https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/10/virtuous-fantasies-of-fascism/
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/10/virtuous-fantasies-of-fascism/
“The doctrinaires entering our education systems are as termites in a wooden building, peddling the view that if you do not ‘celebrate’ some proclivity or other, or publicly expatiate on its virtues, then you must be keen on persecuting those who exhibit it. It is simple notion for the simple minds of those who find the world just too complex to grasp.”
When I mentioned to some friends that I was about to pay a short trip to Hungary, they were all duly horrified. It was as if I had announced in late August 1939 that I was going on holiday in Germany.
I readily confess that my knowledge of current Hungarian politics is very limited. I know four words in the language: please, thank you, water and national. This does not entitle me to pose as an expert, even though I know infinitely more Hungarian than did my horrified friends.
There was something formulaic about their horror, if I may so put it, a bit like the sign of the cross for those who do not truly believe but yet are attached to ancient customs. They had heard that Hungary was a fascist country, the kind of country that, according to the Dutch Prime Minister, should have no place in the European Union. Of course, he took that to mean that it was not virtuous, or not virtuous enough.
I had been to Budapest several times before: it is undoubtedly one of the most pleasant capitals in Europe, grand and dignified but not overwhelmingly large. I first went in 1970, when no one was horrified by my proposed journey: it was merely a communist state, that was all, and therefore not the object of obloquy.
Even then, the food was better than in other communist countries, but the greyness and dilapidation were evident. For the first and only time in my life I had difficulty in spending all the money that I had. One had to change irrevocably a certain amount of money to be allowed to enter Hungary, and by the end of my stay I was left with a bundle of forints that I could neither change nor take out of the country (not that anyone outside the country would have wanted them).
When I mentioned to some friends that I was about to pay a short trip to Hungary, they were all duly horrified. It was as if I had announced in late August 1939 that I was going on holiday in Germany.
I readily confess that my knowledge of current Hungarian politics is very limited. I know four words in the language: please, thank you, water and national. This does not entitle me to pose as an expert, even though I know infinitely more Hungarian than did my horrified friends.
There was something formulaic about their horror, if I may so put it, a bit like the sign of the cross for those who do not truly believe but yet are attached to ancient customs. They had heard that Hungary was a fascist country, the kind of country that, according to the Dutch Prime Minister, should have no place in the European Union. Of course, he took that to mean that it was not virtuous, or not virtuous enough.
I had been to Budapest several times before: it is undoubtedly one of the most pleasant capitals in Europe, grand and dignified but not overwhelmingly large. I first went in 1970, when no one was horrified by my proposed journey: it was merely a communist state, that was all, and therefore not the object of obloquy.
Even then, the food was better than in other communist countries, but the greyness and dilapidation were evident. For the first and only time in my life I had difficulty in spending all the money that I had. One had to change irrevocably a certain amount of money to be allowed to enter Hungary, and by the end of my stay I was left with a bundle of forints that I could neither change nor take out of the country (not that anyone outside the country would have wanted them).