2,263 words
Cecile Tormay
An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune, An Account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Hungary
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2020
“Pole and Hungarian brothers be.” Poland and Hungary have enjoyed a long and special relationship since the Middle Ages. It was the ethnic Magyar Stephen Báthory (yes, of the same family as the infamous “Blood Countess”) whom Polish noblemen voted into power as the king in 1576. As king, Báthory created the famous hussar corps of the Polish-Lithuanian army and imported skilled saber makers from Transylvania to create fearsome blades that earned a reputation for both high quality and deadly efficiency. Another shared monarch, the Pole Władysław III, died leading Christian forces against the Turks at Varna. Over the course of centuries, Poles and Hungarians fought side by side against shared enemies like the Teutonic Knights and Turks, plus they deserve credit for turning the tide against the Mongols. Their friendship is a brotherhood defined by a shared Christian faith and a willingness to use arms in order to defend Christendom.
Poles and Hungarians today also share the distinction of being the primary enemies of the European Union and the American Leviathan. The national conservative governments in Warsaw and Budapest have managed so far to thwart the machinations of Berlin, Paris, and Washington in regards to Muslim invasions and the globohomo agenda that in effect is the cultural arm of neoliberal imperialism. NGOs filthy with Soros lucre constantly harp about Hungary’s “turn away from democracy,” and Western think-tanks rotten with Russophobia write screeds denouncing the genuine populism of Poland and Hungary as a roundabout Russian plot. The attacks on Poland and Hungary reveal the naked truth that “our democracy,” which Western elites worship, is nothing but pseudo-imperialism designed to corrode all racial, national, religious, and communal bonds in the service of global capital.
As for the Poles and Hungarians, their resistance is borne of experience and history and as victims of various totalitarian ideologies (liberalism is a totalitarian ideology, after all). Hungary’s first encounter with Bolshevism came in March 1919. The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was the first Bolshevik state outside of Russia, drenched Hungary in a sea of blood. Fueled by ethnic resentment as well as Marxist fervor, the Hungarian Communists made it their mission to oppress and wipe out all traces of Christianity, familial loyalty, and national pride in the Hungarian people. Published in 2020 by the fine folks at Antelope Hill Publishing, An Outlaw’s Diary by Hungarian novelist Cecile Tormay is an eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Hungary. Despite its age, the book is painfully relevant today in our age of increasing anarcho-tyranny.
Reviled by the same forces who disdain Orban and his government, Tormay was once a popular novelist and Right-wing activist in Hungary during the age of the Dual Monarchy. When the Bolshevik revolution hit Hungary in March 1919, she, like millions, was caught in the black heart of the movement in Budapest. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was born out of the ashes of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in November 1918. The so-called “Aster Revolution” installed the First Hungarian Republic and Mihály Károlyi as its leader. Like the German Revolution that occurred in the same month, the First Hungarian Republic was a bourgeois coup led by professors, wealthy urban merchants, and members of the Social Democratic Party (MSZDP). The First Republic was thoroughly unprepared to deal with both the vengeful Entente (who wanted to punish Hungary for fighting alongside the hated Germans) and its voracious neighbors. A weakened Hungary was attacked on all sides by the new states of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as old enemies in Romania. The Slavs and Romanians invoked nationalism to carve out lands formerly belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary. The First Republic seemed unwilling or incapable of invoking an appropriate response.
Waiting in the shadows of these events was the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP). Founded in Moscow by radicalized prisoners of war, the MKP enjoyed Soviet financial backing as well as a reputation for ruthlessness (some members of the group fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution, while others executed White Russian and Austro-Hungarian prisoners in Russia). The Communists were also savvy enough to latch onto the nationalism issue, and during the debate over the Treaty of Versailles, the Communists promised the Hungarian proletariat both revolution and revanchism.
The leader of the Hungarian Communists, Béla Kun, became the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the First Republic on March 21, 1919. This is where Tormay’s diary begins, on the night when the Bolsheviks seized control and formed a new Communist-Social Democrat coalition government:
“Death to the bourgeois!” A bullet strikes a lamp and there is a shower of glass on the pavement. A carriage drives past furiously, then stops away in the distance. Other cars follow its track into the maddened, lightless town. What is happening here, beyond it, everywhere, in the barracks, in the boulevards? Sailors are looting the inner city: a handful of Bolsheviks have taken possession of the town. There is no escape! [1]
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Here’s the Thing here.
