A change in control at Budapest’s 1956 Institute, prompted by Hungary’s illiberal premier Viktor Orban, is part of a wider trend of stifling academic freedom and limiting public dissent, creating a narrative that portrays Hungary as a 20th century victim of the Nazis and the Soviets, The FT’s Valerie Hopkins writes:
The controversy over the 1956 Institute is in line with a vision Mr Orban spelt out last summer. Speaking at a summer festival in Transylvania, organised by his party and its local partners, Mr Orban said his victory in elections that year which brought him a fourth term as premier had given his administration “nothing short of a mandate to build a new era”. “An era is a special and characteristic cultural reality . . . a spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste — a form of attitude . . . determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs,” he said. “This is now the task we are faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.”
“They are trying to sell the idea that there is only one hero in the change of the regime — that [Mr Orban] single-handedly defeated communism and cut the iron curtain,” says Gabor Egry, director of the Budapest-based Institute of Political History. Adding that their version “is a very simple story, taken out of international context”.
Orban’s push to create institutions that forge a new national grand narrative about the past have been aimed at reinforcing a sense of collective victimhood, says Gergely Romsics, a historian and lecturer at Budapest’s ELTE university and a senior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
“This would legitimise a defiant stance towards western institutions on the one hand, and foster a national community on the basis of all groups having suffered at some point in history,” he says, alluding to Mr Orban’s regular clashes with Brussels in recent years. RTWT
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Wikipedia
Orban is a tyrant, not a populist, said the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller. In a moving obituary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Jürgen Habermas compared Heller, who was forced to flee anti-Semitic totalitarianism for the US, to the heirs of German idealism, adds Eurozine (a partner of the National Endowment for Democracy):
In a 2009 contribution to the sadly now inactive Hungarian Quarterly, Heller wrote of her abiding joy since 1989: ‘Those who have directly known servitude and oppression, and for whom freedom is the greatest value and gift, have not ceased rejoicing to this day. Regime change, as far as I was concerned, was a miracle that one hoped for but did not expect to see, and a miracle it has remained.’