Jewish–Hungarian Conflicts and Strategies in the Béla Kun Regime, a Review-Essay of “When Israel is King” (Part 5 of 5)

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5118 words.

The casualty figures of dictatorships, political systems, or simply certain policies and views, play a significant role in historiography and mainstream political activism. There is a reason the mere lowering of the number of victims of what we know as the “Jewish Holocaust” is a crime in Hungary and many other countries. While the number of alleged or real victims of the Holocaust is protected by law, the questioning of Jewish responsibility is also “incitement against a community”—according to the Jewish Tett és Védelem Foundation (TEV), as already mentioned. While revisionism of any tragedy is academically legitimate, if the results of research give it foundation, we will see below that in the case of the victims and perpetrators of Bolshevism, a philosemitic slant dominates mainstream historiography.

Returning to the leitmotif of our study, in When Israel is King, the Tharaud brothers inevitably discuss the activities of the Lenin Boys. They mention that Bela Kun “sent [József Cserny] to Moscow to study terrorist organization. Cserny returned in a very short time, having been initiated in the right methods, and bringing with him eighty professional executioners for the further instruction of the Hungarians. A Russian Jew, Boris Grunblatt, and a Serbian burglar, Azeriovitch by name, were told off [sic] to recruit men for him in Budapest” (Tharauds, 2024, 123–124).

Regarding the number of victims of the red terror, publishing in the newspaper Népszava, Péter Csunderlik (2022) cites the official 1923 number of 590, which he claims is “relatively low compared to other countries” (note that we are talking about “only” 133 days), while also claiming that some of the victims were “killed in firefights or [were] common-law criminals executed for committing a crime,” revising the number to “380–365” (he adds that this might still seem high today, but “[i]n 1918–1920, the World War in Central and Eastern Europe was not essentially over yet”).

If they come for you and you let them kill you, this historian will generously consider you a victim—if you fight back, you are not even worth having your death be part of a list of martyrs. You are just a dead militant, apparently. Reasonably, dying while protecting yourself, your family and community, from illegally formed terror groups, would render one a victim—and a hero—but Csunderlik shrugs and lowers the number. That he accepts the claims of executions for crimes, made by a regime that sent terror groups to travel around the country, executing people based merely on suspicions, extrajudicially, might also raise concerns here about the author’s historiographical standards. We might wonder if Csunderlik would apply this kind of rigor to the number of victims of the so-called Jewish Holocaust’s official narrative (which, unlike our topic at hand, is actually protected from critique by law), and whether he would exclude large numbers of Jews from the list of those shot by, for instance, the Einsatzgruppen for partisan activities—or perhaps because they “did not have a Jewish identity” — as partisans, they were likely “internationalists,” after all.

It is worth noting here that, although no longer published by Communists, Népszava back then was the newspaper that published, perhaps with the greatest delight, the writings of Bolshevik leaders of the Kun regime during their reign, along with other propaganda pieces.

A Népszava article glorifies the “heroic” Kun regime (July 18, 1919)

Csunderlik (2023) does not only lower the “relatively low” number of victims—aside from denying the Jewish role—but is also in the habit of dismissing eyewitness reports with a mere wave of his hand—unlikely in the case of Jews claiming to be eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. In yet another piece regurgitating the exact same points we have already familiarized ourselves with earlier (sometimes for extended segments, word-for-word, with only minor additions), he accuses Cécile Tormay of spreading “lots of fake news, scare stories and untrue rumors” (ibid., 22, 23), and claims that her work is “full of verifiably fictional stories” (ibid.), without illustrating his claim with a single example, calling the book a “horror novel.”

As a Holocaust fact-checking revisionist myself, I am acutely aware of the tendency of emotionally involved—and perhaps traumatized—witnesses to be unreliable, and thus I apply that principle to Tormay’s work (or that of the Tharauds), as any reasonable person would. It is possible that some of the stories and details are inaccurate or untrue, and Tormay goes out of her way to underline that some of these things are things that she was told.

Csunderlik then mocks Tormay for thinking that the Galileo Circle was able to influence the war effort, leading to defeat, because of a segment of her book related to the Circle spreading anti-military flyers, calling it “laughable” that this could have had any influence (ignoring the fact that members of the movement were at the forefront of both the Aster Revolution and the Kun regime: their influence was significant). Csunderlik even fabricates a quote from her when he says that for Tormay “the domestic agents of the imagined ’Judeo-Bolshevik world-conspiracy’ were the atheist-materialist student association, the Galileo Circle, which produced anti-war pamphlets” (ibid.). Putting aside that the group did way more than just spreading flyers, nowhere in her work does the quoted text appear; it is presented as a direct quote in the Hungarian. But it is Csunderlik’s fixa idea to debunk this “world-conspiracy” theme by emphasizing how non-religious these Jews were, making anything “Judeo” self-evidently absurd in his presentation, attempting to keep Jewishness within a religious framework, conveniently—something we have already addressed. (That some members of the Circle, incidentally, literally worked with Soviet Bolshevik agents, making themselves “agents,” has also been shown earlier from Russian archival material.)

In Hungary “[p]ublic denial of the crimes of the National Socialist and Communist regimes” is a crime: according to the 1978. IV. law (modified in 2010): “Anyone who denies, doubts or trivializes the fact of genocide and other acts against humanity” in public, committed by these regimes, “commits a crime and is liable to up to three years’ imprisonment” (269/C. §). Note that this crime relates only to “the Holocaust”: if one publicly “violates the dignity of a Holocaust victim in public by denying, casting doubt on, or trivializing” the official story. Applying the extremely low standard for what counts as “Holocaust denial” in the country, Csunderlik might just be “trivializ[ing]” the Kun regime’s “acts against humanity” while violating the dignity of victims he doesn’t even consider victims. Of course, it is well-known that nobody actually gets in trouble in Hungary for trivializing or denying Communist crimes, nor for displaying their symbols publicly (NJSZ, 2023) — another supposedly illegal act (269/B. §). (On the anniversary of the Kun regime’s proclamation, a small group of Bolsheviks publicly commemorated the event, protected by police when a group of Nationalists showed up.)

