Supposed historian Michael Beschloss called PM Viktor Orbán of Hungry a ‘brutal dictator’ in reference to his meeting with Former US President Donald Trump. Rod Dreher, the renowned American columnist living in Budapest wrote a satiric open letter to him in response, drawing attention to the absurdity of that statement.
‘Regardless of whether the outcome is positive or negative, I believe a historian’s duty is to try to reconstruct what happened through primary sources from the archives, as objectively as possible.’
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the work is that its author is brave enough to challenge completely the established thinking and vision that takes historical progress and the associated rise of liberalism for granted.
‘Szekfű described “capitalism” as “having grown in size over time, becoming a more and more fearsome monster, creating factories and cramming hundreds of thousands and millions of people into the unhealthy, immoral air of smoky cities. And the longer the unrestricted freedom proclaimed by liberalism lasts, the more freely the capitalist big business devours the little ones, the more freely it exploits the economic weaklings, especially the workers.” Szekfű’s book Three Generations, in which he also called for extensive worker protection and the regulation of industrialists by law, bears a striking resemblance to the basic tenets of socialism.’
The book’s greatest value can undoubtedly be found in its historiographical sections, which present the historical assessment of the Soviet Republic and the Horthy system. It is in these that the author utilises the largest literary material and provides the widest overview.
How long do we have to put up with the relativisation of the Holocaust, and the irresponsible usage of the ‘Nazi’ attribute? Does the wish to overthrow Viktor Orbán really justify anything now?
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.