Orbán the Toe

Testing Where The Line Is

Who, Me?

I’m taking a break from the series on Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country to quickly address Viktor Orbán’s recent “race” speech, which prompted the resignation of a longtime advisor who called it a “pure Nazi speech” that was “worthy of Goebbels.” In the speech, Orbán cited Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, a favorite of the racist far-right that depicts colored hordes from the South and East overrun the white West. Orbán also explicitly decried “race mixing:”

In such a multi-ethnic context, there is an ideological feint here that is worth talking about and focusing on. The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim – their claim – that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favourable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought at Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and – if I am not mistaken – this is why, in still older times – the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers.

American right-wing intellectuals have long apologized for Orbán and fantasized about his soft-authoritarian regime as a possible future direction for conservativism in this country. In fact, Orbán hosted a CPAC conference and has been invited to address the same organization in Texas this week. They consistently mocked the left-wing claim that Orbán was embarking on the path of Europe’s pre-war dictatorships, even when he explicitly placed his regime in the lineage of Miklós Horthy, the quasi-fascist leader who aligned himself with Hitler and Mussolini, took steps to stack he constitution in his party’s favor and control the media and academia, or when he made thinly-veiled antisemitic attacks on George Soros as a kind of puppet master (which he repeats in the speech along with irredentist themes.) Now you would think, “It would be impossible to defend this speech, this is clearly over the line.” Of course not.

Rod Dreher, despite being unceremoniously booted from Hungary for overstaying his visa, remains a reliable lickspittle. He claims that Orbán, “using the term "race" as a symbol of religion and culture (and I wish he would not have done that, because it makes it hard to explain what he means).” Damon Linker, a center-right pundit and former friend of Dreher, has already dealt with this absurdity well on his own Substack. I will just add that since race has no actual biological basis, it is always a “symbol:” an ideological category, a way of organizing politics and society. The way it has always functioned in European politics is to tie together a number of concerns about national decline and the supposed encroachment of a civilization enemy in a way that was easy to conceive and imagine. The anti-Dreyfusard ideologues all viewed antisemitism in roughly this way: the Jews offered a fortuitous symbolic representation of the malady of France’s national decadence. Many of them rejected biological racial theories and specifically insisted that their ideas were cultural and religious, rooted in the historical traditions. Whatever the justificatory root, they were antisemites and racists and helped prepare Europe for the catastrophe of the next century.

I want to specifically note that in the exchange between Dreher and Linker neither of them elaborated on the most important piece of context for this speech: Hungary’s history of antisemitism and its role during the Holocaust. In fact, the really outrageous and shocking thing here is that the leader of a European country, especially one with its history, would be willing to “go there” and invoke race.

Hungary didn’t need the examples of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to embark on its reactionary project. In fact, in many ways they were ahead of the game. In 1919, reactionary forces lead by Admiral Horthy put down the short-lived Communist Bela Kun regime and initiated a bloody White Terror that targeted leftists and Jews. The counter-revolution gave birth to an ideological protoplasm called the “Szeged Idea,” named after the headquarter’s of Horthy’s forcres, that notably contained a “stabbed in the back” myth and a belief in a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy. Boosters of the Szeged Idea would later brag that they antedated both Fascism and Nazism. Hungary had been even more “humiliated” by the defeat in World War I in Germany—the Treaty of Trianon took away two-thirds of Hungarian territory and had disastrous economic consequences. Interwar politics became dominated by different combinations of national chauvinism, irredentism, and antisemitism.

The historian of fascism Stanley Payne writes, “Of all states in interwar Europe, Hungary probably took the prize for the largest assortment per capita of fascist-type, semifascist, or right radical movements.” The system was divided essentially between right, far right, and extreme right: with the national conservatives around the regent Horthy in competition with explicitly fascist and national socialist groups like the Arrow Cross. The conservatives prevailed with a mix of repression and moving rightward to co-opt fascist appeal. (Compare this to Fidesz’s double-moves with regards to it extreme right in the Jobbik Party and the newer Our Homeland Movement.)