Much like the American racial jacquerie of 2020, the Bolshevik revolution in Hungary was inaugurated with state-sponsored anarcho-tyranny: drunken sailors and soldiers looted shops and homes in Budapest, Communist thugs harassed women on the streets, and all semblance of law and order collapsed as police officers either went over to the revolution or went home to protect their families. As for Tormay, her well-known name meant that she had to flee into the countryside. There, between March and July 1919, she avoided the revolution by moving from house to house and living among the hardy, Christian, and patriotic peasants of Hungary.
What makes An Outlaw’s Diary a must-read text is its brutal honesty and its bravery in telling the truth about the racial makeup of the revolutionaries. “The demoniacal organizers,” Tormay writes, “the raving wire-pullers and prompters have taken their place, and for the first time in the long history of Hungary, Hungarians are excluded from every inch of ground, whether the hills and the vales of the Carpathians; or the boundless plains.” [2] Hungarians were replaced by ethnic minorities, most notably Jews. Outside of Budapest, where the Communists did enjoy some support with the proletariat, the Hungarian Bolsheviks found it impossible to convert Slavs, Romanians, or provincial Hungarians, all of whom saw Kun’s government as a Jewish cabal. [3] This was no mere anti-Semitic trope: the leaders of the revolution were almost all Jewish. The hunchbacked Tibor Szamuely was the Deputy People’s Commissar of War and People’s Commissar of Public Education; Kun’s righthand men were Matyas Rakosi (Roth/Rosenfeld) and Otto Korvin (Klein); György Lukács, the son of a millionaire banker who remains a hero to Western Marxists in English departments everywhere, served as a political commissar for the Hungarian Red Army, as well as one of the leaders of Communist education. These men, along with other agitators, made it their mission to disrupt nominal life in the country. For over one hundred days, they succeeded.
Tormay notes that the Hungarian Soviet consolidated power through pure violence and social control. On the one hand, armed thugs used the trains to travel the countryside and carry out swift executions of “counter-revolutionaries.” The masters of this violence were the Lenin Boys. Known for their distinct leather jackets and flat caps, the Lenin Boys, who were led by Szamuely and a Communist former sailor named Jozsef Cserny, specialized in abductions, torture, and summary executions. This became known as the “Red Terror,” which singled out the clergy, intellectuals, and wealthy peasants for liquidation. Thousands died in this manner.
As for social control, by March 1919, all newspapers in Budapest were either aligned with the Social Democrats or completely controlled by the Communists. All other dissent, even including the one liberal capitalist newspaper in Budapest that had supported the revolution, was squashed. [4] The Communists did not need to capture Hungary’s public schools, for crypto-Communists had long controlled portions of the Hungarian education system. But, with the coming of the Soviet, Communist instructors were given full control of the classroom. With this power, the schools and the Commissary of Education seized private libraries, banned the teaching of Christianity, and instituted sex education for the youngest pupils, including grade school children who were informed about the benefits of free love and the mechanics of sexual reproduction.
Throughout all this turmoil, Tormay never loses sight of the fact that the Hungarian Soviet is nothing more than the secularized synagogue — a state based on the principles of Jewish group identity.
