Tyranny’s new trick: how the Hungarian government is waging war on liberalism

The darkening of the skies in Eastern Europe shows that the optimism of 1989 is long gone

by Nick Cohen / November 14, 2017 / Leave a comment

The House of Terror in Budapest is one of the most carefully contrived museums I have visited. It uses music, props and video—all the modern curatorial tricks—to recreate the rule of the Nazis and Communists. In a final stunt, a lift inches tourists down to the gallows in the basement, as if guards were pushing our resisting bodies towards the hangman. The House of Terror is manipulative. But ignorant foreigners can console themselves with the thought that it is manipulating in a good cause.

The museum is in the old secret police headquarters on Andrássy, a grand fin de siècle boulevard that runs from the centre of Budapest to the magnificent Szechenyi baths. The Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazis, used it from October 1944 until March 1945, as it organised mass murder on an extraordinary scale. (Just under half of the Jews killed at Auschwitz were Hungarians.) Stalin’s armies invaded, and 60 Andrássy became the headquarters of the Hungarian Communist Party’s secret police—the place where opponents real and imagined came to suffer and die. The notion that what unites far-left and far-right is more important than what divides them, remains controversial. The record in Hungary shows they shared the same taste in torture chambers.

In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a cheerful consensus prevailed. After experiencing Fascism and Communism, Hungary and Europe had one option left. They could, indeed they must, embrace human rights, a free press, the protection of minorities, and the rule of law, and become “normal countries.” For that was a time when liberal democracy was thought to be “normal,” and dictatorships were condemned to live in museums.

That world is now upside down. The House of Terror shows how dictatorial movements can manipulate the horrors of the past to justify the oppression of the present—and not just in Hungary. The prime minister and de facto dictator, Viktor Orbán, prospers by rigging and corrupting the political system, media and business. Russia, Turkey and Venezuela follow suit. Meanwhile the conspiracy theories Orbán deploys thrive just as vigorously in Trump’s America and Brexit Britain as in crooked eastern European republics.

In February 2017, Mária Schmidt, the Director of the House of Terror, proved herself an exemplary 21st-century bureaucrat when word reached her that Orbán was preparing to move against Budapest’s Central European University. The threat to…

YOU’VE HIT THE LIMIT

You have now reached your limit of 3 free articles in the last 30 days. But don’t worry! You can get another 7 articles absolutely free, simply by entering your email address in the box below.

When you register we’ll also send you a free e-book—Prospect’s Top Thinkers—which salutes the scientists, philosophers and writers reshaping our times. We’ll also send you our weekly newsletter with the best new ideas in politics, economics, history, science, literature and the arts. You can, of course, unsubscribe from this newsletter at any time.

Prospect may process your personal information for our legitimate business purposes, to provide you with our newsletter, subscription offers and other relevant information.

Click to learn more about these interests and how we use your data. You will be able to object to this processing on the next page and in all our communications.

10171969035efdd5f3450652.97369837

Go to comments

In the age of coronavirus, this one thing unites populist leaders

Jonathan Lis / April 15, 2020

Authoritarian premiers have responded differently to the outbreak but share a common...

Share with friends

Comments

Michael M.
November 18, 2017 at 11:37
Erm, demonstrating the arrogance that boosted Organ is ironic
James
November 18, 2017 at 11:56
A truly gripping read. Married to a Hungarian I've struggled to understand Hungarian politics, this has given me a good precis, and encouragement to read more. Often when I've asked Hungarian friends who do you choose, Orban or Soros? They answer the same, they're both corrupt so what is the point in this choice. They look to EU for resolution, it never comes.
Aasi Tahir Siddique
November 19, 2017 at 06:11
Old money still control the global master plan where political model is being customized according to internal fabrication of particular region.
David E C.
November 21, 2017 at 11:18
I visited the House of Terror this summer, and like you found it entirely manipulative. But it is even more tawdry than you portray it. Hungarians were not oppressed by the Nazis, and there is very little in the exhibition that deals with the Nazi era. This is for good reason: Hungary willingly and actively collaborated with the Reich, even to the extent of ensuring that as many Jews as possible were rounded up for extermination before the Red Army arrived. Mostly, the House of Terrors is a tedious whinge about how horrid the Russians were to the Hungarians after the Red Army, at enormous cost (the Siege of Budapest was the third worst siege of the war), had expelled the Nazis and defeated their Hungarian collaborators. Also very worth a visit in Budapest is "Memento Park", which contains now unacceptable Soviet era monuments which were torn down after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Revealingly, monuments to those who died opposing the Nazis during WWII (e.g. Robert Kreutz, executed by the Hungarians in 1944) are also regarded as equally unacceptable and now reside in this park!
1. J H H
  November 30, 2017 at 12:23
  In my opinion you seriously underrate the Terror House museum. It is one of the most imaginative and striking I have ever visited, evoking both the terror and ending on a note of hope with the beautiful room full of candles in memory of the victims of 1956. You don't seem to realize the horrors that took place under the Hungarian Arrow Cross thugs and, more extensively, the Communist regime which lasted until 1989, you will remember, though it lessened in sheer brutal cruelty after the death of Stalin. Anyone seeing the cells where prisoners were kept without trial for years awaiting hanging would surely be shocked. One thing was not mentioned in the museum literature (which is both free and excellent): prisoners too ill to be hanged (on the spot) were thrown into a bath of sulphuric acid. There were good reasons for "whingeing"! However, Mr Cohen would class both you and myself as "ignorant tourists" (though I can get by in Hungarian, which I bet he can't) so our views won't count for much.
passion fruit
November 25, 2017 at 19:57
Nick Cohen, the 45 minute WMD conspiracy theorist who campaigned for the invasion of Iraq, is a fine example of a neo-Liberal / neo-Fascist camoflaging himself as a liberal.
J H H
November 30, 2017 at 14:59
Cohen's article is the worst and most biaised I've read in "Prospect" in over 10 years. Why on earth didn't they get someone with a good knowledge of Hungarian life and history, not to speak of its language, to do it? His unfair remarks about an outstanding museum give way to a complete demolition of Viktor Orban without mentioning any of his qualities. And of course, as a confirmed Leftie, he has to use the "Nazi inspired" slur. Cohen evidently doesn't realize that the Terror House museum was Orban's idea and that the same person introduced a Holocaust day, the compulsory teaching about it in all schools and a law forbidding Holocaust denial. Nor is it true that he is a repressive dictator. Hungarians can and do protest vigorously - without the risk of being imprisoned or murdered. If Britons had had a leader with as much determination, clarity of thought and foresight as Orban, they wouldn't be in the almighty mess they are in now!