18 June 2015.
László Lőrinc
History kills, dumbs and destroys – especially when it is misunderstood or falsified. Adolf Hitler, as Mein Kampf suggests, believed the anti-Semitic historians who were claiming that in the Middle Ages the German cities that declined were those that had let the Jews in, while the rest prospered. Why then would he not have believed the recent claim that the German army in WWI could have defeated the enemy on two or three fronts, but was stabbed in the back by the Jews (through Marxist and Masonic organisations). If this is so, then all that needs to be done is to get rid of the Jews and the Germans can win another multi-front war. The number of political decisions based on false historical premises is endless. Of course, it is often difficult to decide, whether politics is based on history or present intent creates historical ideology for itself after the fact. Presumably it’s always a combination of both.
Take, for example, the recurring political rhetoric that we Hungarians have always had to fight for independence. Much has been said about why this paranoid view of the past, rooted in the centuries-old traditions of our history education, is fundamentally wrong. Politicians, of course, need not be aware that real historiography takes a very different view. The problem starts when their advisors, not being historians but applying historical arguments, are themselves wandering cluelessly in the labyrinths of the past.
We could read exactly this kind of totally lost expert studies in the volume titled Who is attacking Hungary and why?[1], comprising three studies. The author of one of them, Csaba Lentner, a former MP for the MIÉP (Party of Hungarian Justice and Life) party, was also a member of György Matolcsy’s team and in 2008 participated in the development of the economic policy of the second Orbán government. He reports that “the decline of our economy and statehood has been going on unbroken for five centuries”[2], and that “we are always trying to break free, but we are always under assault”. The government’s fight for freedom is thus “the latest episode in a centuries-long permanent struggle for survival’. “The methods and aims (sic!) used against us have remained essentially unchanged for centuries.”[3]
Lentner’s team identified three alleged attempts at catching up with the West of Europe in Hungarian history[4]: the Bethlen Gábor’s short reign Transylvania, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the Soviet era. The lesson drawn from the failure of these attempts is “that there is no political prosperity without independence”. Lentner rightly mentions the era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy – which spans half a century itself – but he is unaware that it was preceded by a century and a half of steady growth, starting as early as 1711. This represents two hundred years of catching up, which contradicts the theory of five hundred years of unbroken decline, to put it mildly. In other words, there has been much more significant and lasting progress, involving the whole of the Carpathian Basin, than the short 16 years of Bethlen’s reign in Transylvania. Even the then independent 18th century Poland, as a fellow country in the same region, did not progress faster than the Hungarian territories of the Habsburg Empire. On the other hand, Bohemia, although it lost most of its independence after 1620, developed more successfully and rapidly in the 17th and 19th centuries than Hungary, which enjoyed more independence within the Habsburg empire. So neither Hungarian, Czech or Polish successes or catching up, nor lagging behind of these countries are closely related to the degree of independent statehood. For example, one of the most lively periods of development in the Hungarian territories was during the 1850s, when the already existing tax and duty union was very beneficial for Hungary, as well as it was during the dual Monarchy, as Lentner himself mentions. And the absurd lesson drawn from this mistaken historical premise is that Hungary will continue to be successful in the near future if it fights its environment head-on.
However, the same is suggested by the other two studies in the volume, on similar grounds. One of them is by László Gy. Tóth. who was Orbán’s chief advisor from 1995 to 2002. According to him, the “most similar situation to the present one” in the past can be observed between 1918 and 1925, when “Hungary” (in fact, of course, the Horthy regime), was under attack by those in emigration. The decisive role played by Jews and Freemasons, and the ruthlessness of the attack, is illustrated by quotes from extremist politicians. For example, Géza Polónyi,[5] against whose “messy statistics” even Prime Minister István Tisza defended the Jews. But Tóth also quotes Elemér Mályusz’s propaganda work, written in 1931 at the request of the government, which he makes sound like an unbiased historical work from 2006[6]. Yet, according to the blog post of Dávid Turbucz, who writes a truly modern biography of Horthy, Mályusz “falls into the trap of one-sidedness, unfounded statements and distortions”.