Of course, the criminalization of research does not advance the truthful analysis of the past; the above is only to illustrate why the mainstream discourse still maintains that the Jewish role is taboo in such a biased system, since—if such regulation exists at all—instead of the author facing legal problems, Csunderlik’s article was funded with a grant from the state-funded Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Given that the young historian does not believe “that ’the truth’ of history can be known” because of the inherent biases of researchers (noting also that “if there is a ’truth’ at all, since postmodern historical theory denies it”), he has no reason to worry within a neoliberal, postmodernist establishment. With this attitude, his career will most likely continue to develop—something he surely knows already.

Péter Csunderlik (source: hirklikk.hu)

It can be added to the above, that according to Csunderlik, for example, we cannot even speak of a Hungarian nation from the period before the French Revolution (including the Árpád era), because modern nations were created only after the Revolution—which, in the light of the above, I believe, is a typical act of logical manipulation, and again, deriving from a predictable worldview. Of course, our ancestors are our ancestors, and how much we have to do with them is not changed by the French Revolution in any way. The understanding of nationhood does change somewhat over a thousand years, but our ancient codex-type gesta books, both the twelfth-century Gesta Hungarorum and Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, emphasize the importance of common ancestry, which is the basis of the natio; i.e., the same stock of blood. These works are, in fact, national epics. (Hungarians are genetically related to their ancestors, see my earlier study introducing some of the genetic research on this topic: Csonthegyi, 2023). Gyula Kristó (1990, 430–431), a researcher of the Árpád-era Hungarians, states that “from the turn of the 11th–12th centuries onwards, the Hungarian [national] consciousness was—we can conclude with great certainty—established, based on the common (Hungarian) language and the tradition of common origin,” and then he mentions measures aimed at the protection of the “Hungarian” ethnic group, separate from others.

So we have learned from the above that the Jewish group is not a Jewish group because it is atheistic, and the history of Hungarians is not Hungarian because the modern concept of nation was developed at a later point in time. And if another interpretation becomes dominant next year, we may also learn that Hungarians were not Hungarians this year, either. Whether the historian will also explain to the Jews that they have nothing to do with their own past is unlikely—such semantic misrepresentation is presumably used for other purposes. According to Pew Research (2013, 54–55), for the vast majority of Jews today, “remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of what being Jewish means”—that is, modern Jewish identity is a post-Holocaust identity that Jews before the Holocaust could not have had: can we even talk about “Jewish” victims if the Jewish self-image today is somewhat different from that back then, following strictly Csunderlik’s logic? In any case, if this historian is in the habit of reducing victim numbers, and if atheism and internationalism, or the lack of professed Jewish identity, mean that a Jew is not a Jew, his task could be to subtract those from the magical “six million” number—based on the principles of ethics and logical consistency.

Victims and Perpetrators

In a desperate attempt to downplay the role of the Jews, Géza Komoróczy also manipulates the data in the usual, infantile way (e.g., Jewish Communists were not Jews because they were Communists, etc.); for example, he emphatically notes that the “not (!) Jewish” József Cserny was the commander of the Lenin Boys (Komoróczy, 2012, 361), presumably because of his Hungarian origin, so apparently no sealed and notarized proof stating ethnic identity is required, and mere origin is sufficient to classify persons as part of ethnic groups—unless the Jewishness of Jews is to be obfuscated.

As for commanders: it is well known that—while he may have had some autonomy—it was Béla Kun, Béla Vágó, Ernő Seidler, Ottó Korvin, and Tibor Szamuely, who were in command of the Cserny squad, as well as Ede Chlepkó; see for example: “Ede Chlepkó Hantos called József Cserny on the same day and ordered him to arrest and execute those named”—we read in the work of Péter Donáth (2012, 153), where we find several similar statements, including Cserny himself and others claiming that they received orders mostly from Chlepkó (ibid., 166ff). Péter Konok (2010, 77) also states that the forces led by Korvin and Szamuely “also used the Cserny group against the counter-revolutionary forces in the interior”—indicating that they were in command. The commanders named here are all Jews (Korvin was later executed for this reason).
And did the non-Jew Cserny hate Hungary and its culture? Was he a psychopath? Note that the original Cheka was made up largely of non-Russians, and the Russians in the Cheka tended to be sadistic psychopaths and criminals (Werth, 1999, 62; Wolin & Slusser, 1957, 6)—people who are unlikely to have any allegiance to or identification with their people. Indeed, that is the picture the thorough study from Donáth (2012) on the Cserny group paints of them, quoting extensively from their trials. Vilmos Böhm (1923, 382) himself commented: “Cserny’s character is illustrated by the fact that after the fall of the revolution he betrayed his comrades in prison with sadistic lust, and even led innumerable innocent people to the gallows by denouncing them.”

Komoróczy (2012, 363) then attempts to emphasize Jewish victimhood, by presenting two sets of data: the first set is the more well-known 590 number, of which 44 are considered Jewish; the second set is the number 626, of which 32 were supposedly Jewish. Additionally, he mentions a monument, erected in 1936 on Kossuth Square (Budapest), and the 497 names featured on it, of which 32 are Jewish. If we take the data presented by this philosemitic, Hebraist author as our foundation, then the Jewish victims of the Bolsheviks can be concluded as being 7.4 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.4 percent, respectively. This is proportionate to their share in society at the time; as is known, in 1910, Jews constituted 5 percent of the total population. However, since Jews had a heavy overrepresentation among the bourgeoisie, the researcher would expect that a dictatorship of the proletariat would produce more victims from this demographic. But according to this, that was not the case (instead, the regime primarily targeted poor rural Hungarians). In contrast to this, for the dictatorship itself, Jews were overwhelmingly responsible, thus, downplaying their role by pointing the finger at their victims, is a rather shameful tactic.

