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| Europe |
| Hungary Passes Law Equating Communism With Nazism - Criminalizing Denialism |
| 2010-06-11 |
| Hungarian lawmakers have passed a bill equating Communist era crimes to the Holocaust and banned denying it under threat of imprisonment. An amendment to the Criminal Code was passed by the parliament's majority center-right party FIDESZ (Hungarian Civic Union) on Tuesday, Itar-Tass reports. According to the new legislation, those denying, casting doubts on, or depreciating the crimes committed by the Communist regime will be facing from one to three years behind bars. Earlier, in February this year, the former coalition of the left wing parties passed a law banning the denial of the Holocaust. Now the rightists -- who won over 68% of seats in the parliament in spring 2010 -- have struck a balance between Communism and Nazism. The decision is among the first crucial ones made by the Hungarian Civic Union since it came to power. Russian Communists have labeled the decision as a provocation and said it is disreputable for a parliament to do so. According to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, the move is an echo of the Nazi regime, which terrorized Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. "Back then, 23 European states were ruled by the Nazis and pro-Nazi regimes and Hungary was Hitler's first accomplice," he said in an interview with Echo Moskvy radio station. "This voting is a 100% provocation which humiliates our fathers, the victors of WWII. In the year of the 65th anniversary of the victory I consider it to be not just a provocation but a sign of a Nazi plague which is spreading across Eastern Europe," Zyuganov stated. In its history, Hungary experienced living under both the Nazi and Communist regimes. During the Second World War the country was a member of the so-called Axis powers. Collaborating with Italy and Germany back then, Hungary benefited territorially. Fighting on the Nazi's side, the Magyars took part in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the USSR. After suffering tremendous losses in the battle of Stalingrad and realizing Hitler would likely lose the war, Hungary got involved in talks with Western allies in 1944 to seek an armistice. As a result, however, Hungary -- which turned from Hitler's friend into foe -- was occupied by the German forces. Under the occupation, up to 500,000 Jews living in Hungary died from maltreatment or were murdered. Only about a third of the Jews who lived in the country before the war survived the Holocaust. After the war came the years of the People's Republic of Hungary and the Communist regime. In 1956, a student rally demanding reforms and political freedom led to a chain of events that resulted in what is known as Hungarian Revolution. The revolt was suppressed by Soviet tanks and troops which entered the country at the request of the Hungarian Working party. As a result, thousands of Magyars were killed and up to 200,000 Hungarian refugees fled the country. The idea of equating the Nazi and the Communist regimes is not new for the former Iron Curtain states. In November last year, Polish President Lech Kaczynski approved an amendment to the criminal code which outlaws the production, possession, spread and sale of items or recordings containing symbols of communism. A year before that a similar law was passed by the Lithuanian parliament which banned the display of Nazi and Soviet symbols, such as the swastika and the hammer and sickle. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose |
| #12 Well, too bad they didn't cite radical Islam too, but given that the Saudis are making inroads in Magyarorszag and have been for sometime, this is not surprising. |
| Posted by: HammerHead 2010-06-11 19:44 |
| #11 Good. Now add Islamism. |
| Posted by: One Eyed Thinenter6178 2010-06-11 18:42 |
| #10 Nazism and Communism; two sides of the same coin. Just as leftists, liberals, populists, radicals, statists, and progressives are different names for the same philosophical concepts. I call it hiding behind euphamisms. One can easily find TV or radio commentators who willing call themselves conservatives but try to find someone from the MSM who is willing to call themself a liberal or leftist. There is something wrong with that. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2010-06-11 13:56 |
| #9 Free speech is alive and well in Europe! (But you may want to clear it with the ECRI just in case.) |
| Posted by: DepotGuy 2010-06-11 10:48 |
| #8 No First Amendment in Hungary, I take it. |
| Posted by: Gaz 2010-06-11 09:49 |
| #7 Well done, Magyars! |
| Posted by: Mike 2010-06-11 09:00 |
| #6 The whole idea that Nazism == Right is made up out of whole cloth. The deliberate deception (aka lie) is in our schools, the MSM, and in Hollywood - both bastions of 'progressives' (aka socialists). Much like Racism == Right or KKK == Right. When in fact the vast majority of KKK members were Democrats and it was the Democrats who wrote the Jim Crow laws and opposed the Civil Rights Act. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2010-06-11 08:44 |
| #5 no mo uro, this whole canard Nazis=right has. to. stop. Yes, Nazis were right of the commies, but ever so slightly. In the scope of the political spectrum, they still were on the left. While Komintern claimed to be internationalist (as long as the members heeded the Kremlin supremacy), Nazis were nationalist. One may say that in effect, the internationalist approach was just a ruse, the fealty direction was not to be in doubt. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2010-06-11 08:28 |
| #4 This should have been done in the U.S. by George Bush I back when the wall came down. He was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right series of events to have the mandate to de-communize America the way Harry Truman purged Naziism from the education industry and government grant receivers. Bush had enough popular sentiment to defund any grant receiving educator or artist, or any rent-seeking business which espoused communism, and to permanently stigmatize the concept in the eyes of the public using the bully pulpit of the presidency. Not doing so was the greatest mistake of his presidency, worse by far than reneging on his tax freeze promise. The nation suffers hugely for his sin of omission. Children in public schools are taught about the Nazi holocaust almost constantly but in almost all cases never even hear about the communist ones once in twelve years of schooling, because the leftists in teacher's unions and leftist administrators don't want kids growing up with the notion that people with left-of-center politics are capable of doing anything wrong or bad. They want the kids to believe that only the center/right is capable of doing bad or evil things, so they can produce voters who reflexively believe that anyone possessing center/right politics is the same as the Nazis, and that people whose politics are left of center are perfect, wonderful beings. The entertainment industry is similarly quiet on things like the gulag and the Cultural Revolution, for similar reasons. Quite on purpose, they teach or portray nothing at all about the far greater atrocities of the left, so that the same sort of guilt by association cannot be used against their own political agenda. Public education will be incomplete, broken, and irredeemably damaged in this country until every kid that graduates has been taught as much about the atrocities of Stalin and Mao as they have about Hitler's crimes, and reflexively holds the leftist monsters in the same contempt and horror as they do those right of center. The folks in the entertainment industry will always be failures as artists and human beings as long as they stigmatize only the Nazis and not communists (or even non-white fascists like the Japanese). Given the politics of most public school teachers and entertainers, I'm not holding my breath for a fix any time soon. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2010-06-11 06:12 |
| #3 I read an article about Poland's law recently, the journalist poo-poohed the whole thing and said communism is just a phase kids go through, there is no point in comparing it to the world's worst evil. He was dismissive of the whole affair. |
| Posted by: gromky 2010-06-11 02:55 |
| #2 Well, there is only a mustache's worth of difference between the two. |
| Posted by: ed 2010-06-11 01:13 |
| #1 Oriana Fallaci mentioned in her books that there really isn't that much difference between Fascism and Socialism / Communism. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2010-06-11 00:53 |