Awakening

No sooner had the hundred years of Hungarian solitude ended than we were hit by an avalanche of boundless rights proliferation and the cancel culture that sees everything in black and white. The racially-based class struggle proclaimed against white Western Christian culture is a combination of two ideologies that individually both led to dictatorships. We should know, as we suffered both.

Therefore, the new awakening is neither an awakening nor new. It’s practically the same thing that Attila József calls “fascist communism.” It’s a mutation of the same totalitarian thinking that a century ago “misunderstood,” say, Nietzsche or Marx. They haven’t learned from it; they’re telling us the new tale of fascist communism again.

I try to take today’s “culture war” somewhat seriously, but it’s quite difficult because it’s simply ridiculous. We live in a crazy world. We should have started to get suspicious when they attacked meat-eating; since then, every steak is a freedom fight.

Then they started to undermine the traditional family model (father-mother-children), saying it’s an artificial myth. Indeed, it’s only a few thousand years old, that’s not tradition. Tradition, according to this, is not created by the lived past but by the desire-driven future.

The feminist says: if you’re a woman, be a man.

The LGBTQ activist says: if you’re a man, be a woman. But it’s best if you’re both at once and something else too.

The BLM protester would like the white to be black, since black is the new white.

The progression denies its father; don’t dare to think, they shout, differing opinion is thoughtcrime. The neo-Marxists and the liberarians are those ideologues who see the natural space between nations as a gap to be filled. But what looks like fertilization from there looks like violence from here.

In this madness, it’s not so self-evident to greet the European among whites, the Hungarian among compatriots. As a child in Szeklerland, I still believed there was a solution; back then, I imagined that all our historical greats were star soldiers of Prince Csaba, who are commanded to lead the Hungarians in times of need. We recognize them because they don’t say “Forward!” but “Follow me!” That’s why we Hungarians don’t get lost. Neither in space nor in time. Those who went before us have been showing the way for eleven hundred years. Whoever follows them is ours.

And we must move. Because Márai is right that “it was always the poets who made a homeland out of pasture,” but it’s our job to live and maintain the homeland as a homeland. Our greats still help us in this today. They are fighters for the same freedom that we defend now; that same national uplift which made them expand the boundaries of this freedom is what fuels us today; they took off to soar from the same motherland from which we speak today. Our last national awakening, nearly two hundred years ago, was qualitatively different from what we hear about from overseas these days. We didn’t cancel, we created. We didn’t multiply genders, but affirmations. We didn’t attack from a victim’s stance but confronted the world as freedom fighters.

The greats of the Reform Era were the first to go beyond the imperative of the Enlightenment formulated by Kant: they not only dared to think but dared to think in Hungarian. We need this intellectual courage even more today.

Let’s dare to think in Hungarian!

Notes:

Historical context:

“Hundred years of Hungarian solitude”: Refers to the period following World War I and the Treaty of Trianon (1920), which resulted in Hungary losing significant territory and population.

“Reform Era”: A period of Hungarian history in the 19th century (roughly 1825-1848) characterized by social, political, and economic reforms and a national awakening.

Literary and philosophical references:

Attila József: A significant Hungarian poet (1905-1937). The term “fascist communism” is attributed to him.

Nietzsche and Marx: German philosophers whose ideas have been influential but also subject to misinterpretation.

Sándor Márai: A Hungarian writer (1900-1989) known for his works on the decline of Central European bourgeois culture.

Cultural and political concepts:

“Cancel culture”: A modern form of ostracism where someone is thrust out of social or professional circles.

BLM: Black Lives Matter, a decentralized political and social movement.

LGBTQ: Acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer.

“Liberarians”: A neologism combining “liberal” with a derogatory suffix in Hungarian.

 Hungarian mythology:

Prince Csaba: A legendary figure in Hungarian mythology, son of Attila the Hun, believed to return with his army on the Milky Way to protect the Szeklers in times of danger.

Linguistic notes:

“Dare to think in Hungarian”: A play on Kant’s Enlightenment motto “Sapere aude” (Dare to know), emphasizing the importance of national language and perspective in intellectual discourse.