In his thorough study on Jews in Hungary—their numbers, influence, and prospects—Zoltán Bosnyák (1905–1952), one of the most prominent scholars of the Jewish question at the time, presented demographic data in general, but also of only “Torn-Hungary” (Csonka-Magyarország, i.e., present-day Hungary, after territorial losses) where Jews consisted 6.2 percent of the population in 1910 (Bosnyák, 1937, 10). The Kun regime mainly focused on this territory, making this number the most relevant for us. His data on the “upper ten thousand,” which is to say, in contemporary language, “the 1%” of society (supposedly the main enemy of the “proletarian” dictatorship) is heavily Jewish. In Bosnyák’s estimation “[o]ne third of the top ten thousand are Jews (plutocracy), the second third are related to Jews by blood (aristocracy), and the last third are pro-Jewish because they are dependent on and indebted to Jews (intellectual aristocracy)” (ibid., 80). According to this, we see again, that Jews were proportionately represented among the victims—until we take their share in the upper classes into account, which will render this proportion actually underrepresented. Bosnyák concluded that “one of the most important prerequisites for the final solution of the Jewish Question is the formation of a new, self-confident, racially conscious, Jew-free, leadership-oriented Hungarian middle and upper class” (ibid.). It is deeply tragic that the same Jewry, whose acquisition of power Bosnyák so passionately warned about, returned to power after 1945—and this Jewry sentenced him to death for that very warning. He was executed on October 4, 1952, by the newer Jewish dictatorship of Rákosi-Rosenfeld Mátyás, Farkas-Lőwy Mihály, Gerő-Singer Ernő, Révai-Lederer József, and their associates…

Zoltán Bosnyák

If we look at data about the Lenin Boys, we find what we could predict at this point: according to the research of historian Gergely Bödők (2018, 134): “Catholics, approaching 58 percent, are close to the national average (67 percent) for the whole population, making them the largest religious group. In ’second place,’ the Jewish denomination accounted for 21 percent, while 5–6 percent of the total population, and among the ’Lenin Boys’ they were nearly four times as much, making them the most over-represented. However, this is still far below the proportion of People’s Commissars of Jewish origin, which is estimated at 60–70%.” This tells us that Catholics were underrepresented (his Table 1 actually says 57 percent, not 58), but compared to victims, Jews were at least four times as likely to be the murderers, and 12–14 times as likely to be Commissars who were running the regime (not to mention that the Lenin Boys were commanded exclusively by Jews, as noted above). There were also 13 percent Reformed, 4 percent Evangelicals, 3 percent Greek Catholics, and 1 percent Orthodox and Unitarians, respectively, while 129 had no religion registered. This is only based on religious data, however, which is not the best, considering how, generally speaking, these young men tended to be atheists, and we must also remember that many Jews officially converted to Christianity in those decades, which helped them with social mobility. In other words, the ratio is likely higher still.

A well-known symbol of the so-called Jewish Holocaust in Hungary is the monument “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” and the story of the “Danube shootings.” It is less well-known that the method of execution using the Danube was first used by the Lenin Boys. The Tharaud brothers also describe the story of Sándor Hollán (1846–1919) and his son, Sándor Hollán, Jr. (1873–1919):

1. Hollan and his son, the one a former undersecretary for state, the other a railway director, were denounced by their concierge as being suspected of anti-Bolshevist tendencies, and their names appeared on the list of hostages drawn up by the sinister Otto Klein-Corvin. One night a motor lorry, driven by Red Guards, drew up at their door. “I am going to make it hot for these two,” declared a certain Andre Lazar, who was directing the expedition, and for whom the elder Hollan had once refused to sign a request asking that he should be dispensed from military service. The terrorists went into the Hollans’ house, arrested them, and forced them into the motor. (Tharauds, 2024, 126).

Then they were taken to the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, where they were shot from the back, into the Danube, or at least shot and then their bodies were thrown into it by the red terrorists. (There is no information on whether they resisted, so even Csunderlik-types are forced to count them among the victims.)

The sentencing and execution of József Papp by the Lenin Boys in Sátoraljaújhely (a city in the North-East of Hungary), April 22, 1919 (Hungarian National Museum)

Blinkens, Böhm, and the Bolsheviks

The narratives outlined earlier are, of course, propagated by the Open Society Archive (OSA), part of the Jewish George Soros-affiliated Central European University, which has been renamed the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archive after a major donation—the donors here being the father (and his wife, both Jewish), of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. According to the OSA, the over-representation of Jews can also be explained by the fact that at the time there was a “rigid political system that effectively excluded them from the political sphere,” so Jews were attracted to a new system (which is itself a Jewish motivation, but this may not be obvious to the OSA). The concept of Judeo-Bolshevism is sought to be debunked by claiming that the system had Jewish victims (just as German National Socialists had German victims, yet no one disputes that they were driven by German interests and identity), and by arguing that there were patriots among the Jews who, for example, opposed the loss of territories. They mention Vilmos Böhm, the Berinkey government’s Minister of War, as an example of this, but fail to add that Böhm, among others, was one of the facilitators of the Bolshevik takeover by collaborating with them, and he later became commander-in-chief of the Red Army. In this role, to portray him as patriotic, while part of the Bolshevik transformation of the country, is disgraceful.

As far as Böhm’s seemingly patriotic statements are concerned, it is worth recalling that in his 1923 book Két forradalom tüzében (In the Fire of Two Revolutions) he clearly states how the new regime feared the thousands of Szekler (Transylvanian Hungarian) troops, and therefore, instead of accepting losses of territory, they wanted to push the Hungarians closer to the Soviets, by agitating against the Western powers. After realizing that “the adoption of the [Vix] Note will create a storm in the country which will destroy any government which complies with the demands of the Note,” they decided that “the whole country must be called to armed defense, the Western orientation must be replaced by an Eastern orientation towards Russia,” and the Social Democrats “must agree with the Communist Party to establish an alliance with the Russian Soviet troops on the northern border of old Austria” (Böhm, 1923, 240–241, emphasis in the original).

As the reports made it clear that “the Szekler troops and officers would not leave their positions without a fight under any circumstances, would not retreat” (ibid.), Böhm says: “We had to take into consideration the mood and determination of these troops. If the government, without consulting them, simply orders them back from the frontier, thus sealing their fate and foregoing the possibility of liberating their country, in that case, this desperate armed force, under the influence of nationalist agitation, will undoubtedly turn against the government and the revolution, and its victory will lead to the victory of a bloody counter-revolution.” (Ibid.) Böhm’s Hungarian Wikipedia article even quotes from his patriotic speech to the Szeklers, but the above motivation is not explained there either. It is also noted in the article that “from the excessive pacifism of the Aster Revolution, by March 1919, he had come to the idea of armed defense of the homeland”—in words, at least, but then he handed the levers of power over to the Bolsheviks only days later, and instead of protecting the borders of the homeland, he turned the armed forces—under the red flag this time—against Hungarians themselves. Nevertheless, he is the positive example of Jewish patriotism in the Jewish Blinken OSA Archive.