As the sociologist Michael Mann writes, “Other members of the authoritarian family kept them at bay, though only by stealing so many fascist clothes that it becomes difficult to distinguish who was truly a fascist.” The government of prime minister Gyula Gömbös is instructive in this regard. Gömbös had been an organizer of the White Terror, primary exponent of the “Szeged Idea” and the leader of the “Party of Racial Defense.” Upon acceding office, Gömbös publicly renounced his anti-semitism saying, “To Jewry, I revised my viewpoint” but then returning to the old antisemitic stratagem of differentiating a good Jewry and a bad Jewry": “I know leading Jews who pray with me for the Hungarian fate and I know that part of Jewry which does not want or cannot fit into the nation’s social life, the Jews themselves will be the first to condemn….” Gömbös pledged to “secure our own national civilization based on our own special racial peculiarities and upon Christian moral principles,” not sounding so unlike Orbán.

Immediately, Gömbös undertook steps to align the country with Hitler’s Germany and to embark on a series of policies that would discriminate against the Jewish participation in society. He pledged to Göring that he would impose a fully fascist system within a few years. Gömbös died before he could make good on the promise but in 1938, his successor Kálmán Darányi put before Parliament the first anti-Jewish law in 1938; it was followed by two more, in 1939 and 1941, with explicitly racial underpinnings

During the war, like Vichy France, Horthy’s regime resisted Nazi pressure to deport Hungarian Jews en masse, but was happy enough to deliver tens of thousands “alien” Jews into the hands of the SS in Ukraine where they were massacred or to press Jews into forced labor, which claimed over sixty-thousand. When German forces occupied Hungary in early 1944, Horthy gave “free reign to persecution” in the words of historian Mikós Molnár. The Holocaust proceeded in Hungary at a lightning pace: some 435,000 Jews were rounded up and deported to death camps. On July 8th, Horthy paused deportations, partly because he was concerned the deportations now reaching the more assimilated Jewry in Budapest. The ability of Horthy to stop the deportations is not much to his credit: the power to do so only cements his responsibility. After Horthy and his ministers attempted to extricate Hungary from the Axis side when it was clear that it would lose, he was overthrown and replaced with Ferenc Szálasi and the Arrow Cross party, who started up the genocide once again, but most of the Jews were killed between May and July, under Horthy’s watch. Since coming to power, Orbán’s regime has inched closer and closer to an embrace of the Horthy era and falsified Hungary’s role in the Holocaust.

Any time that “race” is mentioned in Hungary, this history is what should inevitably what springs to mind. The contemporary right often speaks of Europe’s decline, but the real sign of civilizational degeneration is that a European leader can speak this way and the response is relatively muted, that there are intellectuals and media figures in the United States prepared to defend him, that he is invited to speak at an American political conference, and that he met with the former U.S. president. Hungary’s president, whose country is so dependent on foreign capital one of the only major economic coups he can brag of his in his speech is the opening of another German car factory (I guess submission to Germany is a nationalist tradition at this point), is a petty leader in Europe who has somehow managed to convince the international right-wing intelligentsia that he’s the leader of the vanguard. At the top of an insignificant economic and military power, he can’t really said to be the head of anything, rather he’s become sort of the big toe of the right, testing out the limits of what’s acceptable.

On a personal note, I’ve received some criticism for using fascism to contextualize for modern illiberalism, but with Hungary the history is clear even when the lines are not: these sorts of anti-liberal, national conservative strains always stood to fascists either as their progenitors, allies or their close competitors for capturing reactionary energy. We should remember that the conservative intelligentsia of the fascist era often also took to fascist regimes as apologists and rationalized appeals to race as being about holding back the hordes of communism or the cultural depredations of liberalism. The continued success of the far right today depends partly on this distortion of the historical record made possible through the intellectual class’s combination of deliberate illiteracy, hazy memory, and hair-splitting pedantry.