system of the new, “democratic”, socialist Hungary.

In this article, we attempt to present the contradictory situation the Hungarian royal police found itself in after the German occupation of 1944.

The fact that Austria, which also lost the war, was being compensated at the expense of Hungary, made the situation even more unacceptable for Hungarians.

Hungary joining the League of Nations transferred the country from the shameful spot of a ‘warmonger’ to the ranks of ‘recognised’ nations.

‘I myself believe that extreme politics, whether right-wing or left-wing, is equally half-hearted, harmful and dangerous.’