As for the so-called northern campaign, it was also aimed at spreading Bolshevism, rather than regaining territory, which soon became clear indeed. As a result, the soldiers’ enthusiasm waned, and the forces collapsed—the Slovak Soviet Republic did not even last a month. The Jewish Zoltán Szántó, regimental commander of the Red Army, in his article The Role of the 1st International Red Army Regiment in the Northern Campaign, describes the titular event as “the sacrifice made by internationalists for the survival of Hungarian Soviet power…”—so not for territorial defense (quoted in Chishova & Józsa, 1973, 274).

Counter-Revolution and Red Collapse

While we are on the subject of victims, it is worth pointing out that the Hungarians did not just passively tolerate the Bolshevik terror but resisted it time and again. Relevant literature is the book of Lénárd Endre Magyar (2020) on the history of the counter-revolutionary events in Szentendre and the collection of notes by Pál Prónay’s (1963)—perhaps the most prominent counter-revolutionary. When Bolshevik power collapsed with the advance of the Romanian troops, this counter-revolutionary momentum was no longer contained by the hordes of Lenin Boys. This is how Lajos Marschalkó recalled the mobilization of the Hungarian resistance:

By the time the train of the People’s Commissars, loaded with treasures, left Hungary, the nucleus of the Hungarian National Army, which had been formed in Szeged under French occupation, mainly through the organizational work of Captain General Gyula Gömbös, was ready three months earlier to call Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy to lead it. When he arrives in Szeged at the end of April 1919, Gyula Gömbös prophesies of a new world. (Marschalkó, 1975, 193)

According to the Tharauds (2024, 154), Béla Kun “also firmly believed that a general revolution would break out simultaneously on the same day, July 20th, in Germany, England, Italy, and France. So he chose that date to launch his offensive. But that catastrophic day, July 20th, 1919, was a most peaceable one throughout Europe. The world revolution in which Bela Kun believed as naively as Karolyi had done a short time before did not take place. And to crown his humiliation he was very soon made to realize that his soldiers were useless.” Some of the leaders then fled to Russia, others, like Ottó Korvin, were captured and executed, while Tibor Szamuely did not wait his turn: he committed suicide at the Austrian border. As Dávid Ligeti (2019, 35) reminds us, “[t]he majority of politicians who then lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s were victims of Stalinist purges, i.e. they were executed on the orders of the Bolshevik dictator—besides Béla Kun, we can also mention the cases of József Pogány and Béla Vágó.”

“Our worker brothers, you are being deceived again!! Watch out, brother!! Don’t let them!!”—poster of the Awakening Hungarians (Ébredő Magyarok) group warning after the fall of the Kun regime that Jewish influence did not disappear

Towards the end of their work as chroniclers, the Tharaud brothers sum up the depressing mood after the storm, with poignant sympathy:

These brutal scenes no longer take place today, but the Jewish question remains. All Hungary has risen up to suppress the Jews. They wish to expel the five hundred thousand Galician Jews who arrived in the country during the war. The number of Jews admitted to the university has been limited so as to diminish their position in the liberal professions; the Masonic lodges, which had become almost completely Jewish, have been closed; everywhere Christian banks and cooperative societies are being established to replace the Hebrew middleman. Publishing houses and newspapers are being created whose mission it is to defend the national intellectuality. A violent struggle has been entered upon between two spirits and two races. (Tharauds, 2024, 160)

It was treachery, or—if we insist on being polite—a mistake on the part of those who were responsible for the Hungarian nation in the decades, or rather, centuries, preceding all this, to allow this group conflict to reach this point. The new Hungarian State of 1849, which had already planned the emancipation of the Jews, and the disastrous emancipation of 1867—the law, which was introduced by Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy (1823–1890) and was widely accepted by both the House of Representatives and the House of Lords—had already set the stage. There could be no excuse for not foreseeing where all this would lead—Győző Istóczy saw it clearly, as did those who helped him into Parliament, to represent this growing concern. The evisceration of rural Hungarians, the cultural and intellectual corrosion, and then the bloody mass murders, were all attributable to this—but only after a lost war, to be followed by yet another Jewish regime, from which Hungarians rebelled against again in 1956, for a few days at least. And the cycle continues to this day, with taxpayer-funded sectarian Jews filing criminal reports on Hungarians, for daring to ask for self-reflection over their past sins, or forcing Hungarians into hiding under pseudonyms in their own homeland, if they dare to question their mythical role as victims—since only Jews can be victims in this dynamic, and the perpetrators are Hungarians whose “identity” no philosemite sets extreme standards for by saying thay they don’t know whether Hungarians are Hungarians just because they were born one. If these ancestors had no excuse a century and a half ago, we really have none at all today. Istóczy tried to spur his compatriots to action just a decade before the Jewish terror:

And let those who can, do something for the cause, if for no other reason, then because we, the present generation, will somehow manage to get along with the issue as long as we live; but what fate awaits our children and grandchildren if things continue to go on as they have been going on, is another matter. (Istóczy, 1906, 20.)

It would, therefore, be worth listening to those, who foresaw where things were going: the Istóczys, the Bosnyáks, the Tormays, the Marschalkós, and many other truth-telling Hungarians who feared for their nation—or Frenchmen, like the Tharaud brothers, in this case. It’s been going on for thousands of years, time to draw the obvious conclusion, pleasant or not. The work of the French brothers is an old-new addition to this process.


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Pew Research Center. “A portrait of Jewish Americans: Findings from a Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center (2013).

Prónay Pál;  Szabó Ágnes, Pamlényi Ervin (eds.). “A határban a halál kaszál: fejezetek Prónay Pál feljegyzéseiből.” Budapest: Kossuth, 1963.

Werth, N. (1999). “A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union.” In Courtois, S., Werth, N., Panné, J., Paczkowski, A., Bartosek K., & Margolin, J. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. J. Murphy & M. Kramer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wolin, S., & Slusser, R. M. (1957). The Soviet Secret Police. New York: Praeger.

 

How to Survive Communism in the USA?

Communist Flag Protest

Editor’s Note: This is Tom Sunic’s article in one piece. Still having technical problems, but we’ll survive!

