Endre Csapó : Peace to end Peace

In the Preface of his book entitled Hungary the Unwilling Satellite (The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1947) John Flournoy Montgomery wrote the following:

To us, the first war appeared primarily as a conflict between Germany and our allies in western Europe because it was there that our troups fought. Austria-Hungary to us was a German satellite, and the part played by Russian autocracy was soon and conveniently forgotten. We were not burdened with knowledge of eastern European history and snatched gratefully the simple formulae offered by foreign propa-gandists. Since Germany was the enemy, Germany was wrong; since Germany was wrong, her Austro-Hungarian ally was wrong too. Since Russia was about to quit, why bother with her? France, Italy, England and Japan were certainly right.

Americans do not seem to be aware that the most fervent longing of modern nationalists is not for freedom but for mastery. Austria-Hungary seemed ramshackle to Americans. Russia, just as heterogeneous as she, did not seem so, because the Czars, more reactionary than the Hapsburgs, had kept their subjects illiterate.

Making good use of our impression that we had participated in a principally Western conflict, our allies and associates laid down for us laws of habitual hatred and fondness concern-ing eastern Europe. We responded by being obedient and trustful, like draft oxen under the yoke. The English and French had already developed the conception of Latin--Slavic co-operation against non-Slavs and non-Latins. The German-Austrians and the Magyars were neither Slavic nor Latin. Hence these two were treated as vanquished and guilty while the Slavs of Austria-Hungary were nominated victors, although with exceedingly few exceptions they had defended the Hapsburg Empire for four and a half years with no less fervour and tenacity than had the others. We Americans were ordered to love Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia and to applaud the ill-treatment meted out to Hungarians and German-Austrians. We did. We bowed reverently to the fact that one racially mixed community, Austria-Hungary, was replaced and absorbed by a number of states, three of which, namely Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania, were no less mixed than the dissected empire had been, whereas two states, Hungary and German-speaking Austria, suffered amputation of their best provinces.

I say we bowed to this settlement. To be quite exact, we did not care. The limited attention we gave to Europe hardly crossed the Rhine. If it suited the British and French to put millions of German-Austrians and Hungarians under Czech rule, Hungarians under Rumanian, and Croats under Serbian domination, why should we be squeamish?

But having helped our allies to win, we had our share of responsibility in the results of victory. We should not have washed our hands of all the injustice committed in the name of national self-determination, and yet we did. The fact that others, nearer to the spot, were no wiser than we may exculpate us, but it does not mean that we acted wisely. Peace treaties involve recognition of new factors that have been introduced by war; they also should involve a consulting together on the part of all the belligerents as to how best to set the world in working order again. Our desire to dictate the peace deprived us of much needed advice and criticism from experts among the countries most affected.

Even before Hitler shocked us into realizing our blunders, the truth had dawned upon some Americans who visited the dismembered empire. Businessmen, having visited first Croatia and then Serbia, or first Transylvania and then old Rumania, would ask me in bewilderment why advanced races had been put under the rule of comparatively backward ones. I could not find a satisfactory answer. Apparently in 1919 Chris-tian statesmen had not yet discovered --as we now seem to have discovered-- a method of chasing millions of provi-sionless people over the border without the slightest regard for family ties.

It is amazing how endurable have been those habitual hatreds and fondnesses produced in the First World War and then foisted on us by our allies. The explanation is propaganda -- an amount of propaganda unthinkable at the time of Washing-ton's warning. People deprived of their livelihood by their neighbors never even had a hearing. At the same time, those who profited by the victors' arbitrary discrimination showered us with an unceasing flow of propaganda. Especially does this refer to the Czechs, who took some of the best agricultural parts of Hungary and the richest industrial parts of German-speaking Austria. Many millions of dollars were spent every year in various kinds of propaganda -- the object of which was to keep what had been seized.

