By Nora Berend
In Hungary, the political uses of antisemitism have reached distressing proportions in recent years. As part of several government-initiated anti-George Soros campaigns, posters spewing messages of hatred and inviting the population to participate in “national consultations” were plastered all over the country. The millionaire philanthropist is accused of advancing a sinister plot. According to the Hungarian government, the goal of the “Soros Plan” was to flood the country (and Europe) with immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. The 2017 national consultation stated: “Soros has been working for years to change Europe and European society. He wants to reach his goal through the settlement of masses of people with a different civilizational background.” The questionnaire then asked the respondents whether they agreed with this part of the “Soros Plan.”1 The businessman’s smiling face appeared on the questionnaire and posters along with the slogan: “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh.”
A look at the grotesque caricatures in the notorious Der Stürmer clearly reveals the Nazi provenance of that poster.2 While the word Jew was not used, the fact that it was implied was evident in the language (such as “dirty Jew”) and imagery (stars of David) of the graffiti scrawled on many of the placards.3 In vain did the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities (MAZSIHISZ) repeatedly implore the government to end the campaign. The following year, the “Stop Soros” campaign continued in a similar manner. The rhetoric of the Fidesz Party according to which opposition politicians are in “Soros’ hands; he pulls the strings” is also reminiscent of the Jewish puppet master imagery employed by the Nazis.4 An alleged “Soros network,” which would encompass opposition politicians, NGOs, and all those who demonstrate against the government, is constantly blamed.5 In 2019, photos of prominent Hungarian journalists were displayed on posters featuring the Israeli flag, with the words, “We, too, came from across the border,” and the captions “constant whining,” “latent anti-Hungarianism,” and “treason.”6 The idea was to insinuate that these journalists are Jews serving Israeli interests.
While there was significant popular support for antisemitism in the interwar years, just as there is today, it does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it is strongly intertwined with the renationalized historical discourse. In many countries history is being renationalized, which is just one consequence of the rise of populist authoritarians. With the standard of living in decline, rampant corruption, and pervasive inequality, many politicians exploit the emotional power of national stories. A supposedly glorious past and a sense of superiority and unfair victimhood are all embedded in the stirring Hungarian narrative and presented as historical truth. This serves to divert emotional energy; as a result, instead of assessing the real harm government actions are causing the citizens of the country, people who can be mobilized by such stories direct their rage toward the “enemies of the nation.” Those who do present research-based historical analysis to combat the distortions are branded traitors who hate Hungarians. National history is a key component in the battle for voters; it has the power to bamboozle the population and satisfy the emotional need for belonging and the innate craving to make sense of the past through storytelling.
Hungary’s Fidesz-led government has been renationalizing history for many years now. This is manifested in everything from political speeches to public monuments to school textbooks, and antisemitism is an integral part of this twisted version of the past. There are several crucial building blocks of that reworked history, with multiple neuralgic points in which any realistic assessment of historical processes becomes impossible, since the whole edifice would collapse. Some of the key elements in this national story are the foundational ones, which must attest to both the primacy of the Hungarians and their superiority in the region, hence demonstrating the cruel injustice of the breakup of the Kingdom of Hungary in the aftermath of World War I. The purported ancient history of the Hungarians and their origins, various military victories, and their first Christian ruler, King Stephen I who reigned from 997–1038, are central facets in this narrative.
An emphasis on Christianity and Hungary’s role as the “bulwark of Europe” is equally important, because these features supposedly “prove” that the Hungarians had the moral high ground and justice on their side. When it comes to twentieth-century history, this narrative seeks to mitigate or completely whitewash Hungary’s responsibility for its alliance with Hitler and the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in order to retain the country’s victim status. Hungarians are presented as blameless in their treatment of minorities and mere victims of an unjust dictate that dismembered their country. The post-World War I Treaty of Trianon (1920) is actually viewed as the “Hungarian Holocaust.”7 It is both the sole root and justification for all subsequent government actions. The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919) and the Communist period after World War II are both equated with “the Jews”—who are consistently depicted as aliens and outside the nation. Today, Hungary’s interwar and wartime regent, Miklós Horthy, is being glorified; any Hungarian responsibility in the Holocaust is denied, and Hungary is systematically presented as a victim rather than a perpetrator. Antisemitism is not a separate phenomenon but embedded in the distorted version of the past; it is partly generated by the national story as renationalizers would have it, and then is used to justify other aspects of that narrative.