The fundamental mistake made by most American conservatives, both old and new, is to think of communism solely as a violent ideology designed to abolish private property. During the so-called Cold War, they imagined that by mimicking some communist practices they could tone down the very real communist threat and elicit some Soviet sympathy. They should have been more careful what they wished for. The reason why communism fell apart in the early 1990s in the communist East was due to the fact that communist ideologemes, such as the idea of progress, economic equality, and the instauration of a borderless and multiracial society, had been more successfully put into practice in the capitalist West than in the communist East — albeit under a less abrasive name and without resorting to a large scale state terror.

For many Americans, surviving communism is therefore a contradiction in terms given that they have already fully aligned themselves to the System, i.e., “the deep state”, oblivious to its repressive crypto-communistic principles. Unsurviving communism, by contrast, is a destiny of a hapless few who are prepared to live a life of dissent — and also pay a heavy price for their non-conformist views.

Modern day neo-communist BLM and antifascist activists in the US know well that parading with the name of communism could backfire. Their self-ascribed title “antifa” resonates far better in the ears and eyes of the modern media. Many of them, including many of their Democratic party overlords are heirs to a now defunct Homo sovieticus species who once thrived in communist countries of Eastern Europe. The twin brotherhood between former Homo sovieticus and the present Homo americanus has had a very long history irrespective of their often feigned feuds and fake semantic posturing. [i] Given that the US, since its inception, has also been involved in a large number of world-improving projects, not least its century-long messianic virtue-signaling adventures aimed at elevating foreign peoples world-wide to a global City on the Hill, it was to be expected that at some point the communist temptation would gain in popularity in a new garb and hit home in the US. For example, US campuses continue to be the main breeding ground of antifa activists, having now more of their adepts than campuses in Western Europe where, over the last decade, there has been a noticeable recycling to populism and nationalism by many former leftist, but also Jewish authors (Michel Onfray, Alain Soral, Eric Zemmour). In post-communist Eastern Europe, organized antifa groups and their LGBT sidekicks are virtually non-existent, except when temporarily hired and exported by EU or State Department-sponsored NGOs in order to unseat some local populist and anti-globalist ruler. Hatred against antifas in all segments of East European society is understandable given that for many the term antifascism rings the bell of communism. Worth recalling is that words and locutions containing nouns or modifiers related to the word “antifascism” were in surplus in all official communist documents in Eastern Europe, even on marriage certificates, lasting well into the late 1950s. During the Cold War, and without any exception, all East European dissidents were squarely depicted in communist court proceedings as fascist agents.

The brainwashing of young American masses by the word antifascism owes much to the early Bolshevik agitator Leo Trotsky and his collection of essays under the title What is Fascism and how to Fight it,[ii] in which he depicts fascism as the ultimate stage of capitalism and showing how communists in the USA must smash it:

The backwardness of the United State working class is only a relative term. In very many important respects, it is the most progressive working class of the world, technically and in its standard of living…The next historic wave in the United States will be the wave of radicalism of the masses, not fascism. Of course, the war can hinder the radicalization for some time, but then it will give to the radicalization a more tremendous tempo and swing.[iii]

The recent antifa riots in many large cities in USA are also a belated follow-up on riots carried out by antifa “sixty-eigthers” half a century ago all over the West. [iv] They were successful in imposing communist cultural hegemony in higher education and in paving the way, a decade later, for the political takeover by the Left. Sixty-eighters spawned the modern-day antifa. However, neither the psychology of sixty-eighters, nor their modern antifa offshoots can be fully grasped if one loses sight of the world order created jointly by the capitalist US and the communist Soviet Union in 1945, both being part of the common antifascist block. In the final analysis, the entire West, with America at the helm, is unable to repudiate modern antifa activists, let alone declare them a terrorist organisation, unless it first revises its own writing of the history of World War II and overhauls its own system of liberal governance.

The antifa mindset

Apart from the Gulag system and the topography of its countless killing fields, Communism must first and foremost be analysed as an anthropology, or better yet as a widespread social pathology, albeit savored and craved subconsciously by a very large number of its future victims. The obsession with the idea of equality and equal redistribution of goods and capital is as old as humanity itself irrespective of the name this obsession may carry in different countries and epochs. Several undeservedly forgotten authors such as Claude Polin and Alexander Zinoviev, already quoted in TOO on several occasions, long ago noted that it is a deadly mistake to view communism as the terror of the few against many; rather, “it is the terror of all against all at every moment.”

As the flower and crowning glory of communality, communism represents a type of society which is nearest and dearest to the masses no matter how dreadful the potential consequences for them might be.[v]

Long ago I wrote, based on the analyses of these and other authors dealing with the communist anthropology, that the faith in communism presupposes first and foremost a peculiar mindset whose historical realization has been made possible by primordial egalitarian impulses followed by negative socio-biological selection. Throughout man’s biocultural evolution egalitarian instincts have been held in check by cultural institutions and racial in-group constraints. With the advent of the mass multiracial system, deceptively called democracy, resistance to these animalistic and inborn instincts is becoming virtually impossible.

The contemporary USA is a good place to study the proto-communist mindset. The very abstract eighteenth-century Enlightenment-egalitarian-inspired statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was bound to open up a Pandora box of wishful thinking all over Europe, also opening, two hundred years later, the floodgates of non-European immigration. Those do-good romantic Jeffersonian words had a specific meaning in his epoch and for his fellow travellers; today they are being differently interpreted by US lawyers of Mexican, Asian or African ancestry, let alone by their illiterate or semi-literate, lowe-IQ clients arriving in droves to America from Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

It is also a great self-delusion common to many American conservatives, both old and new, to imagine that they can avert the rise of communism by preaching the capitalist gospel of permanent economic growth. Contrary to a well-entrenched communist-Trotskyite dogma, communism can very well thrive in and within a capitalist free market economy. In view of the coming shortages of resources and the surge in the surplus of uprooted people, the communist experiment seems to be the only functional and viable system for the future of the world. Unlike any system hitherto in the history of mankind communism offers an effortless society, psychological predictability and economic security, however meager, bleak or frugal they may all be. Worse, communism increases the basest human instincts, which can best be seen in the violent behavior of US antifa rioters. Communism is the ideal system for any multiracial state composed of gregarious masses, consumer-minded citizens and lower-IQ individuals.

