MEP Gyöngyösi on Russia’s fasification of history

Válasz Online has recently published István Kollai’s piece – as a response to one of the most “destructive” Magyar Nemzet articles in the past few years. I believe every adult Hungarian citizen is responsible for the state of Hungary’s public discourse, so I thought it was important for me to respond, not as a politician but as a Hungarian citizen. Consequently, I am not going to address partisan political issues in this article. Instead, I am going to focus on the objective truth and the issues that should have the same meaning for everyone. Except for those who think that the partisan view is the only possible view on life…

“History is the teacher of life” and “those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it” – many wise quotes address the importance of how we, both as individuals and groups, must be aware of the acts committed by our ancestors. No surprise there: our intention to systematically record our past is as old as the first human civilization.

Of course, the way how people transferred their knowledge of past events and how they presented them to the next generations has changed a lot over time. From the minstrels and folk ballads of bygone eras, we have gotten to the modern historical science which relies on several ancillary sciences to understand and systematically record what happened to humans. Throughout all those centuries however, the ultimate goal remained the same: to remember the glorious deeds and the catastrophic failures as well as to learn from success and disaster alike.

With the ever-faster flow of information, we have had more and more opportunities to widen our scope with new aspects and understand how the success of a particular group may be viewed completely differently by another.

This kind of knowledge enables and requires us to integrate the experiences of other groups into our own, thus building us and helping us to understand what happened.

“History is always somebody’s opinion”, says the pessimistic adage, and not always without merit. Ever since the existence of monarchs and political agendas, the study of history has always been accompanied by an effort to subjugate it to ideological or even partisan goals. Beside ruling the present and the future, decision makers and their minions thought they had to rule the past as well, even if it meant that they had to completely rewrite interpretation frames in order to straighten out the detours of the ruling logic.

In addition to the chronological and systematic recording of events, the study of history has always involved passing judgements and drawing conclusions. This is completely natural. What is not natural however, is the distortion of actual facts in an effort to draw the “appropriate conclusion”. This is something that must immediately be rejected by all who love history. I am not suggesting that debates about the evaluation of an era, which can offer new aspects to enrich our knowledge, are unwanted or without merit. What I am suggesting is that meaningful debates cannot be conducted unless the facts are fully respected by everyone, and the participants of the debate not only listen to the other party’s arguments but try to understand them as well.

What is presented in the Russian textbook is nothing but a falsification of history.

To call the participants of Hungary’s 1956 revolution fascists and arrow-cross members or to state that the uprising was driven by Western secret services is not just offensive to Hungarians. It is an objective lie, too. As a lie, it is also a political attack on universal science, which has very clear records and evidence of the reasons and events of the 1956 revolution in Hungary, just like we have very clear and properly researched knowledge of the reasons and manner of the Soviet withdrawal in 1991. These are not opinions; they are hard facts that have just been distorted and falsified by Russia to provide moral grounds for the Soviet Union’s rehabilitation in line with the momentary interests of the current leadership. We are talking about the Soviet Union that was a murderous, genocidal regime, not just according to the moral norms of 2023 or the opinions of some western countries. It was responsible for the death and misery of tens of millions of people.

Since it also affected Hungary, all reasonable Hungarian people rightfully expected their government to contact Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and protest against not only the offensive statements, but the falsification of history, too.

But it never happened. Despite how bravely the Fidesz government summons ambassadors and how fervently it reacts to criticism, the Hungarian foreign ministry kept silent this time. The Prime Minister, who never misses out on using the word “sovereignty” when he claps back at critics, failed to speak up, too. Finally, Fidesz’ leading figure in cultural policy Szilárd Demeter was able to produce a reaction saying he was upset by this “point of view”, but it was an understandable Soviet interpretation of the events. After that, state secretary of foreign affairs Tamás Menczer added that they would rather not address the matter.

The embarrassing silence and the trivialization by lower-ranking officials reveal two things. The first one is the true nature of the Orbán government’s relationship with Russia. Back in Hungary, the government tries to explain away its Russia relations (which estranged it from the whole of Europe, by the way) saying we are a sovereign country that builds relations on an equal basis just like such powers as Germany and France do, but the reality is that Viktor Orbán’s and Péter Szíjjártó’s relationship with Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov is just as consensual as Leonid Brezhnev’s famous kiss on János Kádár’s lips. (Just in case you don’t know the background: Kádár was always terrified of Comrade Brezhnev’s greetings to his mouth, but the Soviet comrades never asked him about it, and he thought he had better not complain.) Now, decades later, the Hungary-Russia relations are so unequal again that the Hungarian foreign minister thinks he had better not raise these issues at all. So much about sovereignty…

In the meantime, many people, myself included, thought that the best response to the left’s lies and distortions of history is to view events objectively. In contrast, Fidesz believed the best solution was to rewrite Hungarian history to make it more “jingoistic”, not refraining from massaging the facts or, if need be, to completely misinterpret and falsify events.

When the leading government propaganda outlet releases an article that present the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia as the continuation of Hungarian territorial revisionism, explaining that we must interpret history from a special “Hungarian point of view”, and printing such concrete lies that Communist dictator Kádár’s Hungarian occupying troops arrived in Czechoslovakia as liberators and were greeted as such by the local Hungarian population, it certainly must be hard for the government to find the moral ground to condemn Russia’s falsification of history. Back in 1968, the commanders of the Socialist Hungarian army took particular care to make sure that none of the soldiers could assume any similarity to the events of 1938, and the local Hungarian population was not at all happy to see this army that was much more Socialist than Hungarian, both in spirit and in actions. These are the facts of history.

Now you can easily realize why Szilárd Demeter, while personally unable to identify with the “Soviet interpretation” of 1956, finds it understandable.

What you see here in action is the method used by authoritarian regimes to create their own interpretations (lies) about history in order to construct their own mythology and support their ideology’s occasionally creaking pillars with all those “historical lessons”.

Indeed, it would be very strange if Hungary’s ruling party tried to blame Putin for something that Fidesz also does to Hungarian history.

This mentality is typical of Nazism and Bolshevism, and has nothing to do with conservatism, but this is not even the biggest trouble with it. This should be a problem for Fidesz members who claim to be conservatives or the voters who cast their ballot for Fidesz because they saw all kinds of Christian and civil virtues in Antal Rogán’s political products. Even more importantly, this mentality is nothing but intellectual well poisoning, in other words, the prevention of future generations from being able to draw their own conclusions by studying their real history. This mentality prevents us from learning the lessons from our failures and falls, but it also falsifies and corrupts our happiness about the elevating chapters of our history, of which we Hungarians fortunately have quite enough not to have to make up and write new ones that never existed.

The biggest and universal problem is that this mentality sidelines history as a science. If we allow ideologues to parrot that history is nothing but an opinion and the most partisan science, and to use it as a pretext to deliberately misinterpret and falsify facts, then there’s no need for anyone to study history at all. We can throw the entire history of Hungary out of the window, too, and write a new one where we come from the star Sirius, Hungarian is the original language of mankind, we can win the battle of Mohács, Rákóczi can conquer the world and Kossuth can establish the Danube Republic.

If enough nations put sufficient effort into this “project” for decades, slowly but surely, we can get back to the age of overflowing national romanticism and start waging wars on national basis, trying to reclaim what we lost. Each their own. It will be great, won’t it? No. Remember: “those who forget their history…”

Disclaimer: the sole liability for the opinions stated rests with the author(s). These opinions do not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Parliament.