The Jew comes uninvited and declines to go when dismissed. He spreads and yet holds together. He penetrates the bodies of nations. He invisibly organizes his own nation among alien peoples. He creates laws beyond the law. He denies the conception of “patrie” but has a “patrie” of his own which wanders and settles him. He scoffs at other people’s conception of God and yet builds churches of his own everywhere. . . . What the Jew finds ridiculous in other people, he keeps fanatically alive in himself. [5]
The Jewish-dominated Hungarian Soviet could not hide its ethnic character, nor did it really bother to try. Tormay recounts one time during a public execution of “counter-revolutionaries” when Szamuely let a Jewish prisoner go with a pithy phrase about how Jews were only hung by accident. Elsewhere, despite the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Hungarian Soviet, the government found willing accomplices among Jewish bankers and financiers in Budapest (a similar situation unfolded in Bolshevik Russia, too). Jews were spared from the rampant looting of the Bolsheviks, as Red Army soldiers with bayonets guarded Jewish homes and shops. [6] Jewish officials were also protected from angry Hungarian crowds following incidents like the one during the Feast of Corpus Christi, where Jewish Communists in cars tried to run worshippers over or spit on the consecrated host. [7]
For Tormay and other Hungarian patriots, the conundrum of 1919 was that they suffered under Communist rule, and yet did not want salvation in the form of foreign occupation. The Hungarian Soviet never knew a moment of peace, as the Czechoslovakian and Romanian armies continued to press in on the shrunken Hungarian state. At times, the Red Army showed some promise, especially against the equally hapless Czechoslovaks. However, against the Romanians, who enjoyed French military support, the Red Army fell apart. Much of this was due to internal divisions, as most of the soldiers were Hungarian nationalists who grew to resent the mostly Jewish political commissars who refused to do any fighting. Then, in the summer of 1919, several cities in western Hungary rose in revolt, initiating a counter-revolution led by the Hungarian National Army, which was officered by and composed of World War I veterans. These Hungarian Whites, after a few missteps and failed risings that were put down with extreme violence, found a leader in Admiral Miklós Horthy. Horthy and the National Army would enter Budapest with the Romanians in August 1919, effectively ending the Hungarian Soviet. Kun and company fled to Vienna rather than face justice. Kun would be accused of Trotskyism by Stalin. He died sometime after being arrested by the NKVD in 1937. Other former Communists tried to offer their services to the Whites, while thousands were executed in revenge killings known as the White Terror. Tormay notes with disgust that the Jewish women of Budapest saved their skins by sleeping with Romanian soldiers. [8]
As for Horthy, he ruled as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 until 1944. His national-conservative government expanded Hungary’s borders after successful wars against Slovakia and Yugoslavia, plus it sent Hungarian divisions to the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union. Horthy’s government, which did not have much enthusiasm for Germany’s war, quietly saved an untold number of Central European Jews. For this, Horthy is today painted as a “Nazi” by the international Left.
Tormay, who was already a middle-aged woman when she composed An Outlaw’s Diary, lived long enough to see Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, which she supported with gusto as the opening salvo of a European-wide counter-revolution against Soviet Communism and Anglo-American liberalism. Tormay was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, but she died in 1937 without having won the award. Today, in a renewed and prosperous Hungary, many celebrate Tormay as a Hungarian patriot. An Outlaw’s Diary is a reminder of just how patriotic Tormay was, plus it might serve as a blueprint for a future American dissident. After all, the current regime in Washington, DC is clear on its abhorrence of the Historic American Nation and the utility of anti-white vitriol. The neoliberal Leviathan sees rooted, rural, and Christian whites as the last impediment to complete atomization. Therefore, ethnic resentments are but one tool for oppression prior to dispossession. This scenario played out in Hungary in 1919, but unlike Hungary, no foreign governments are coming to save the United States.
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Notes
[1] Cecile Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune, An Account of the Revolution in Hungary (Antelope Hill, 2020), p. 1.
[2] Ibid., 7.
[3] Keith Hitchens, “The Rumanian Socialists and the Hungarian Soviet Republic,” Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 109
[4] Tormay, 29.
[5] Ibid., 51.
[6] Ibid., 187.
[7] Ibid., 149-50.
[8] Ibid., 200.
21 comments
“Korvin” is an old Transylvanian nobility name. That jew had some chutzpah…
Corvin means raven. But there´s Jewish name Korban/Corban. Korban is sacrifice, offering. And all those Korbans mask as Corvins. I do not know if the former KGB agent in UK Jeremy Corbyn is one of them or not.
By coincidence I am halfway through this very book.
Three things:
1. The parallels are scary obvious.
2. Yeah I noticed that WE won’t be getting any external help (as lackadaisical as the help was that the Hungarians got — at first).
3. Remember how Solzhenitsyn said how they burned in the camps knowing they could have fought back early but didn’t? I felt the same way reading this book — a few hundred, or maybe even just a few dozen brave, well armed, and well disciplined, loyal and committed men could have nipped that (((communist))), poison flower in the bud. If they had understood and acted quickly.
I plan to finish this book this weekend and try to get as many friends and acquaintances to read it as possible.