It is another well-spread hoax doctored up by Leon Trotsky that communists are archenemies of capitalism. The case of modern China, a country the size of the US, bears witness that in an overpopulated society facing scarce resources, the communist ruling oligarchy can work hand in hand with liberal free marketeers, creating large differences in wealth. Similar to Germany’s numerous antifa organisations, including the powerful and well-funded German Amadeu Antonio Stiftung , the activities of modern day antifa in America are also profusely funded by wealthy financiers, international corporations, and individuals, with a billionaire George Soros being the best known. Finally, from the geopolitical perspective it must not be forgotten that antifascist guerillas during World War II in Europe would have not lasted a week had they not been supported by the US and UK massive financial and military aid handed out to their sponsor in the Soviet Union.

Most American conservatives are supportive of communistic legal practices such as affirmative action, forgetting that the same “positive” racial discrimination legislation, albeit differently worded, was part and parcel of the Soviet system whose goal was to strike a balance between 16 former Soviet republics containing dozens of competing and feuding nationalities and ethnic groups. The passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was quite in line with the American Cold War wish to neutralize the Soviet threat by doubling down on the same Soviet legal practices, that is, the re-enactment of the multiracial system already laid down in the Soviet constitution of 1936. But, unlike in the Soviet Union — the dogma of multiculturalism and legal provisions on affirmative action are still alive and kicking in America.

The good news is that even if American communists, under the banner of Antifascism or Democratism, or Liberalism come to power in the US they will soon start eliminating each other. This would be fully in accordance with the iron law of egalitarian entropy, a fact often overlooked by many analysts of communism. The still-strong myth that communists and antifas only enjoyed killing anti-communists and fascists during and after World War II must be dismissed. In fact, ever since their coming to power communists and antifas in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in 1917 and 1945 respectively, were involved in the orgy of mutual purges and killings. It must be expected that American antifas or liberals, or whatever they may name themselves in the near future, will start, once in power, with similar mutual killings. Virtually all big masterminds of communist mass killings during the pre-WWII and the post-WWII Soviet era, heads of powerful Soviet secret police agencies ( Genrikh Yagoda, Lavrentiy Beria, Nikolai Yezhov, Lev Kamenev ) were at some point demoted or ended up themselves on the gallows erected by their former communist comrades. A fresh example of latent communist entropy transpiring in incessant intra-communist warfare could be observed on the eve of the violent break-up of multicultural communist Yugoslavia in 1991, falsely ascribed by the foreign media to local nationalists. However, a closer look at the profile of major decision makers in seceding ex-Yugoslav republics points to their common communist past. Similarly, on a positive side, if one carefully looks at the pedigree, or reads the early works of some of the best and brightest anti-Communist analysts and writers (Boris Souvarine, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ante Ciliga), one can notice that they were at some point in their life ardent supporters of antifascism and communism.

Reductio ad hitlerum; reductio ad iudaeorom

The language arsenal of modern American antifa activists is another field of study that merits closer psycholinguistic attention. Antifa rioters and their college mentors, along with pro-communist US main media outlets, including a large number of their Democratic party coaches are using a revised communist jargon borrowed from the defunct Soviet Union. The Soviet talk was once the daily menu of the communist propaganda in Eastern Europe, its goal being to dehumanize, demonize and criminalize political opponents. The language processing was simple — it consisted in reversing the meaning of words and redefining political concepts. Similar practice can be observed today in the US amongst modern antifa activists and main media outlets who resort to the principles of reductio ad absurdum, that is, they posit propositions that elicit contradictory yet self-serving conclusions. Along these reductionist lines of verbal sophistry, the process of vilifying Whites as fascists is being facilitated by the methodological tool of reductio ad hitlerum. By now this equation, i.e., Whites = Fascists has become a standard practice in social science studies and in the media in the US. For modern antifa rioters in the US, the word fascism is a pivotal killer-shut-up word. Once uttered it disables any communication. This word, however, has completely lost its original political designation, standing now instead for a synonym of the absolute cosmic evil.

The same verbal demonizing wordings apply to another killer-word i.e. “Nazism,” a derogatory hyperbolic abbreviation of the word in usage since 1945. The word ‘Nazi’, however, was never used in the official National-Socialist documents or academic journals in Germany from 1933–45. Ironically, it first appeared in the late 1920s as a deriding title of the book Der Nazi-Sozi [vi] written as a short lampooning manifesto against Jews, Communists and capitalists by Joseph Goebbels, who was to become in 1933 the main figure of the NS German propaganda war.

Using the pejorative word ‘Nazi’ today is the equivalent of the pejorative word “commie”, the difference being, however, that in a polite academic company in the US, or in academic journals nobody would ever use the word ‘commie’ in the description of communists. The whole array of new euphemisms, as well as torrents of killer-words have been manufactured over the last fifty years in the US , such as “white supremacism,” “ hate speech,” “affirmative action,” “Afro-Americans” instead of Negroes, the modifying adjective “Jewish” instead of a more piercing noun ‘Jew’, with most of these words being taken now as a commonplace either when criminalizing political opponents or when praising non-Europeans to the skies. When inspecting the prose of many leftist or Jewish-run journals or pro-Jewish news agencies in the USA, such as the SPLC or ADL, it becomes obvious that they function primarily as antifa educational loudspeakers when blaring on all frequencies the demonizing labels neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or fascists.

Historical amicability of a large number of Jewish-American intellectuals for antifascist projects have been amply documented by Kevin MacDonald. Most Jewish-American authors, for obvious reasons, are pretty tacit when it comes to analyzing the high percentage of leading Communists officials of Jewish origin in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their role in early communist-antifa movements, as well as their role in the establishment of repressive communist regimes. The very large overrepresentation of liberal-leftist Jews in the major media and elite academic institutions, as well as in financial contributions to political causes of the left, has also been critical in creating the culture of White guilt and fanning the flames of the communist temptation in contemporary America.

However, reducing the birth and the spread of communism, including its modern version of antifascism to Jewish intellectuals and activists is not the whole story; it means ignoring the all-encompassing, indeed democratic reality of the communist temptation. Gentile communist auxiliaries, reared in the culture of White guilt, operate as willing executioners; they fear being suspected of a lax attitude toward non-communist foes, or harboring themselves latent anti-Semitic feelings, and they often outperform their Jewish-communist comrades. It is no accident that the frontmen in modern antifa riots in US cities today are mostly troubled White individuals who have lost the sense of identity and who, driven by feelings of historical guilt (as is the case with most academics in Germany), look for atonement by becoming the loudest sympathizers or standard-bearers of antifascism.