The following quotation is taken from a speech delivered by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on August 20, 2020, at the inauguration on St. Stephen’s Day—which commemorates Hungary’s first Christian king, canonized in 1083—of a new monument to national unity called “Belonging Together” [Összetartozás], which lists all the toponyms of pre-Trianon Hungary:
It is a rare grace that the strategic decisions of successive generations all prove to be correct. They [the Hungarians] targeted the Carpathian Basin, the most defensible settlement territory of Eurasia. They chose settlement instead of migration, a centralized state instead of a loose tribal confederation, Western Christianity instead of a nomadic belief system. They conquered the presumably much more numerous local peoples; they crushed the invading Western imperial armies; they quashed internal rebellion and breathtaking nation-building began. What times, what greatness, glory and unprecedented performance! … Gratitude and thanksgiving … we must … at least remind ourselves on August 20, how much strength, purpose, talent, blood, sacrifice, and valor was needed so that we can stand here today. Glory to Stephen, king of the Hungarians!8
Such short-circuiting of past and present and the mixing of a simplified and even falsified history with current politics is an example of the recent renationalization of history. In that way, political rhetoric is again saturated with what is purported to be national history. This is the case both because of the available nineteenth- and early twentieth-century models, and because it is a knee-jerk reaction to globalization, in which the national is presented as an antidote to sinister global forces. Renationalized history is a product of nationalism. Because, as Hannah Arendt observed, legitimacy is always tied to the past,9 the past is the cloth in which nationalist legitimizing strategies are cloaked. It is carefully tailored, and whatever elements are deemed inconvenient are excised, so that the garment flatters the national body; cherry-picking and distortion override any genuine historical inquiry.
When the prime minister of Hungary claims that “the person who looks at the world through Hungarian eyes sees it through the eyes of St. Stephen,” meaning, “We wish to make the Carpathian Basin great together with the peoples living with us,”10 it implies that Stephen I was not a historical personage whose story needs to be understood in the context of the early eleventh century, but rather a wise guide whose teachings are timeless. In other words, there is only one way to “be” Hungarian and that is to see the world through the eyes of the wise King Stephen.
Stephen I can more easily be lionized as founder of both state and Church when we forget that exactly the same developments were happening concurrently elsewhere in Central Europe, Scandinavia, and Rus’. This creates the false sense of the singularity of Hungary (to match the national uniqueness claim underlying every brand of nationalism). What Stephen wanted for the twenty-first century is of course determined by whichever politician is invoking his legacy. The above quotation includes a reference to supposed Hungarian leadership in the Carpathian Basin, alluding to the territory of the former Kingdom of Hungary. This is a type of inverse “Make Hungary Great Again.” It is “Make Hungary great in the past.” Such a view has also made its way into the educational system; in the new history textbook for ten- and eleven-year-olds, the false claim is made that in the early tenth century, the German Empire tried to annihilate the Hungarians, who successfully defended themselves, and states approvingly that the neighboring peoples were afraid of the Hungarians.11
Such a political use of history is not new. Indeed, the birth of professional history writing in modern Europe was inextricably linked with the formation of modern states, conceptualized as nation-states. Thus, in the initial phase of nation-building projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professional historians were very much architects of mythic national histories (their writings have even been labeled “mythistory”12). Since World War II demonstrated the logical endpoint of national rivalry, academic historians have mostly lost their appetite for this type of history-writing, and indeed turned toward debunking mythic histories. Yet, whatever has been done to challenge this by many professional historians and however many myths have been discredited, the heritage of mythic national history has been revived, especially in enterprises of the political right.