So many horrible tales come out of Central Europe between the ending of WWI and WW2, but they are so necessary for us to know, because I feel I am becoming surrounded by 100 swords now in my own country here, presumably “Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave”. I was most interested in hearing of the Jews being involved, not only in the Russian Revolution, but in the takeovers of so many small Central and East European countries. Having been brought up to hear the sad stories of the Holocaust, over and over, in which Jews were eternally made out to be ‘innocent victims’, I am finally hearing the truth about how wide-spread they were throughout all of Europe, and how widely they were involved in Communism, which killed millions upon millions of White Europeans. To hear the story that, all of a sudden, one day in Germany, the German people just woke up and decided –‘ Well, today, we are going to begin killing all the Jews’, as if this idea just fell out of the blue sky! So, books like this which tell the full story are so valuable. Even in college, I heard the same story, but now I hear the other side. Thank you for this enlightening essay.
That’s quite an exaggeration, as both are members of the EU and NATO. A more accurate description would be that they are somewhat rebellious provinces of the Neoliberal Empire but provinces nevertheless.
True, vassal states may raise some objections, but they still remain vassals.
”A weakened Hungary was attacked on all sides by the new states of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as old enemies in Romania. The Slavs and Romanians invoked nationalism to carve out lands formerly belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary. The First Republic seemed unwilling or incapable of invoking an appropriate response. ”
No! Hungarian Soviet Republic attacked all of its neighbors and got severely beaten. Hungary can not and will not rule ever again on other peoples!
In fact Hungary tried to occupy lands with non-Hungarian majorities at Lenin instigation.
Romanians defeated the Russians in the Battle of Galati (12-22 January 1918) and the fightings for Basarabia during January 1918. The Russian soldiers started to rape and loot all over Moldavia.
In April 1919 Hungary attacked Romania and Czechoslovakia. And it was the entire Hungarian army both the nationalists and Bolsheviks. The second Hungarian offensive on 20 July 1918 was smashed by the Romanian Army and it ended with the Romanian cavalry occupying Budapest on 3-4 August 1919.
The Romanian Army booted out the demented Bella Kun in August. The Romanians orderly retreated after 14 November 1919.
Do not forget that these operations were synchronized with the Polish-Soviet War between 14 February 1919 – 18 October 1920, concluded after heavy fighting in front of Warsaw!
And it was not the ”Bolsheviks” attacking Warsaw, but the Russians! Aleksey Brusilov, the last tsarist head of army, was appealing the Russians to join the Red Army and fight for the Red Army under the command of another former tsarist officer Mikhail Tukhachevsky!
Romanians were not invoking nationalism in order to steal some foreign land. Romanians claimed what was their ancestral land! We prevailed against all odds. And be sure we are still ready to fight against Putin and its minions.
It’s true that Kun’s armies attacked the Romanians and Czech first, and there might have been a strong contingent of actual Hungarian nationalists among them. After all, from their perspective, these were the people who “stole” Hungarian territory from them. Speaking of perspectives, it’s understandable how the author of the book might see things the way she did, as a young Hungarian nationalist in the immediate aftermath of WWI, when her country was carved by Woodrow Wilson and the Entante, but the author of this review does very little justice to the reader by simply repeating Miss Tormay’s views in an uncritical fashion.
Returning to the Romanian intervention; they dispatched the Hungarians quite easily from their territory, BUT, the incursion into Hungary itself was done in part at the beckoning of the western powers. It might have been that the Romanians would have intervened even without the west calling them to do so — it was a big debate at the time, and what France, Britain, and the US thought might not even have served as the decisive argument.
And some three years later, Romanians give political rights to the same pernicious scoundrel that created the Hungarian crisis… Following pressures from the west… the last country in Europe to do so.
Wilson didn’t “carve” no ones country! Transylvania was Romanian. Hungarians were a minority. That’s it.
The entire book is a venomous lie.
Romania was made by the Romanian Royal Army and the Romanian National Army (the Romanian soldiers and officers in the Austrian Army – a force of 160 000 men) and by the Romanian people.
What this author wanted? The Romanians in Transylvania were loyal to Franz Joseph not to Hungary nor Mihály Károlyi nor Bela Kun. Hundreds of years of injustice and arrogance were at play.
Trianon only stated what was obvious. Transylvania had a Romanian majority and the union with the Kingdom of Romania was voted by Romanians and the Germans (both the Schwabs and Saxons) on 1 December 1918. The peace and order was instated by the Romanian National Army led by Iuliu Maniu and the Baron Ioan Boeriu (former general in the Austrian Army).
