The following is an Orange Files translation of an excerpt from an editorial entitled “The Same Stench” that pro-government journalist Zsolt Bayer published in the newspaper Magyar Hírlap on January 4, 2011 (see primary source in Hungarian). On June 26, 2013, Hungary’s supreme court, the Curia, ruled that the content of “The Same Stench” was anti-Semitic (source in Hungarian). 

 

The Same Stench

A “stench wafts” from Hungary, writes some stinking end-product that answers to the name Cohen¹ from somewhere in England. Cohen, and Cohn-Bendit² and Schiff.³ While Népszava⁴ appears with a red figure holding a hammer and demands press freedom. Most people think that this is something new and that there has never been a campaign of this type before. Foolishness. There is nothing new under the sun. Unfortunately they didn’t manage to bury everything up to its neck in the Orgovány Forest.⁵. . . After the red Terror—here at home the rule of the mass murderers has for decades gone under the euphemstic name “the 133 glorious days” and their intellectual heirs love these protozoa to this day—Béla Kun and his followers depart for Austria. Some of them consider this departure to be permanent, since in all their born days they hated this country. . . . So that is how they left. Austria and their stupid chancellor, Renner, and even more stupid state secretary, Bauer, were waiting for them. These two pro-Bolshevik enthusiasts awaited the people’s commissars and the murderers with open arms, granting them asylum in advance. Kun and his rotten-to-the-core gang received the manor house of the honorable Count van der Straaten in Karlstein as their residence. And from this time on these stinking end-products were able to conduct their activities and their wild-animal propaganda against Hungary amid the utmost liberty. . . . And today, just as it was then: the communists, the bourgeois radicals, the Bolsheviks, common criminals and the lowest of the press joined forces to destroy the government. The biggest traitors: Jenő Landler, Zsigmond Kunfi, Andor Gábor, Ferenc Göndör, Vilmos Böhm, Zoltán Rónai.⁶ Their press organ: Népszava, the slander sheet of the Austrian communists Rothe (sic!) Fahne⁷ and don’t forget the Bécsi Magyar Újság.⁸ It was here that they incited and lied about the horrors of the “white terror.” . . . Well has anything changed since then? No, it hasn’t changed. “Western public opinion sees Hungarian events only in the distorted mirror of the émigrés. Nobody talks about the Russian terror, nobody remembers the Hungarian Red Terror anymore, everybody only hears about the White Terror.” Yes indeed. . . .   

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Speaking about “The Same Stench” on the opposition radio station Klubrádió on January 5, 2011, Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities President Péter Feldmájer accused Bayer of anti-Semitism (source in Hungarian). 

Bayer sued Feldmájer for damages, claiming that his alleged slander had caused him professional harm. 

The Budapest Court of Justice rejected Bayer’s claim. However the Budapest Court of Appeals later overturned the lower court’s decision. 

On June 26, 2013, Hungary’s supreme court, the Kúria, overturned the decision Budapest Court of Appeals, declaring that content of “The Same Stench” was anti-Semitic (source in Hungarian). 

Notes

1-Journalist Nick Cohen, who wrote the following in an article on Hungary published in British newspaper The Observer on January 2, 2011: “The silence of Europe’s rulers will suit Fidesz nicely. Ever since it won a landslide victory over the corrupt and incompetent Hungarian left, it has been turning Hungary into a . . . well, I will not call it a fascist country or even a neo-fascist county, but just note that an old, foul stench wafts from the ‘new society’ Orbán’s patriots are building on the Danube” (source). 

2–Member of the European Parliament Daniel Cohn-Bendit of Germany, a frequent critic of the Orbán government. 

3–Hungarian-born British pianist András Schiff, who said with regard to Hungary in a December 2012 English-language interview with Finnish website yle “I can’t take what’s happening there now. It’s very, very sad. . . . The right and the extreme right are so prominent and so strong. And there is so much racism, hatred, anti-Semitism and nationalism. . . . It would be suicide for me to go there. . . . They would chop off my hands” (source). 

4–Népszava is a left-wing daily newspaper in Hungary that has been published since 1877. 

5–In November 1919 an anti-Bolshevik National Army detachment under the leadership of Iván Héjjas killed 36 people in the village of Orgovány (central Hungary) suspected of having supported the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic earlier that year. Many of the victims were Jews (source in Hungarian). 

6–Members of the Revolutionary Governing Council and communist journalists at the time of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Most or all of them were Jews. 

7–Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) was the newspaper of the German Marxist-revolutionary organization the Spartacus League founded in November 1918. 

8–The Bécsi Magyar Újság (The Viennese Hungarian News) was the newspaper of left-liberal Hungarian political émigrés in Vienna published between 1919 and 1923.

Last updated: June 6, 2015.