Posted on 12/24/2002 2:18:38 PM PST by knighthawk
Earlier this month I accompanied John O'Sullivan, the head of United Press International, on a private tour of a museum in Budapest. The House of Terror, as it's now called, is situated in an unremarkable apartment building on a thoroughfare of elegant fin de siècle mansions. I passed it often in my childhood and youth, though always careful to walk on the opposite side of the street. We used to call the building simply by its address: 60 Andrássy Road. For 12 years, between 1944 and 1956, saying "60 Andrássy Road" carried the same meaning for us as saying "Bastille" would have carried to Frenchmen before July 14, 1789.
60 Andrássy Road wasn't a prison, strictly speaking, though thousands were detained, tortured or killed in its subterranean chambers. Both Nazis and communists chose the nondescript apartment building for their "secret" police headquarters -- not that there was anything secret about the thugs of the uniformed Nazi Arrow Cross or the similarly uniformed Communist "AVO," the Hungarian acronym for Department of State Security. They were both organizations of blatant, in-your-face terror.
It's not my purpose here to talk about the exhibits. 60 Andrássy Road would require Dante's pen and the length of the Inferno for an adequate description; having neither at my disposal, I won't make the attempt. It's instructive to see, though, where the House of Terror fits in with contemporary politics.
The museum, which was conceived and completed during the centre-rightist government of prime minister Viktor Orbán, attracted 30,000 visitors within weeks of its opening in February, 2002. It also attracted immediate controversy. Hungary's "post-communist" left felt aggrieved by the museum's implication of equivalence between the two totalitarian systems. Some Jewish organizations and spokespersons thought that the museum diminished the uniqueness of the Holocaust. There were even suggestions that by devoting only one of about 24 rooms exclusively to the Holocaust, the House of Terror implied that communism was worse.
The objections bear no scrutiny. The parallel between the two systems is a matter of history, which the Nazis and the communists conveniently underlined in Budapest by choosing the same building for their respective headquarters. If the bulk of the communist exhibits exceeds the Nazi ones, it's because the Arrow Cross's reign of terror lasted only about four months, between October, 1944, and February, 1945, while the communist reign of terror lasted some 40 years.
What the objections illustrate is that, unlike Nazism, communism wasn't defeated in Europe. Though it became dysfunctional and eventually collapsed, its ruling circles were never "de-Nazified." They even managed to achieve continuity under various guises within the post-communist left. Indeed, in Hungary they succeeded in narrowly winning the election two months after the opening of the House of Terror.
Hungary, along with nine other countries, joined the European Union at last week's Copenhagen summit. Seven of the 10 used to belong to the Soviet empire. Over the next two years these countries will be phased into the EU, an entity in which Holocaust-denial is a crime, but Gulag-denial flourishes under both Brussels's eurocracy and various socialist-leaning governments. This prospect is unlikely to be without consequences.
Today the post-communists are trying to make good on their promise, made before the April elections, that if they win they'll turn the House of Terror into a monument to "reconciliation." As Mr. Orbán remarked at the time: "Reconciliation is always an expression for those who committed the crimes." Or for those who suspect they share the criminals' heritage. The victimizers whose portraits are displayed on the walls of the House of Terror include the post-communists' mentors, along with their fathers, uncles, cousins, spouses and friends. In some cases they include the post-communists themselves in earlier incarnations. The new Prime Minister, Peter Medgyessy, used to be secret agent D-209 in Hungary's communist Ministry of Interior. (In Budapest metal key-chains circulate with the inscription "souvenir from the Hungarian elections of 2002" on one side and "D-209" on the other.)
The left doesn't yet feel secure enough to replace the House of Terror with a socialist-inspired House of Reconciliation. Director Mária Schmidt says the post-communists are currently trying to invoke obscure municipal by-laws to harass the museum. It may be a smart move: Fighting City Hall is no easier in Budapest than anywhere else.
Matters haven't been helped by the energetic Nancy Goldman Brinker, the Bush administration's ambassador to Hungary, who took up her post in September, 2001. A glossy Palm Beach socialite and all-around American go-getter, Ms. Brinker has proven to be somewhat out of her depth in the complexities of East European history and politics. She declined, for instance, to visit the House of Terror. A minor omission, but in situations where symbols amount to substance, such gestures matter. By appearing to subscribe to the notion that Hungary's post-communists are the main bulwark against anti-Semitism and the resurgence of Nazism in Hungary, Ms. Brinker managed to alienate Hungary's centre-right opinion-makers -- i.e., the natural supporters of America and the Bush White House who speak for about half the electorate -- and did so without making the United States one iota more attractive to its natural opponents on the Hungarian left.
The point isn't just that such naive stumbles disillusion East European centrists about the Bush administration. The point is that Jews, in Europe as elsewhere, have more to fear from the political left in the current climate than from the political right. In our times anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism is the acute danger. Whatever the far right amounted to once -- or may, heaven forbid, amount to one day in the future -- at present it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The Arrow Cross party and its one-time adherents are just a sickening exhibit in a few rooms inside the House of Terror. One way to resurrect them as a political force in Eastern Europe is by trying to sweep the Red Terror under the carpet to spare the sensibilities of D-209 and his colleagues. This, alas, is the task to which Mr. Bush's ambassador seems to be lending an unwitting but helping hand.
The heart of the matter.
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