Claim:
Hungarians are a ’fascist nation’
Rebuttal:
The claim is obviously false and there is actually no proof that anyone ever made such a claim.
In detail:
No nation can be described en masse with just one set of collective political adjectives. Moreover, in Hungary ’fascism’, by which we mean extreme political ideologies, enjoyed widespread popularity predominantly before 1941, but not because of its antisemitic, but its social program and vision. (At that time the communist party had been made illegal, so it didn’t feature on the ballot papers.) The claim was allegedly made by Mátyás Rákosi, complaining to his inner circle how difficult it is for him to live with ’nine million fascists’. However, there is no trustworthy source to underpin this claim, and we don’t even find a reference to it or to anything similar in the propaganda of the Rákosi-era. On the contrary, it was asserted that the Hungarian ’nation of workers’ had always been sympathetic to the Soviet Union and positioned itself in opposition to the ’ruling class’ serving the Germans and exploiting the people. However, some of the writers who partly made their career as complicit with the communist regime were prone to accuse their powerful patrons (whom they perceived as Jewish) to consider Hungarians a ’nation of fascists’.
Common past: knowledge to dispel historical misconceptions – supporting the work of Slovak and Hungarian history teachers through print and online publications, professional conferences. A project of the Association of History Teachers and the Hungarian-language newspaper of the Denník N news portal.
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