Jobbik’s Unholy Alliance

It seems that these days hatred, and the right to use it, even in defence of one’s nation, race, and culture, has to be offset by plenty of misplaced love. This is the take home message from Gábor Vona’s recent trip to Turkey, where the president of the Hungarian nationalist party Jobbik has been declaring his “Eurasian love”:

I didn’t come here to talk to you about the transitory subject of diplomatic and economic relations. Others will do that on behalf of me. I came here to meet my brothers and sisters, to offer a fraternal alliance and bring you the good news: Hungarians are awakening. Our common mission and the universal task of Turanism [see also Hungarian Turanism] are to build bridges between East and West, between Muslims and Christians, to be able to fight together for a better world – to show to the world that Christians and Muslims are not enemies, but brothers and sisters. No one can accomplish this mission more effectively than Hungarians and Turks because we are connected by common blood.

That’s all we need, European nationalist parties endorsing the very people most bent on colonizing and destroying Europe. Turkey, let us remember, is hostile to Greece and Golden Dawn, supports the Islamic jihad in Syria (along with Israel and the USA), harbours Chechen terrorists, and is seeking to extend neo-Ottoman influence in the Balkans through supporting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And this is the country that Jobbik wants to French kiss and take home to meet its mother!

Of course, “Love” is not a word usually associated with Jobbik. Thanks to the antinationalist bias of the mass media, Jobbik is better known for its hatreds of Jews, Gypsies, and the various nationalities that surround the ill-drawn borders of the Hungarian nation.

There is nothing wrong with hatred in itself. It can be good or bad, depending on circumstances; just or unjust. Without hatred of that which harms nothing can survive. So it is quite possible that Jobbik may be justified in some if not all its hatreds.

But there are two problems with Vona’s hands-across-the-Bosporus approach. The first problem is the need, as shown here, to apparently offset sincere and possibly justified hatred of Hungary’s enemies with an insincere, contrived, or simply misplaced love for something else. The second problem is the mythic form of history and nationalism that Jobbik is indulging in, as opposed to actual history and reality.

This offsetting of hate with ‘love’ has been seen before. The UK’s English Defense League, not content with simply loving itself (whatever its faults) and hating the colonization of the country by Islam, felt a need to declare its undying love for Israel and homosexuality into the bargain, a policy that they perhaps filched from Geert Wilders, who has enjoyed considerable success with it in “detoxing” his anti-Islamic message in an atmosphere of political correctness.

Such moves seem designed to say, “Hey, we’re not just about the hate, y’know. We’ve got some of the warm, gushy stuff as well.”

But assuming that it’s more than this, what could possibly be motivating Jobbik, a search for actual allies and support? Vona’s recent declarations are somewhat suspicious in that they seem to reflect the Eurasian geopolitics that the Kremlin is currently experimenting with:

In order to create a new value system and build a new strategy for the future it is paramount to simultaneously carry both the European and the Asian point of views. European practicality and the contemplative spirit of the East should be harmonized. I see three nations that may be suitable of such a harmonization: Russia, Turkey and Hungary. These are the three peoples that due to their history, and destiny preserved both European and Asian values. Therefore, the new Eurasian alternative should be articulated by these three nations.

This sounds like something Alexandr Dugin could have come up with, and well may have. It reminds us that, whenever considering the complex geopolitics of Eurasian states, it is always necessary to filter things through a vast amount of historical and geographical knowledge. That will alert you to the possibility that one thing may have something to do with something else not being reported on at the moment, like the fact that Russia has recently had a few difficulties with the Ukraine, which is just one of several countries that Jobbik has an ancestral beef with because it occupies lands that were once occupied by Hungary.

The idea of Hungarian history that Jobbik promotes is an extremely selective and distorted one, and is therefore guaranteed to cause problems. It is also the reason why Jobbik is seeking out such unlikely bedfellows. At the heart of this view is the idea of Turanism, the notion that the Hungarians are essentially a Turkic people from Central Asia (“Turan”).

There is some truth in this, and it is in fact a part of the national story, although only one part. It is nevertheless quite a distinctive and inspiring part of the national story, creating a sense of uniqueness and pride while also explaining the neighbouring enmities. But this narrative, on its own, is also highly distorting as it downplays the European elements of Hungarian identity – the Germanic, the Slavic, even the Catholic – which clearly outweigh the Asian elements.

In some way, Turkey, the country with which Vona craves mystic union, is as much a myth as Jobbik’s own preferred “Khanate of the steppes.” Turkey as it is now understood, essentially came into being in the 1920s, when the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Mustafa Kemal earned the title of Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”) by creating the streamlined and simplified idea of a modern Turkish national state out of the ruins of a polyglot Empire that had no specific national identity. To achieve this, all sort of omissions and fabrications were of course required.

But back to Hungary: The idea of Greater Hungary that Jobbik espouses is damaging not just to the reality of Hungary, which is a much more European country than Jobbik admits, but also damaging to Europe in general, both as a concept and actuality.

First, it weakens the idea of a collective European identity with clear borders and limits; while also suggesting that Europe can Europeanize whatever the world throws at it — a very dangerous idea in this day and age. It must be stressed that the Europeanization of the original Magyars, a comparatively small group, took centuries, involved isolation from the steppes, and required repeated racial admixture with European populations.

As Tom Sunic stresses, the last thing Whites need is a continuation of petty European nationalisms.

The interethnic resentments in Eastern Europe …  are very pronounced, and they often turn ugly. Thus the national identity of a Polish nationalist, who may otherwise agree on all points with his nationalist counterpart from Germany—such as their common criticism of globalism, their anticommunism and their antiliberalism — is often accompanied by strong anti- German feelings. One third of ethnic Hungarians — more than 2 million — living in Slovakia, Serbia and Romania typically define their national identity through their resentment of the peoples among whom they live. Czech nationalists seldom like to discuss with their German counterparts the issue of the forcible deportation of 3 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II. Despite some semblance of peace between Serbs and Croats, these two ethnically similar, neighboring peoples identify with two entirely different historical narratives and two completely different and mutually hostile and exclusive victimhoods. (Tom Sunmic, “Ethnic Identity versus White Identity: Differences between the U.S. and Europe,” The Occidental Quarterly, Winter 2012–2013, 51–64.)

Alongside these mistaken ideas, is the notion that the surest way to get ahead in a world that hates Whites is to stop identifying as White. By rebranding themselves as “Turans” and Asians, Jobbik obviously hopes to qualify for all the privileges that non-Whites enjoy – the freedom to hate and be racist, first and foremost among them. Identifying themselves with Islam offers the same advantages, especially if they make the effort to criticize the anti-Muslim parties that are common in the rest of Europe.

The trouble here is that the Hungarians are in fact too White and the world is unlikely to allow them to get away with this. Jobbik’s negative attitudes toward Jews and Gypsies will ensure that, regardless of their temporary expediency for the likes of Russia and Turkey, the world will still continue to consider them as evil, White racists.

The idea that hate needs to be balanced by at least an equal amount of love expended elsewhere may well have something in it. In that case, it would make much better sense both tactically and spiritually for Jobbik to throw away its petty, divisive nationalism and myths of Eurasian glory, and instead love its neighbours in the European family of nations and direct its hatred accordingly.