Thus, although renationalized history relies on the tropes first constructed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians, there is something new in the way in which history is being renationalized today. Scholars created the early national narratives. Today, however, renationalized history willfully ignores, discounts, or attacks scholarly findings that do not fit into its framework, and vies for the creation of its own preferred version to the point of even suppressing professional academic historical research. Those who promote it claim to produce scientific work, yet the chasm between nationalized history and impartial academic history is deeper than ever.
This is, for example, very visible in the fate of a large exhibition, which opened in March 2022, to commemorate the first Hungarian dynasty, of which Stephen I was also a member. Under the direction of the National History Museum, many scholars participated in designing the exhibition and writing the accompanying catalogue. Three months before the planned opening, however, the ministry fired the curators and appointed the Institute of Hungarian Research (Magyarságkutató Intézet, a government-funded new institution; the term magyarság also means “Hungarianness”) to oversee it.13 The new curator from the Institute, who never finished his doctoral degree, demanded radical changes, and almost all the historians and archaeologists previously working on the project resigned. According to reports, the new curator decided to delete all the material relating to the Slavic and other local populations, as well as to the Muslims and Jews who had immigrated in the early medieval period. He said that “too much attention had been paid to the non-Christian populations.”14 Finally, the exhibition allots no space to the various peoples who inhabited the area before the arrival of the “Hungarians” (who themselves were of mixed heritage). Muslims are only very briefly discussed in the room devoted to villages, and Jews in the one focusing on towns, but the accompanying booklet omits mention of both. The captions concerning the Jews are unambiguously antisemitic, and state that the size of the Jewish population “necessitated” regulation, and that “antipathy, not devoid of atrocities” led to the expulsion of the Jews.
The new national history is in fact government-sponsored distortion designed to highlight national greatness. It caters to the mindset George Bernard Shaw famously lampooned as “a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”15 While renationalized history masquerades as a corrective to a “left-liberal” mindset, promoting patriotism and community, it is in fact often used by antidemocratic, autocratic regimes and props them up. Many politicians have taken up neo-nationalism as a useful political strategy after having repeatedly changed their ideology.
Renationalized history does not better our understanding of the past; it only serves to advance a present-day agenda. History as a means of understanding increasingly clashes with history as apologetics. To some extent, the renationalization of history benefits from a perversion of postmodernism and the ideas that there is no objective history, that all narratives are made up, and that personal biases influence any attempted reconstruction of the past. This notion is used to undercut the work of serious historians by claiming that “left-liberal” academics distort their narratives. Yet at the same time, renationalizers profess to be free from bias and to provide the truth and nothing but. This claim is key to the success of this enterprise, since the purported absolute continuity from past to present is the backbone of all other legitimizing claims that are based on national narratives. In other words, while renationalizers seek to delegitimize intellectual opponents using repurposed vulgar postmodernism, they also claim to have a monopoly on the truth about the national past. There is a resemblance here to the production of fake news more generally, but the ultimate bedrock and measure of supposed veracity is the “restoration” of national pride.
This has a destabilizing effect, as the general public can no longer distinguish between entirely unfounded wishful thinking and real research. This was expressed quite well in a discussion on a new history textbook that is so full of distortions no real scholar could endorse it. Yet an audience member stated: “If there is no scholarly consensus, then there is no proof, only opinions. And this textbook is one opinion.”16
This approach entirely blurs the distinction between lack of consensus and unverifiable historical interpretations—the difference between the possible and the completely invented. It also opens up new avenues for antisemitic expression. One of the recent recipients of a government award for service to literature has spoken of “an implacable war in religious guise seeking to destroy our people” and “the moral holocaust of the Hungarians, directed by false prophets in disguise, with only their beards being real,” adding several other references to signal that he meant Jews.17 Alleged Jewish hostility is even projected into the distant past, with another recipient of a government award (who sees the Hungarians as the children of God) declaring:
Our ancestors used the power of crystals to communicate and preserve the accumulated knowledge of the ancients. They fed our cultural treasures into huge crystal blocks in the shape of a horse’s head. Hebrew scribes became acquainted with the technique of storing and retrieving crystalline information. Someone has figured out that this can be used to corrupt us, and this operation has been going on for nearly five thousand years.18
Such ideas jibe with the statement in the new school textbook’s that Jewish priests were jealous of Jesus and therefore conspired to have him killed.19 When those pushing pseudo-science and antisemitism are honored with government awards, how can the ordinary citizen distinguish between renationalized discourse and true history?
