Thread by @Adderabbi

On Victor Orban, a thread.
I see lots of people piling on the "Victor Orban is an anti-Semite, or panders to anti-Semites", so I thought it would be good to look at some of the facts of the matter. 1/

It boils down to 4-5 pieces of evidence:
1) He portrays Soros using anti-Semitic tropes.
2) He is denying Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust.
3) He is an extreme right-wing anti-immigrant nationalist.
4) He is trying to resurrect the reputation of Miklos Horthy.
2/

Let's start with Horthy. It's the most complicated, but also the simplest.
Horthy led Hungary from after WWI until the end of WWII. Hungary was dismembered after WWI. It got the short end of the stick on all counts, leading to decades of festering revanchism and irredentism 3/

Horthy, it must be said plainly, was an anti-Semite, like lots of other people in the world. We are living at the tail end of a 70-year guilt-ridden lull in anti-Semitism and have forgotten just how commonplace it was before WWII. But I digress. 4/

Hungary was, and is, nestled between the German and Russian spheres. In the late 1930s, Horthy made an alliance with Nazi Germany. It's easy to say now that this was evil, but the alternative was probably an alliance with Stalin. Tough to know in advance which is worse. 5/

Once the alliance was made, Hitler pressured Horthy into implementing laws like the Nuremberg laws and then the Final Solution. Horthy obliged - to an extent. This is where it gets complicated. Horthy implemented the race laws and evicted non-Hungarian Jews - to be killed. 6/

But he also protected Hungarian Jews, and there were almost a million of them (including the newly annexed territories). For the first 5 years of WWII, Hungarian Jews were safe and *felt* safe.
7/

In my own family, my grandmother's siblings begged her to move from Southern Transylvania - still part of Romania - back to Northern Transylvania, under Hungary, because it was deemed safe. For those 5 years, Hungarian Jews were safe not in spite of Horthy, but because of him 8/

Then the Nazis got wind of the fact that he was considering switching teams and joining the Allies. They summoned him to Germany and imprisoned him while German tanks occupied Budapest. This is when the Hungarian Holocaust took place. March-June 1944. 9/

This is how @yadvashem , hardly a revisionist shill, puts it:
"The extermination phase in Hungary only began later, after the Nazi invasion in March 1944. Until then Horthy refused to succumb to Hitler’s pressure to hand over the Jews."
yadvashem.org/holocaust/abou… 10/

In other words, Germany could only perpetrate the Holocaust on Hungarian Jewry by actually occupying it and doing it themselves.
This doesn't make Horthy into some kind of hero, but nor is denying his role in the Holocaust a form of Holocaust denial. 11/

Next is the claim that Orban/Fidesz is "extreme right".
Honestly, I can't remember the last time I saw a newspaper call someone "moderate right" or "center right". There is only extreme right.
Well, guess what: Fidesz is center-right. 12/

Remember Jobbik? That's the Hungarian far-right. They got 20% of the vote in the 2018 elections in Hungary. When 20% of the country is to your right, you are not "far right". Also, Jobbik is not part of Orban's government. Multiparty parliamentary systems FTW. 13/

Orban is a nationalist and anti-immigrant, though Hungary remains part of the Schengen Zone. Hungary is a nationalist place. A relatively small country with an astoundingly unique language and culture that it takes a lot of pride in. 14/

Like many states that shook off Communism in the early 90s, it's young enough to be excited about its identity, which it feels is placed at risk by EU dominance and by unfettered migration. These are real concerns, not simply knee-jerk xenophobias. 15/

On to the tropes. George Soros is caricatured using anti-Semitic tropes. Pretty much only George Soros, who actually is Hungarian and does play a major role in cultivating cosmopolitan values in Hungary and elsewhere. OTOH, there are remarkably few anti-Semitic incidents. 16/

You don't see anxiety among Hungary's 100,000 Jews like you do among France's 500,000, and for good reason. I think a lot about what it means to use classic anti-Semitic tropes against one specific Jew while welcoming others. It's a really tough call. 17/

The worst case scenario is like in the Weimar Republic, where you have celebration of Judaism in some places (mainly cities) and demonization elsewhere (in the rural areas), a sort of schizophrenia about Jews that never ends well, The best is that it's really just about Soros 18/

As for denial of general Hungarian complicity, show me the state that doesn't deny its complicity. British, French, Lithuanian, Polish, American, Palestinian. Heck, probably even Jewish. Let's take solace in the fact that people find participation in a Holocaust unimaginable. 19/

Orban is also accused of using Chabad as court Jews. That strikes me as sour grapes. Of course a conservative govt will support conservative(-seeming) religious groups. That's not evidence of anything untoward. 20/

In the final analysis, Orban is illiberal and is willing to use anti-Semitic tropes against an enemy. He's also a democrat, albeit with a strong majoritarian streak. He believes in a world order of nation-states. These positions may be loathesome, but they are not extreme. 21/

I.e., one may find these positions loathsome, but they are grounded in a vision of how the world should be politically organized - a vision that retains a strong hold in most "new" democracies, those that emerged in the 20th century. 22/

You don't have to love it. But conflating parties like Fidesz with parties like Jobbik, Golden Dawn, Freedom Party, etc. is a category error that betrays real misunderstanding. /End