Removing the communist temptation presupposes cleaning up the swamp, first in American higher education and then in defunding departments of humanities in all colleges. In order to do that, the fallacy of multiculturalism needs to be discarded; it has never worked anywhere in the world. It has always been a recipe for disaster and civil wars all over the world. Abandoned policies of racial segregation must be reconsidered as a viable option for a functional society. It is better to have fences than cohabiting with an alien partner in a fake marriage. Prior to that, however, the whole idea of progress, still strongly embedded in the American dream, needs to be re-examined. Of course, this may all sound like wishful thinking because, as we have seen thousands of times in history, it is the size of someone’s sword which only makes the difference between good and evil.

Notes:

[i] T. Sunic, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age (Arktos, 2018), pp. 34-70.

[ii] Leon Trotsky (Pathfinder, 1969).

[iii] Ibid. „The Perspective in the United States,“ published first in Fourth International, October 1940.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

[iv] T. Sunic, „Sixty-Eighters“, Chronicles of American Culture, March 1999.

[v] Alexander Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism (London: Victor Gollancz), p.28.

[vi] Joseph Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi; Fragen und Antworten für den Nationalsozialisten, (Elberfeld, 1926). In Egnlsih trans.: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/nazi-sozi.htm

 

How to Survive Communism in the USA? Part 4

Editor’s note: I can only post very short pieces, so this very interesting article is posted in four parts. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2.
Go to Part 3.

Historical amicability of a large number of Jewish-American intellectuals for antifascist projects have been amply documented by Kevin MacDonald. Most Jewish-American authors, for obvious reasons, are pretty tacit when it comes to analyzing the high percentage of leading Communists officials of Jewish origin in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their role in early communist-antifa movements, as well as their role in the establishment of repressive communist regimes. The very large overrepresentation of liberal-leftist Jews in the major media and elite academic institutions, as well as in financial contributions to political causes of the left, has also been critical in creating the culture of White guilt and fanning the flames of the communist temptation in contemporary America.

However, reducing the birth and the spread of communism, including its modern version of antifascism to Jewish intellectuals and activists is not the whole story; it means ignoring the all-encompassing, indeed democratic reality of the communist temptation. Gentile communist auxiliaries, reared in the culture of White guilt, operate as willing executioners; they fear being suspected of a lax attitude toward non-communist foes, or harboring themselves latent anti-Semitic feelings, and they often outperform their Jewish-communist comrades. It is no accident that the frontmen in modern antifa riots in US cities today are mostly troubled White individuals who have lost the sense of identity and who, driven by feelings of historical guilt (as is the case with most academics in Germany), look for atonement by becoming the loudest sympathizers or standard-bearers of antifascism.

Removing the communist temptation presupposes cleaning up the swamp, first in American higher education and then in defunding departments of humanities in all colleges. In order to do that, the fallacy of multiculturalism needs to be discarded; it has never worked anywhere in the world. It has always been a recipe for disaster and civil wars all over the world. Abandoned policies of racial segregation must be reconsidered as a viable option for a functional society. It is better to have fences than cohabiting with an alien partner in a fake marriage. Prior to that, however, the whole idea of progress, still strongly embedded in the American dream, needs to be re-examined. Of course, this may all sound like wishful thinking because, as we have seen thousands of times in history, it is the size of someone’s sword which only makes the difference between good and evil.

How to Survive Communism in the USA? Part 3

Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2.

The good news is that even if American communists, under the banner of Antifascism or Democratism, or Liberalism come to power in the US they will soon start eliminating each other. This would be fully in accordance with the iron law of egalitarian entropy, a fact often overlooked by many analysts of communism. The still-strong myth that communists and antifas only enjoyed killing anti-communists and fascists during and after World War II must be dismissed. In fact, ever since their coming to power communists and antifas in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in 1917 and 1945 respectively, were involved in the orgy of mutual purges and killings. It must be expected that American antifas or liberals, or whatever they may name themselves in the near future, will start, once in power, with similar mutual killings. Virtually all big masterminds of communist mass killings during the pre-WWII and the post-WWII Soviet era, heads of powerful Soviet secret police agencies ( Genrikh Yagoda, Lavrentiy Beria, Nikolai Yezhov, Lev Kamenev ) were at some point demoted or ended up themselves on the gallows erected by their former communist comrades. A fresh example of latent communist entropy transpiring in incessant intra-communist warfare could be observed on the eve of the violent break-up of multicultural communist Yugoslavia in 1991, falsely ascribed by the foreign media to local nationalists. However, a closer look at the profile of major decision makers in seceding ex-Yugoslav republics points to their common communist past. Similarly, on a positive side, if one carefully looks at the pedigree, or reads the early works of some of the best and brightest anti-Communist analysts and writers (Boris Souvarine, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ante Ciliga), one can notice that they were at some point in their life ardent supporters of antifascism and communism.

Reductio ad hitlerum; reductio ad iudaeorom

The language arsenal of modern American antifa activists is another field of study that merits closer psycholinguistic attention. Antifa rioters and their college mentors, along with pro-communist US main media outlets, including a large number of their Democratic party coaches are using a revised communist jargon borrowed from the defunct Soviet Union. The Soviet talk was once the daily menu of the communist propaganda in Eastern Europe, its goal being to dehumanize, demonize and criminalize political opponents. The language processing was simple — it consisted in reversing the meaning of words and redefining political concepts. Similar practice can be observed today in the US amongst modern antifa activists and main media outlets who resort to the principles of reductio ad absurdum, that is, they posit propositions that elicit contradictory yet self-serving conclusions. Along these reductionist lines of verbal sophistry, the process of vilifying Whites as fascists is being facilitated by the methodological tool of reductio ad hitlerum. By now this equation, i.e., Whites = Fascists has become a standard practice in social science studies and in the media in the US. For modern antifa rioters in the US, the word fascism is a pivotal killer-shut-up word. Once uttered it disables any communication. This word, however, has completely lost its original political designation, standing now instead for a synonym of the absolute cosmic evil.

The same verbal demonizing wordings apply to another killer-word i.e. “Nazism,” a derogatory hyperbolic abbreviation of the word in usage since 1945. The word ‘Nazi’, however, was never used in the official National-Socialist documents or academic journals in Germany from 1933–45. Ironically, it first appeared in the late 1920s as a deriding title of the book Der Nazi-Sozi [i] written as a short lampooning manifesto against Jews, Communists and capitalists by Joseph Goebbels, who was to become in 1933 the main figure of the NS German propaganda war.