In the Hungarian case, renationalized history seeks to highlight the glorious deeds of ancestors, real and imagined, thus reiterating that Hungarians have a right to live in their country. This right is, in reality, uncontested, but is portrayed in the nationalist rhetoric as being under constant threat from neighboring countries, from “the West,” and from “the Jews.” That fictitious danger is the politicized heritage of the breakup of the Kingdom of Hungary. For centuries, it was a polity that incorporated speakers of many languages, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emergent national movements of minority populations started to compete with the Hungarians’ own nationalism. Being on the losing side in World War I, the former kingdom’s territory was drastically truncated, with lands assigned to neighboring countries; former minorities now joined these neighboring lands or created their own separate states. Because of the mixed populations of many areas, many Hungarians suddenly found themselves as ethnic minorities in the new states. The inability to come to terms with new realities propelled the Hungarian elites to side with Hitler to satisfy their revanchism and regain lost territories. Areas that were returned to Hungary as a result of that alliance were lost again after World War II, when Hungarians again found themselves on the losing side.
Amid the official silence on the issue of minorities in the postwar decades and the blame attached to the old elites, Hungarian society never faced or processed the past. At the earliest opportunity after the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, nationalist narratives were revived. The mounting economic and social problems of the last decades only accelerated this revival, and the national narrative that was consolidated in the interwar years is once again the government-sponsored version of Hungarian history.
EU money is “owed to us because of historical, moral, and, not least, economic reasons,” said the director of a government-funded institute.20 Here, “moral” refers to the aforementioned notion of Hungary having served as the bulwark of Europe throughout its history, protecting Europeans from outside threats. According to renationalized history, for generations Hungary defended Western Europe at the price of its own development; instead of Hungarians being rewarded for their sacrifices, they were punished with the Treaty of Trianon, which stripped them of large parts of their patrimony. Although the “bulwark” terminology started in the medieval period and was used by the papacy as well as by Hungarian rulers to characterize their activities, the reality was much more complex. Self-defense was always a significant factor rather than altruism or self-sacrifice on behalf of the West. German estates of the Habsburg rulers made significant financial contributions to support Hungary’s anti-Ottoman wars; and Hungarians actively cooperated with the Ottomans, including taking part in the siege of Vienna on the Ottoman side. Hungary as the selfless and victimized bulwark of the West was a myth dear to the Horthy regime, as it served its revisionist agenda, which was born out of Trianon.
Antisemitism has been latent or open in many government-sponsored rewritings of the past, most obviously about the Holocaust in Hungary. In 2014, the government created a “historical research institute,” Veritas, which it continues to oversee. Not only its name, but its purview evokes Orwell’s 1984. That institution is tasked with “strengthening national cohesion” and analyzing the history of the last hundred and fifty years in a manner that “will strengthen national identity.”21 Of course, historians at universities and at the historical research institute of the Academy of Sciences were not to be trusted with such a delicate task. On January 17, 2014, the director of Veritas, Sándor Szakály, gave an interview in which he emphasized that “we must say that in opposition to the image of Hungary that has been created, Jews here only started to experience significant losses when the German army occupied Hungary and thus the country’s sovereignty was strongly limited after March 19, 1944.”22 Szakály also said that although many historians think that the first deportation from Hungary during the war took place in the summer of 1941 to Kamianets-Podilskyi (Kamenets-Podolsk) in German-occupied Soviet Ukraine, in his opinion it can be considered more of an immigration procedure, because only those without Hungarian citizenship were deported. In fact, between 1920 and 1942, twenty-two laws were enacted that progressively deprived Jews of their rights, as did 267 ministerial edicts, also embracing the racial definition of Jewishness, between 1938 and March 19, 1944. Beginning in 1939, service in forced labor battalions was made compulsory for adult Jewish men. All of these were the result of the autonomous decisions of the Hungarian government. It was also that government that in 1941 deported over 17,000 Jews, mainly from the recently re-attached Carpathian Ruthenia and some other areas, to Kamianets-Podilskyi, where the vast majority were murdered by Ukrainian auxiliaries and German units. Deportations were halted because of German protests.23
