Orban and Anti-Semitism
by tristero
Yes, as Digby writes, Orban traffics in anti-Semitic tropes and is doing whatever he can to re-write Hungarian history in order to: (1) minimize Hungarian actions against Jews during World War II; (2) minimize the atrocities that the right wing have perpetrated in the past; and (3) imply that the Communists were Jews. An excerpt from William Echikson's excellent article:
In the 2017 parliamentary election, Orbán promoted anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world. Thousands of posters of a grinning Soros with the slogan “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” were posted around the country on billboards, on the metro, and on the floors of Budapest’s trams. Just this year, a new media campaign featured Soros and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker with the caption: "You also have the right to know what Brussels is preparing for!”
The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable.
Szabolcs hesitated and struggled a minute for an effective response. He ended up answering that the ads were needed to prevent Soros from flooding Europe with Muslim migrants. That does not make things better.
The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable. Not by chance, the Hungarian leader is rewriting his country’s history of that period. In the Holocaust Remembrance Project that I recently edited, we showed how the country’s right-wing government has rehabilitated wartime figures as anti-communist icons.
It has inflated Hungary’s role in “saving” the Jews of Budapest and minimized discourse on their own complicity in deporting and killing Jews. State-appointed “historians” have relativized the horrors of the Holocaust, and often depict their own people as victims of what they say was Jewish-supported communism.
After Orbán came to power in 2010, he appointed András Levente Gál to direct the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center in Budapest. According to Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Gal’s first proposal was to eliminate mention of [wartime Hungarian leader] Miklós Horthy's alliance with Adolf Hitler and participation in the dismemberment of three neighboring states — Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia — as 'irrelevant' to the Holocaust.”
Gal’s second proposal, Shapiro recounted, “was to sanitize the record of Hungarian participation in the ghettoization and deportation of the country’s Jews and place full blame for the destruction of Hungarian Jewry on Germany.” Even though the resulting international outcry led to Gál’s dismissal, Orbán’s government went ahead anyhow and built a "Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation" with the same message.
Orbán has persisted in rewriting history. He has praised Horthy for reconquering lost territories. Several towns have erected statues or placed plaques on buildings in the wartime leader’s honor. Busts of Horthy still stand across the country, despite his record of virulent anti-Semitism. According to Shapiro, Horthy wrote “with pride to his Prime Minister in 1940, ‘I have been an anti-Semite my whole life.’”
Orban should be an international pariah. But nooooooo...