Using the pejorative word ‘Nazi’ today is the equivalent of the pejorative word “commie”, the difference being, however, that in a polite academic company in the US, or in academic journals nobody would ever use the word ‘commie’ in the description of communists. The whole array of new euphemisms, as well as torrents of killer-words have been manufactured over the last fifty years in the US , such as “white supremacism,” “ hate speech,” “affirmative action,” “Afro-Americans” instead of Negroes, the modifying adjective “Jewish” instead of a more piercing noun ‘Jew’, with most of these words being taken now as a commonplace either when criminalizing political opponents or when praising non-Europeans to the skies. When inspecting the prose of many leftist or Jewish-run journals or pro-Jewish news agencies in the USA, such as the SPLC or ADL, it becomes obvious that they function primarily as antifa educational loudspeakers when blaring on all frequencies the demonizing labels neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or fascists.

Go to Part 4

 

Bitter Harvest: A Brilliant Film on the Ukrainian Holodomor

“This particular film was extremely important to me, and it felt almost like a mission. I wanted to bring knowledge about the famine genocide, the Holodomor, to the Western world, and that’s why I did it.”
        Ian Ihnatowycz, Bitter Harvest Producer

Bitter Harvest (2017) is a film inspired by the love and rediscovery of the writer Richard Bachynsky Hoover’s ethnic heritage. On a trip to the homeland of his Slavic ancestors he began to ruminate on how to capture the story of the Holodomor on film. With small acting parts in a variety of television series Bachynsky Hoover was learning the ropes of the film and entertainment industry. He went again to Kiev, investigating his family history. It was 2004 and the Orange Revolution was in full swing — he saw firsthand a Ukraine in the midst of upheaval. He learned that Western audiences had never seen the Holodomor dramatized on film — a dramatically different situation compared to that other genocide that has become a touchstone of Western Civilization and both a sword and a shield for Jewish and Israeli interests through endless promotion in the media.  In 2008 he would return with a script, seeking financing for an English language period piece set during the Holodomor. He met with officials from the Ukrainian Government as well as various oligarchs. All of them turned him down. It was not until 2011 that the dream to make his movie finally caught a glimmer of hope when fellow Ukrainian Canadian investor Ian Ihnatowycz committed $21 million to the film.

British actors Max Irons and Samantha Barks star as Yuri and Natalka, two childhood sweethearts from the same village. They marry young and soon their lives are thrown into the whirlwind of revolution and resistance that comes with annexation of the Ukraine by the Soviet Union and eventual famine by way of grain confiscation. Barry Pepper and Terence Stamp are crucial to the supporting cast as Yuri’s family. Pepper sports the classic Cossack khokol (also called oseledets in the Ukraine) haircut — a long lock of hair on the top or front of an otherwise completely shaven head. Tamer Hassan, an English actor of Turkish Cypriot descent, takes the role of the real life villain Sergei, a Soviet officer who enforced Stalin’s will with relentless brutality. Hassan is the only non-White cast member, and may in fact be the only non-White member of the film crew. With the exception of a few stunts the entirety of the film was shot in Ukraine with Ukrainian extras and crew — some of whom took part in the Euromaidan protests during their off hours while shooting from late 2013 to early 2014. In several interviews and promotional appearances for the film much of the cast — but most significantly Max Irons — expressed a slight sense of shame over their prior ignorance of the Holodomor and the need to raise awareness of this historical tragedy. Read more

Communism In Romania: The Anti-Humans by Dumitru Bacu

To this end the students were obliged to crush under-foot everything they held most sacred ­– God, family, friends, love, wife, colleagues, memories, ideology ­– everything which bound them to the past, anything that might give them inner support while in prison. (Dumitru Bacu, The Anti-Humans)

The story of Communism in Romania may not be a unique story. The familiar elements all present their ugly heads. As the Bolsheviks came to power the lives of the indigenous population worsened precipitously — the ideology of the enlightened government against the backward people. Foreigners became policy makers. Peasants starved. Prisons swelled. Slave labor killed hundreds of thousands. And lastly, the indigenous intellectual class was suppressed. What is unique about what happened in Romania is how the intellectual class was suppressed. Rather than simple suppression through imprisonment and discouraging political activity, the intellectual class in Romania was subjected to sadistic experimentation in what has been dubbed “re-education experiments.”

The intellectual class targeted for re-education was a specific group of people. Rather than target older academics or those of influence, the Communist regime targeted university students for their experiments. These students were chosen for a variety of reasons. To become a student in a Romanian University was a difficult task. For example, to be a student, an individual was expected to know French and German as well as either Latin and Greek or English and Italian. This demanding language requirement as well as other academic requirements brought a high degree of prestige to the very word student. The prestige of being a student could not be bought either. The wealthy who wanted to send their children to university had to send their children to another country if they did not meet the requirements. The result was that a large portion of the student body came from peasant backgrounds.

The final, and perhaps most important reason for targeting students, was their ardent patriotism. Students in Romania were patriotic for a number of reasons. Just as our American rural class is disproportionally conservative, the Romanian students who mostly came from an agrarian background were also a highly conservative group. Furthermore an influential man on the student body was Corneliu Z. Codreanu. He established the Legion of Michael the Archangel (the Iron Guard or simply the Legionary Movement) in 1927. The organization’s principles were love of country, a code of honor and moral intransigence, the reciprocal loyalty of knighthood, rigorous subordination of body to spirit, and an absolute faith in Christ. These high-minded ideals attracted students and other intellectuals to the movement. Even 30 years after Codreanu’s murder by Bolsheviks in 1938 he had faithful followers, many being students who were still part of the nationalist Legionary Movement.

The most intense and psychologically damaging experiments were done at Pitesti Prison between 1949 and 1951. The primary victims were students, the majority of whom had previously been a part of the Legionary movement. The students were often arrested for being involved in “anti-Communist activities” which could mean essentially anything that the Communists found politically expedient. Often times being part of the Legionary Movement was reason enough to arrest a student but in other instances, telling an anti-Communist joke could be grounds for arrest. Regardless of how or why they were arrested, the true horrors of Communism made themselves apparent inside the walls of Pitesti. Read more