Tom Sunic’s letter to the US Ambassador to Hungary

October 11, 2014

Mr. André Goodfriend
Chargé d’Affaires
Embassy of the United States of America
Szabadság tér 12
H-1054 Budapest

Dear Mr. Goodfriend,

As an American citizen I would hereby like to express my concern over the recent decision by the Hungarian government to ban the National Policy Institute (NPI) conference which had been scheduled to take place in Budapest from October 3 to October 5, 2014. I would also like to express my dismay at the arrest and expulsion of my good colleague, the NPI Chairman, Mr. Richard Spencer, whose colleagues and I decided to proceed with the conference despite the previous ban by the Hungarian government. The interdiction of the conference by the Hungarian government caused severe financial losses to the organizers, to the speakers, as well as to all registered and would-be attendees of the conference.

While I am aware that the truncated NPI conference, held in private in Budapest on October 4, was in legal defiance of the earlier decision made by the Hungarian government, let me also state the following: The NPI has hosted over the years prominent scholars in the field of sociobiology and political science, both from the USA and Europe. Contrary to frequent media headlines and often bizarre speculations, as well as the earlier statements issued by the Hungarian government about the alleged NPI racist gathering, the speakers, including myself, at that smaller version of the event did not preach xenophobia or promote racial hatred. Instead, the main focus of our short lectures was how to prevent nationalist and racial violence in the EU and the USA, which, as an historical rule, always occurs in forcibly and artificially created multicultural and multiracial social structures.

Nor do I think that the chief of the police in Hungary, who deployed significant effort and manpower to prevent the NPI conference, can, with his own communist past, serve as a role model to teach the NPI the meaning of tolerance. With my background in linguistics and political science, I tend to be somewhat suspicious when the media or the political class all too often label their political opponents with increasingly meaningless words such as “white supremacists,” “racists,” or “fascists.”  In former communist Hungary, or for that matter in former communist Yugoslavia, any political dissent was labeled by the standard communist vernacular — as “fascist.”

On a personal note let me point to a small historical irony. My late father, the Catholic attorney Mirko Sunic, also broke the Yugoslav law in 1983, after having been involved in “hostile propaganda,” under Section 131 of the Yugoslav Criminal Code. He was sentenced to four years of prison, and his case was championed by the US and French Amnesty International. The late American Congressman of Hungarian background, Tom Lantos, along with some other US Congressmen, also intervened on my father’s behalf.

In my name and on behalf of my colleagues from the NPI I demand apologies from the Hungarian government for having caused unnecessary stress and unexpected and additional financial costs to my colleagues, to our guests and to myself, including the NPI Chairman Mr. Richard Spencer.

Sincerely,

Tomislav (Tom) Sunic, PhD

cc:

1. HE Gábor Iván
Ambassador of Hungary to Croatia
Pantovčak 255-257
10000 Zagreb
Croatia

2. Mr. William Johnson, Esq.
Johnson & Associates
350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 190
Los Angeles, CA 90071
USA