In 1920, at Trianon, the negotiators of the winning WWI allied forces dictated terms of peace to Hungary that were and are unparalleled. ‘Cruel’ and ‘spiteful’ are the words that come to mind when we consider the aims and resulting pain that sprang from 2/3 of the country being stripped from Hungarian possession.
Hungary lost people, natural resources, a logical railway network and more besides. Millions of Hungarians immediately found that they were now citizens of other states. Second-class citizens, to boot.
The chaos of the 20th century meant that even though the terms of the dictated peace deal were recognised as being nothing short of spiteful, no meaningful revision was ever achieved, and the Hungarians have long been forced to face the ignominious order from international sources to ‘just get over it!’. Yeah, try that one on for size – surrender, under duress, 2/3 of your country, watch as your brethren are treated badly in what was their own land, now gifted to others along with all the natural resources you had at your disposal, and just put it behind you. Believe us, it’s not possible.
The only people for whom the pain of Trianon fails to register are the vast majority of the Hungarian opposition.
As left-wing opposition, they are naturally born of communist and socialist parentage. This means that they have the credo of internationalism not nationalism tattooed proudly on their hearts.
They recoil from any display of national pride, unless it occurs in the sports arena. That, they can stomach, just.
The Hungarian Left see their brethren, their kin from across the borders as a target. It has always been thus. As committed internationalists, they refer to traditional Hungarian cities by the names that they were re-christened with when the territories were lost to other states. To the Left, the Hungarians that are compelled to live outside the borders of the country are not Hungarians, but Slovaks, Ukrainians, Romanians, Serbians and Croats.
Much as the Left regard the native inhabitants of these countries positively, they regard Hungarians from these countries with deep-rooted suspicion. The Left’s view is that these Hungarians are to be feared. Less well-off than Hungarians in Hungary, the Left, ever fearful of naturally proud Hungarians, peddle the idea that these Hungarians from beyond the border intend to relocate to within the borders of modern Hungary to benefit themselves.
As a result, for the Left, these people are targets to be continually attacked, no matter how distasteful a task that truly is.
Masters of the kindergarten-level tactic of expressing outrage all the time, no matter what the situation is, the Leftwaffe can regularly be heard erupting in indignation, both within parliament and without.
And nothing has changed with the circumstance of the current pandemic. Just as the Left have sought to repeatedly hobble the government’s attempts to provide respite for the nation, so have they fixed their guns repeatedly on Hungarians living on the other side of the borders.
When the Hungarian government sent personal protective equipment in the form of face masks to Hungarians living beyond the borders, one of the most dented, shop-soiled stars of the Leftwaffe attacked the idea of solidarity between Hungarians no matter where they live. Tímea Szabó, a woman permanently on the edge of a self-induced nervous breakdown, attacked the government’s decision to provide tens of thousands of masks to those in need outside of Hungary. Her outrage at providing help for others provoked satirical applause to drown her out.
For the government, Csaba Dömötör summed up that which everyone with both a heart and a brain felt when he finished his response to Szabó’s outrageous outburst:
“Shame on you!”
But to the Leftwaffe, Hungarians are always fair game, and this season never closes. The blackest day remains that day in December 2004 when, in a referendum, the Hungarian population, stirred up by socialist propaganda, didn’t vote in large enough numbers, thereby preventing Hungary from offering citizenship to Hungarians living outside the modern borders of the country. The vote followed a campaign by the then-governing socialists led by Fletó Gyurcsány which succeeded in scaring people into thinking that there was a more than realistic chance that Hungarians from across the borders would flood the country snatching jobs and claiming pensions to which they had not contributed.
A black day. Long since rectified, but a black day nonetheless.
The anti-Hungarian campaign continues, however, a permanent feature of the Hungarian Left’s bill of fare.
Ágnes Vadai, one of the less stable members of Fletó’s new party, revealed recently that her party, the Democratic Coalition (DK), had sent a written request to the Prime Minister to demand that information be provided regarding vaccines and Hungarians living outside the borders of modern-day Hungary.
We find ourselves being tossed hither and thither in a sea of uncertainty by the emergence of a virus of which we are stumbling, as a race, to comprehend and organise defences against. At a time like this what we need less of is the incessant stupidity of the Left.
No matter, what we can be assured of is that nothing will stop the stupidity that flows from the Left. Ágnes Vadai, a politician of a party which seeks to convince people not to have themselves vaccinated (for it is via this tactic that Vadai and her like seek political capital), is now attacking the premise of vaccinating Hungarian dual-citizens who live beyond the borders. Flip-flop. One minute they’re declaring that people should run in fear from any vaccine not yet rubberstamped by the EMA, an organisation which moves slower than anything else on earth, the next they’re complaining about the possible ‘loss’ of vaccines to those who don’t, in their eyes, count as ‘real Hungarians’.
By their incessant attempts to derail both vaccination plans and feelings of kinship, the Left in Hungary once more have shown their hand: divide and conquer is the only tactic that they value.
