Paul Gottfried on Viktor Orban and Hungarian Nationalism

Did readers see the stunning admissions made by Jewish professor Paul Gottfried in a recent VDARE essay?  Weekly Counter-Currents writer Andrew Hamilton kindly drew my attention to it this week.

Gottfried is of Hungarian Jewish origin and speaks quite candidly about events there past and present. His article, Viktor Orban And The National Question In Hungary, tells a familiar story. Viktor Orban is the current prime minister of Hungary, and like many other citizens of formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe, he does not buy into the guilt-inducing stories about World War II, nor does he accept the kind of multiculturalism now ravaging Western Europe and the Anglosphere.

Because he is a nationalist, and because Hungarians are White, this has excited the usual suspects — and Gottfried names them:

Hungarian artists and writers, and most notably Jewish ones, easily made their peace with the Soviets and their agents. It is not surprising that a very intelligent Hungarian Jewish Marxist of my acquaintance, Agnes Heller, has been livid with rage against the “Victator,” as Orban is now contemptuously called by his opponents.

One Green member of the European Parliament in particular, the famous lifetime leftist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, flies into rage when Orban’s name is mentioned. Describing the Hungarian head of state as an “authoritarian lunatic” may be the nicest thing that Cohn-Bendit has said about him.

Cohn-Bendit’s anger is spreading. As the Austrian member of the European Parliament Andreas Mölzer notes in Junge Freiheit, every day the European Union is looking for new measures by which to “quarantine” what it regards as the incipiently fascist regime in Budapest.

Gottfried correctly notes the parallel to Jewish and multicultural howling about leading Austrian politician Jorg Haider, though he neglects to mention what happened to Haider:

Only two weeks after his triumph in the Austrian elections, with his party sporting the biggest proportionate vote gain, and combined with his former Freedom Party coming very close to being the largest political bloc in the country, Jorg Haider was killed in a car crash on Saturday. (See In Memoriam: Jorg Haider – Tomorrow Belongs To Him? By Patrick Cleburne.)

The Jewish  state was, of course, outraged—so much so that they withdrew their ambassador. Imagine their shock that a European country wanted to retain its White Christian identity.

In my essay Jews Instinctively Fear and Feel Threatened by Nationalistic, Particularistic Societies, I explored this phenomenon. Interestingly, in Part II of the essay, I extensively discussed the unsavory life of aforementioned Daniel Cohn-Bendit. I give Gottfried credit for coming close to saying that it is normative among some Jews to hate Whites. Notice the consequences Gottfried lists:

But among those protesting Orban’s vision of a resurrected Hungarian nation, beside the inflamed multiculturalists and open-borders enthusiasts, is another group on the left.

They are the older, predominantly Jewish population—numbering now perhaps 100,000 out of a total TK population —whose families had been persecuted and sometimes murdered during the Nazi occupation and sometimes by Hitler’s Hungarian collaborators. Hungarian Jews often viewed Stalin’s armies and the Soviet victory as a godsend.

Indeed, Jews, including family members of mine, were heavily involved in two brutal communist dictatorships in Hungary, the first under Bela Kun (Kohn) 1919-1920 and the second under the Stalinist dictatorship of Matyas Rakosi (né Rosenfeld) 1945-1956. Wikipedia refers to these murderers as “atheists,” but they were ethnically Jewish. In Hungary the involvement of Jews in Communist regimes has inevitably generated anti-Semitism, which was already apparent in the uprising in 1956. Although the Israeli historian Jacob Talmon and Richard Pipes discuss this problem in their books, Wikipedia tries to ignore it and dwells on Christian and fascist anti-Semitism among the Magyars

No doubt most TOQ and TOO readers know this history, at least in part due to the frequent writing on the topic done by our editor. (See, for example, here, here, here and here).

Hats off to Professor Gottfried.