On December 31, 2013, the government decreed that a monument would be constructed to commemorate the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944. Despite widespread protest, in April 2014, two days after the government was reelected, work began. The statue was erected one night in July 2014, without an inauguration ceremony and under strong police protection.24 An inscription in several languages states that the statue is “to the memory of the victims,” while a Hungarian inscription specifies that these are “the victims of the German occupation.” Originally, the Hebrew inscription, which should have been LeZichram shel HaKorbanot was inverted as HaKorbanot LeZichram shel, an error only corrected after a public outcry. The statue, which features the archangel Gabriel, symbolizing Hungary, attacked by an imperial eagle, the symbol of Nazi Germany, suggests a simple and false message: All Hungarians were victims of Nazi persecution. In the face of criticism, Prime Minister Orbán insisted that everyone was a victim of a dictatorship that was “a manifestation of anti-Christian tendencies”; thus, Jews were not victims of antisemitism, but of anti-Christianity. He even issued a veiled threat to the Jewish communities of Hungary, who objected to the false messaging in the very year that was declared the year of commemoration of the Shoah in Hungary. He stated that “it would be difficult to imagine a future sincere coexistence” with those who do not admit that the deportations were due to the Nazi occupation, adding, “Our generation became the follower of radically anti-Communist politics because we had enough of insincere life built on mistrust.”25
The last sentence becomes clear only when considering its broader context—the common right-wing tendency of equating “Communists” with “Jews.” This was the basic tenor of Horthy’s “Christian national” regime, and it has been revived, as is demonstrated, for example, in the House of Terror Museum, which minimizes the Shoah and denies Hungarian responsibility for the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. It suggests that Nazism, including the Hungarian Arrow Cross party, merely reacted to the Communist threat—and in any case posed much less danger to Hungary than the Communists, whose post-World War II crimes are emphasized. This would suggest that the Communist terror lasted for more than forty-five years. The deeds of Hungarian Communists of Jewish origin are highlighted, implying that Jews were responsible for the imposition of Communism and its worst and bloodiest excesses.26
A similar distortion is now enshrined in government-mandated school curricula. In a new compulsory history textbook (that appeared in 2016) it is noted that ecclesiastical leaders protested the Third Anti-Jewish law (even the terminology is misleading, since in Hungarian these antisemitic laws are called “Jewish laws”), which provided a strictly racial definition of who was considered a Jew. In reality, these ecclesiastics only protested the lack of protection for those who had converted to Christianity much earlier. Moreover, the book claims that the deportations were the work of the Nazis, and more mention is given to those few who tried to save the Jews than the many who collaborated in their murder.27
Of course, historical reality was very different from the story told in the textbook. The Nazi occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, was precipitated by Horthy’s efforts to conclude a secret armistice with the Allies, yet there was no real resistance to the German army, and Horthy stayed on as regent, appointing a new government. He suspended deportations when only the Jews of Budapest remained; thus, it is a myth that the Hungarian government was powerless against German pressure. The Nazis would not have been able to deport so many Jews so quickly without the full support of the Hungarian state. Beginning in May 1944, in just fifty-seven days, 437,000 people were deported, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hungarian gendarmes forced the Jews into ghettoes and eventually onto the cattle wagons. Hungarians stripped them of their property and maltreated and even tortured those to be deported in their attempts to find hidden valuables; Hungarian midwives conducted intimate searches of women for the same reason. Hungary’s loss of life in World War II has been calculated to have been between 830,000 and 950,000; 40–46 percent of all the dead were Jews, nearly all of whom were victims of genocide. Moreover, once the Arrow Cross seized power on October 15, 1944, its members began killing Jews in Budapest. Between 1945–48, there were several pogroms against Shoah survivors all perpetrated by Hungarians.28
The Horthy era is whitewashed in the government-sponsored narrative, and this is evident in public monuments as well. Statues of István Bethlen, for example, were erected in a number of cities, including in Budapest in 2013. He is celebrated as the prime minister (1921–31) who allegedly consolidated Hungary’s economic position after the Treaty of Trianon. He is credited with opposing later prime ministers’ pro-Nazi policies. Yet he not only concluded an alliance with Fascist Italy in 1927; he wrote in his diary in 1944 that had he been convinced that Germany was going to win the war, he would not have opposed Hungary’s collusion with Hitler regardless of any sympathy or antipathy.29 In other words, Bethlen’s opposition was not due to Hitler’s policies but rather to the calculation that the Germans would, in the end, lose the war.