As much as Tóth likes to equate today’s “traitors” with the “Masonic” and “Jewish” emigrés, he is silent about some of the much more daring attacks on “Hungary” by some earlier emigrants. For example, about Ferenc Rákóczi II, who – as we know from historian Gyula Szekfű – not only lived on the income of a card-room in France (how many times would this fact be pushed into our faces, had it happened to pertain to Oszkár Jászi!), but was preparing to return to Hungary with a Turkish army. Yet the Hungarians were just as fed up with war and the Turks then as they were fed up with the revolution in the 1920s. Lajos Kossuth had also negotiated with French, Serbian and Romanian rulers about an allied attack on his homeland, and wrote vociferously abroad against the Austro-Hungarian compromise that the legitimate Hungarian Parliament had accepted, accusing Deák, among other things, of striking a deal with the nationalists. According to this logic, he was also attacking Hungary, giving it a bad name.
Meanwhile, Tóth is silent about the dozens of harsh criticisms that opposition right-wing politicians have made against the contemporary Hungarian government abroad. (Of which one can read here, too.)
A typical case of this kind of factual trickery is when only the part of a historical figure’s life that is relevant to the speaker’s point of view is mentioned. Thus, for example, the volume quotes with approval Imre Pozsgay[7], because of his recent political statements concealing the fact that he was an important and loyal leader of the Communist Party-led Hungarian state for decades in various posts, right until Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union.
Péter Farkas Zárug, the third author of the volume, goes even further. At the beginning of his essay, he states that he is “trying to uncover the web of conflict of the Orbán government”[8]. First, he retroactively names Ferenc Gyurcsány as the “last president of the Communist Youth League”[9] (which he wasn’t and indeed, couldn’t have been, as the League, KISZ, ha no president, only a first secretary, but terminology aside, he wasn’t the leader of KISZ at all, and of course his importance in the previous regime was no more than a thousandth of that of Pozsgay’s).
On the other hand, Zárug also deviates from the well-known historical facts when he states that in 1989 the “declaration summarising the distorted consensual system of opposition round-table negotiations was not signed only by a single one of the regime-changing negotiator parties: by the chairman of Fidesz, Viktor Orbán”. [10] The paper later discusses how and why Orbán’s majority (winner-take-all) election system introduced in 2010 is better than what he calls the “fake consensus” system.
However, Orbán could not have been the president of Fidesz in 1989, as it did not have one, nor did it have a leader by any other name until 1993. And the refusal to sign the document was not initiated by Fidesz, but by the Free Demokrats, SZDSZ, which had recently been regularly retouched from images of the roundtable of the regime changers. The refusal was announced by their delegate at the negotiations, Péter Tölgyessy, while several other parties and organisations (including Fidesz) just joined in following his call for boycott. As the minutes reveal, Orbán was not even present at the meeting of the Opposition Round Table when the SZDSZ announced its stance, and it was Zsuzsa Szelényi who reacted on behalf of Fidesz (János Áder, László Kövér and Gábor Fodor were also present.)
Besides, the refusal to sign at the time had nothing to do with the consensual system that Zárug criticises: it was only about whether the MSZMP should have the right to delegate the President of the Republic (in the person of Lentner’s fancied Imre Pozsgay) or not. Tölgyessy, Szelényi, and Imre Mécs (SZDSZ), who reasoned in favour of the boycott at the time, are now all critics of the Orbán “non-lying” majority system in principle.
Moreover, Zárug even attributes Viktor Orbán’s victory in 2010 to the prime minister’s “protesting as a democrat at the opposition round-table talks”[11], by which he aims to provide a historical foundation for the current confrontational foreign and domestic policy.
And it is precisely this writing that has now been republished without any changes in the author’s new volume, now available at Book Fair.
László Lőrinc
18 June 2015
The first version of this article appeared on hvg.hu.
[1] Tóth Gy. László – Csaba Lentner – Péter Farkas Zárug. Bp. Kairos, 2012
[2] Tóth-Lentner-Zárug p. 100
[3] Ibid. 101.
[4] Ibid. 133.
[5] Ibid. 44. See also Péter Bihari: Trenches in the Hinterland. Bp. Napvilág 2008. 96.
[6] Ibid. 44-47.
[7] Ibid. Lentner, 134.
[8] Ibid. 210.
[9] Ibid. 241.
[10] Ibid. 206.
[11] Ibid. 209.
Irredentist poster from the 1920s
