Diegetics

Jobbik, the "movement for a better Hungary", has received 17% of the vote in 2010, becoming Hungary's third party.




Members of Jobbik





Members of the Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard), the paramilitary branch of Jobbik
Dissolved by the courts in 2009 because of its activities against human rights of minorities... reformed since as a "cultural" association




For comparison: the illegal WWII-time Arrow Cross flag.
This was a Nazi-like Hungarian movement which took significant part in slaughter of Jewish Hungarians, and targeted Roma too.


Among all populist / anti-globalization / far-rightist parties in Europe, it is to my knowledge the only one so clearly filiated with Nazism and other völkisch / imperialist ideologies, and so open about it.

Its main domestic target are the Roma, albeit anti-semitism may also be present.

Its main foreign policy objective is to revise borders resulting from the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, so that Hungarians living in neigbouring countries, mainly Romania and Slovakia, may unite with the Motherland.


Hungarian population in Slovakia


Hungarian population in Romania


All this less than three years after the beginning of the Crisis...

We do live interesting times

One of the residual problems in the region due to communism, I think, is that history was frozen, resuming from 1935 after the fall.

The dreams of a so-called Greater Serbia providing no lessons for those dreaming of a Greater Hungary.

Unfortunately, rabid nationalism was one of the tools used by the communist parties across Eastern Europe to keep under control populations that didn't like them much. Scratch the surface of the people from my generation up and you are bound to find some entrenched nationalism. I hope the younger generations are less indoctrinated. One can still see the traces in parties such as Jobbik or "România Mare" (Greater Romania).

I've always thought Eastern Europe was unjustifiably nationalist. Why is it typically the least accomplished nations that are the most provocatively nationalist? "We're uneducated and have historically been total losers. Surely by looking further inward, we can buck this trend."

Probably because we're losers. Or uneducated. Something like that.

The Law of the Retarding Lead (a subject Brits know something about).

Back in Communist days, Hungary under Kadar and Tito's Yugoslavia were the least oppressive and most prosperous of the East European states. Travelling the region in the late 70s the difference between Hungary and repressed Czechoslovakia was startling. Since 1990 they have done the worst (at least Hungarian stagnation has been peaceful, and not turned them into Europariahs like Serbs and Croats).

Budapest is one of my favourite cities, fabulous Victorian architecture built from the profits of subjection of Hungarian ruled peoples like Slovaks and Romanians. On the other hand, I did get my pocket picked (I'll hazard a guess as to which ethnic minority did it...). The only positive was a magnificent declaration of loss in impenetrable Magyar for insurance purposes, which I had framed.

So, SHE dumped YOU, didn't she? These Polish girls. Can't live with them...

Captain Murphy, you are sounding a bit like a 19C German - unless ST is right . It is true that Poland, given the size of population and its long history, should have been culturally another France, Germany, Spain, Italy, UK - and wasn't. It's chequered political history was no excuse, the same was true of Germany and Italy.

It's not fair to Hungarians, however. Given that the place was always a borderland, there were not that many Hungarians, and was mostly occupied by the Turks for several centuries, it did pretty well. This was especially in music ( Haydn, List, Bartok, Kodaly) and science and mathematics (von Neumann, Szent Gyorgi, Gabor, Teller, Szilard). Of course many of the latter ended up in the USA, but education and upbringing were Hungarian. Given the language (I mean, totally not Indo- European) it's not surprising their literature does not travel. Not to forget the humble Biro or Rubik cube...

The main charge is a nasty form of small country syndrome - having been at the receiving end of oppression and foreign rule for centuries, when they got their own brief taste of power 1867-1918 instead of empathy drawn from experience they simply oppressed the subject peoples around them, payback being the manifestly unfair Treaty of Trianon in 1919 which has never been undone.

Warsaw is ugly because it was systematically demolished 1944. Go to Krakow instead (no war damage), or Gdansk or Wroclaw which were much more sympathetically rebuilt.

Nicholaus Copernicus.

Marian Smoluchowski.

Stefan Banach.

Stanislaw Ulam.

Mark Kac.

Antoni Zygmund.

Leopold Infeld.

Marie Curie [only person to have been awarded the Nobel prize for both physics and chemistry].

The Polish mathematicians who first cracked the German Enigma machine during WWII.