Antisemitic thought patterns permeate the explanation provided by government loyalists and supporters. In 2021, the government-funded Institute of the Twenty-First Century published a book on the “Soros Plan” in which it was claimed:
Operation Soros consists of a multitude of open and secret actions that seek to fundamentally change the Central and Eastern European region. The history of the Soros Empire started in the middle of the ’80s and continues today. It aims to liquidate, to undermine everything for which in the twentieth century millions shed their blood: democracy, freedom, self-determination, and national sovereignty. His organizations, ensnaring the whole world, now want to undermine the very foundations of our identity. They want to reeducate our children, destroy our families, and take our country.30
Thus, the philanthropist who funds education and programs for democracy and for the most deprived is depicted as the evil head of an organization attempting to destroy Hungary and the surrounding region.
Renationalized history can channel deep discontent into anger at alleged national humiliation and at those who dare deny Hungarian superiority. The supposedly glorious past is used both as a legitimization of the policies of the present regime and as a means of inciting emotions. It is easier to foment hate than to either provide a decent standard of living or face the past as it really was. In that way, any account that does not aggrandize the nation demeans it. Thus, those who point to Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust as well as those who speak of Hungarian raiders in the tenth century are out to depict Hungarians in an unjustifiably negative light, and decry the nationalist “truth” of sole German responsibility for the destructions of Hungarian Jews and Hungarian warriors fighting in the interest of the state in the tenth century. Antisemitism is a strong motif in renationalized history; it also flows into the claim of a conscious conspiracy to topple “Christian Europe” and governmental rhetoric of a conspiracy against “Christian” Hungary.
There are, of course, varying interpretations of historical events; however, the renationalized version tendentiously distorts the past, ignoring facts, de-contextualizing information, and creating a closed system in which upholding national pride is the main aim. Facts that are incompatible with that purpose are, therefore, automatically rejected. The use of what is billed as national history in political speeches is accompanied by a range of measures both to normalize a government-approved national history as the only historical reference point and to saturate public life with it. This includes the wholesale rewriting of history: the creation of research institutes, books, and school textbooks; a constant airing of national history themes on public media; the renaming of streets; and the construction and deconstruction of monuments. It is increasingly difficult for average citizens who are not fully cognizant of politically motivated rewritings (as opposed to experts) to distinguish between scholarly writings arising from serious research and distortions churned out by the government-sponsored propaganda machine. Wikipedia articles on Hungarian history, especially those in English, are also under constant assault. Antisemitism is one of the keystones of the entire endeavor and cannot be understood without it. As long as the current narrative of renationalized history is in place in Hungary, all attempts to combat antisemitism will be fruitless.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nora Berend
Nora Berend, a native of Hungary, is Professor of European History at the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. Her book, At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and Pagans in Medieval Hungary c. 1000–c. 1300, which won the Gladstone Prize, explores the relationship between Christians and non-Christians in a kingdom on the frontier of Latin Europe. She was the editor of Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–1200, which analyzes the interconnected processes of Christianization and the establishment of political power. She is presently focusing on the formation of identity in medieval and modern times.