What optics is in here? The lies of Hungarian disarmament? The lie of Hungary being attacked? The lie of the 1 400 000 men Honved Army (including of course the Romanians and everybody else)?
Romanians VOTED the union with the Kingdom of Romania.
You are clearly indoctrinated by decades of Romanian propaganda. The historical facts are far from the Romanian fairytales.
Slovakia (part of newly formed Czechoslovakia) was Upper- Hungary part of the Kingdom of Hungary (1000–1918) with a large ethnic Hungarian population.
Transylvania (Erdély) was Hungarian since 1003 till 1918. There were wars with the Turks and the Austrian Habsburgs but in all that time it was never Romanian before and between 1003 and 1918- After 1918 it was occupied by Romania with the help of the French.
Your post here are the classical predictable Romanian hate and lies on the facts about Hungarian history and ethnic Hungarians.
Really? Romanians were the majority in ztra Transylvania even after 900 years of occupation and colonization. There are imperial statics showing exactly the Romanian ethnical dominance. It is a fact.
You are spouting venomous propaganda and straight lies. And truth to be told arrogance and hubris lost Hungary…
Why would a Romanian in his right mind to be under Hungarian occupation in his own country? This is the simple question you are constantly evading.
Transylvania is Romania!
Nice that you talk about the Battle of Varna and Polish-Hungarian brotherhood. What you are forgetting is that there were lots of Romanians there too, both from Transylvania and Walachia. And Corvin were a Romanian family.
We will see.
In January 2021 it was published that the graves of János Corvin and his son were found in Croatia. The son and grandson of Matthias Corvinus (king of Hungary) who was the son of János Hunyadi and Erzsébet Szilágyi.
Now research of the bones will show the ethnic origins of the Hunyadi family (male line)
Yeah. Call an international expert panel if you are really intersted to find out the truth!
Peace, everyone! The globalists are our common enemies now, and we’ve got to hang together.
I think you meant Nobel Prize for Literature.
Oh dear, Romanians and Hungarians started arguing in the comments. Bring the popcorn.
The doom may be upon us and we’re still stuck in the same old petty squabbles. As if that was not ridiculous enough, or as if that would save us, it has transformed into which imperial province should govern this or that piece of land. The only benefit of it is that our enemies may die ROFLing.
I have yet to see one Hungarian that cannot integrate well, and I have met quite a few. I have been to Budapest many times and I would have no problem at all living there.
So do you want to take Transylvania back? Why don’t you come over then, I know where the good coffee is. And if you decide to stay, fine. You can make as many proud fierce Hungarian babies as you like. There is not a problem with that as Romanian birth rate is terrible, and so is the Hungarian one.
“He scoffs at other people’s conception of God and yet builds churches of his own everywhere. . . . What the Jew finds ridiculous in other people, he keeps fanatically alive in himself.”
Perhaps this is because while Jews practice an essentially traditional, ethnic religion, they have the peculiarity of believing their God is the God of all “the nations,” nonetheless. They have no way of respecting other people’s traditions- indeed, it’s an integral part of their identity and religion not to!
The Jew essentially believes that all other people’s worship false gods, and are thus morally inferior. But only they, the Jews, are chosen to worship- can worship, the right and only God.
For them, all other national identities are fake and worthless, only theirs is meaningful and worthwhile, and no one else but them can truly participate. They cannot live and let live, as Greg puts it.
I got the book. Hard to put down. But I do tire of rehashing the intrigues of WWI and WWII, and even the Cold War. The key is the family, and education. Have big families, and teach them how to think, and how to work. Teach them self-reliance and self-respect. All that is hard work… leaves no time for idle speculation or thought experiments. Make white babies and white flight until the system collapses onto itself. Keep it simple.
The notes on what happened in the educational system there concurs with what Laszlo Pasztor had to say about it. From what he related, things were very bad indeed. The schools were encouraging the kids to be juvenile delinquents, turning the young against the old. It sounds like a dress rehearsal to the 1960s Counterculture – gosh, I wonder why?
Other than that, Gyorgy Lukacs – the gentleman heading up all this – snuck out of the country and became wildly popular with the cultural Marxists. I first encountered him in my critical theory English class in college; he was cited reverently as a wise elder.
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