Notes
1 Márk Herczeg, “Rogánék a bíróságon azzal védekeztek hogy a nemzeti konzultáció egyik tételmondatának nincs köze az alatta lévő magyarázó szöveghez ami amúgy is csak vélemény,” !!444!!!, December 13, 2017, https://444.hu/2017/12/13/roganek-a-birosagon-azzal-vedekeztek-hogy-a-nemzeti-konzultacio-egyik-tetelmondatanak-nincs-koze-az-alatta-levo-magyarazo-szoveghez-ami-amugy-is-csak-velemeny.
2 Christian-Zsolt Varga, “Zwei Minuten Hass: So reagiren die Ungarn auf die Kampagne gegen George Soros,” Ostpol, July 11, 2017, https://ostpol.de/beitrag/4941-zwei-minuten-hass-so-reagieren-die-ungarn-auf-die-kampagne-gegen.
3 See, for example, Ádám Lestyánszky, “A PEN International a Soros-kampány befejezésére szólította fel Orbánt,” The Budapest Beacon, July 20, 2017, https://hu.budapestbeacon.com/kiemelt-cikkek/pen-international-soros-kampany-befejezesere-szolitotta-fel-orbant/.
4 MTI, “Az ellenzék Soros György kezében van, ő mozgatja a szálakat,” Origo, January 17, 2019, https://www.origo.hu/itthon/20190117-az-ellenzek-soros-gyorgy-kezeben-van.html.
5 “Fidesz: a tüntetők nem tisztelik a magyar emberek döntését,” Népszava, December 14, 2018, https://nepszava.hu/3018612_fidesz-a-tuntetok-nem-tisztelik-a-magyar-emberek-donteset. A recent accusation, for example: ATV Híradó report “A Fidesz szerint Soros beszállt a kampányba, az MSZP viszont azt mondja, 2006-ban a Fidesz fordult az EBESZ-hez,”ATV, January 20, 2022, https://www.atv.hu/belfold/20220120/a-fidesz-szerint-soros-beszallt-a-kampanyba-az-mszp-viszont-azt-mondja-2006-ban-a-fidesz-fordult-az-ebesz-hez.
6 Zsófia Blaskó, “Antiszemita plakátok jelentek meg az Index újságíróiról Budapest-szerte,” Mérce, November 24, 2019, https://merce.hu/2019/11/24/antiszemita-plakatok-jelentek-meg-az-index-ujsagiroirol-budapestszerte/.
7 Sándor Czinkóczi, “Kiakadt a román külügy Lázár Trianonról szóló beszéde miatt,” !!444!!!, June 9, 2017, https://444.hu/2017/06/09/kiakadt-a-roman-kulugy-lazar-trianonrol-szolo-beszede-miatt; Róbert Friss, “Holokauszt vs. Trianon,” Népszava, May 9, 2015, https://nepszava.hu/1056513_holokauszt-vs-trianon.
8 For Orbán’s full speech see https://demokrata.hu/magyarorszag/orban-viktor-beszede-az-osszetartozas-emlekhely-avatasan-281121/.
9 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando, 1970), p. 52.
10 For Orbán’s full speech see: https://keszuljetek.hu/orban-viktor-unnepi-beszede.
11 Péter Gróf and György Szabados, Történelem Tankönyv 5 (Budapest, 2020), p. 115.
12 William McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1985); see also the analysis by Chris Lorenz, “Drawing the Line: ‘Scientific’ History between Myth-making and Myth-breaking,” Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock (eds.) (New York, 2011), pp. 34–55.
13 Barna Borbás, “Szinte az összes tudós felállt, miután a Kásler-féle intézet ‘einstandolta’ az év történelmi kiállítását,” Válasz online, January 11, 2022, https://www.valaszonline.hu/2022/01/11/kiralyok-es-szentek-kiallitas-szekesfehervar-magyarsagkutato-nemzeti-muzeum-hatter/. The term magyarság is equivalent to the German Deutschtum.
14 Péter Hamvay, “Kiengesztelhetik a Magyarságkutató szerepe miatt tiltakozó kutatókat,” Hvg.hu, January 19, 2022, https://hvg.hu/itthon/20220119_Kulon_kotetbe_adjak_ki_a_tiltakozo_kutatok_tanulmanyat.
15 George Bernard Shaw in The World (November 15, 1893), cited in Bernard F. Dukore (ed.), Not Bloody Likely! And Other Quotations from Bernard Shaw (New York, 1996), p. 142.
16 Ádám Kolozsi, “Finnugorok helyett hun rokonságról tanulnak az ötödikesek,” Telex, October 11, 2020, https://telex.hu/tudomany/2020/10/11/teherbe-eshet-aki-turullal-almodik.
17 Péter Urfi, “A kormány babérkoszorút nyújtott át az irónak aki szerint a zsidótörvények a zsidók érdekeit szolgálták,” !!444!!!, March 12, 2019, https://444.hu/2019/03/12/a-kormany-baberkoszorut-nyujtott-at-az-ironak-aki-szerint-a-zsidotorvenyek-a-zsidok-erdekeit-szolgaltak.
18 Ádám Kolozsi, “A Szent Korona auratisztítójának adott lovagkeresztet Kásler,” Telex, September 2, 2021, https://telex.hu/kult/2021/09/01/a-szent-korona-auratisztitojanak-adott-lovagkeresztet-kasler.
19 Gróf and Szabados, op. cit., p. 67.
20 Dániel Kacsoh, “Nagy idők állnak előttünk, de bátorságra van szükség,” Magyar Hírlap, September 5, 2020, https://www.magyarhirlap.hu/belfold/20200905-nagy-idok-allnak-elottunk-de-batorsagra-van-szukseg?fbclid=IwAR3HAbw0sxLL87rWkZzk9okVmv6fCJ61irXROLZwtrc2oYo0O9KyOvIwjLM.
21 9/2019 (II. 5) Korm. rendelet a VERITAS Történetkutató Intézet és Levéltárról 3. § https://net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=A1900009.KOR&searchUrl=/gyorskereso%3Fkeyword%3DVeritas.
22 “Idegenrendészeti eljárás a zsidók halálba küldése,” Index, January 17, 2014, https://index.hu/belfold/2014/01/17/idegenrendeszeti_problema_a_zsidok_deportalasa/.
23 For testimonies and a bibliography in English, see http://degob.org/index.php?showarticle=2019.
24 Nora Berend, “Hongrie: le travestissement gouvernemental de la mémoire de la Shoah,” L’Atelier international des usages publics du passé, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, September 5, 2014, http://usagespublicsdupasse.ehess.fr/961/.
25 Orbán expounded upon his ideas in a letter, available (in Hungarian) at http://www.origo.hu/attached/20140430davidk.pdf.
26 Krisztián Ungváry, “A káosz háza,” Magyar Narancs, March 7, 2002, No. 10, https://magyarnarancs.hu/konyv/a_kaosz_haza-59381; András Mink, “Kommunizmus, terror, Péter Gábor ollója,” Beszélő, VII:3, http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/kommunizmus-terror-peter-gabor-olloja. See also Heidemarie Uhl, “Conflicting Cultures of Memory in Europe: New Borders between East and West?” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, III:3 (2009).
27 Péter Borhegyi (ed.), Történelem Tankönyv 7 (Budapest, 2016), pp. 185–86, 188.
28 László Csősz, Antiszemita zavargások, pogromok és vérvádak 1945–1948, Társadalmi Konfliktusok Kutatóközpont, http://konfliktuskutato.hu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=140:antiszemita-zavargasok-pogromok-es-vervadak-1945-1948&catid=16:esetek.
29 Ignác Romsics (ed.), Bethlen István emlékirata 1944 (Budapest, 1988), p. 99.
30 “A nagy terv: A Soros-birodalom Közép- és Kelet-Európában, ” XXI Intézet, August 26, 2021, https://www.xxiszazadintezet.hu/a-nagy-terv-a-soros-birodalom-kozep-es-kelet-europaban/