All of this may sound like past history, outrun by events of incomparable magnitude. In reality it is living history. The same habitual hatreds and fondnesses are still alive and have already begun to shackle us and to make us blind to our own interests. I am not speaking of Germany and Japan, although these are cases where a policy of permanent hatred would be the source of most fateful blundering. I am speaking of the eastern half of Europe which includes one half of central Europe.

Again as in 1919, we are asked to consider the Slavs our natural friends and the non-Slavs our natural enemies. But Slavism now means something quite different from what it meant after the other war. Then it referred to small and sepa-rate nations, to Poles, Czechs and Serbs. Now it refers to the largest continuous empire on earth, which, controlled by a dictator, stretched from the Pacific Ocean into the heart of Germany, having reduced to the position of satellites all the Slavic races which had not been under the scepter of the Czars -- all Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. At the same time, we are expected to contribute, at least by acquiescence, to the chaining of those elements in the Soviet sphere which are non-Slav, principally Hungary, Rumania and German-speaking Austria.

With great foresight, Russian, Czech and southern Slav-communist propagandists, drawing from seemingly inex-haustible funds, prepared the ground for this policy before the Second World War ended in Europe. A shrewd distinction has been dinned into our ears -- a distinction between Hitler's victims and his collaborators and satellites. How many Ameri-cans remember that Dr. Edouard Benes was swept out of office as President of Czechoslovakia by an irresistible wave of pro-German collaborationism which even rotted his own National Socialist Party, whose champions, Beran and Chvalkovsky, he had nominated as premier and foreign minister? How many remember that the Slovaks, described for twenty years as members of the one Czechoslovak race, sided with Hitler in his war against Russia and declared war on Poland and America? Very few, it is safe to say. But everyone seems to believe that "feudal and fascist Hungary" was Hitler's enthusiastic ally. Again, few remember that the Moscow Declaration, signed by us in 1943, reminded Austria, Hitler's first victim, of her responsibility in having participated in the war. The labels "victim", "collaborator" and "satellite" have even been inter-changeable. As long as it suited Moscow, Bulgaria was called a satellite of Hitler. When she became a satellite of Russia, it was acknowledged that she had been Hitler's victim. The same happeded to Croatia.

It is undeniable fact that Hitler's best collaborators in the Second World War were the Czechs, the Slovaks and the Rumanians. Hungary held out longest against German demands, indeed, until the spring of 1944. Foreign propaganda, however, supported by our OWI, succeeded in distorting historic facts by telling our public that the regimes in Bohemia, Slovakia and Rumania were not representative of their peoples' wishes whereas the Hungarian regime was. This allegation is highly questionable.

Having been United States Minister to Hungary from 1933 to 1941, my regular post of observation in those critical years was Budapest. It was a unique post because the Magyars, neither Teuton nor Slav, were always aware of being between the two fires of German and Russian imperialism. During those years, most of us saw only one fire, the German one. Hungary's vision was far ahead of ours. Had we listened to Hungarian statesmen, we should perhaps have been able to limit Stalin's triumph in the hour of Hitler's fall.

Hungary, between the two wars, was a small country, and from my watchtower on the Danube my eyes could roam over her neighbors and neighbors' neighbors, over Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Germany and Italy. The Department of State encouraged my travel across many borders. Anticipating what I want to show in this book, I might say that what I witnessed was a tragic and insoluble conflict between fear and honour, in which fear was bound to win. It is an undeniable fact that on many occasions those who had been treated as stepchildren by the Western powers in 1919 showed more loyalty to the Allied cause than their spoiled favorites did.

Would it not have been better if we had opposed the arbitrary discrimination indulged in by the surgeons of 1919, who thereby afforded Hitler his most powerful arguments? Offered a second chance, we ought to set ourselves strongly and firmly against a repetition which this time would allow Slavic imperialism to run amuck.

(End of quotations from J. F. Montgomery's book).

It is well known that in 1919 Rumania was reluctant for a long time to accept obligation for vested rights of the minorities to be included in the peace treaty. This is odd because it is typical of a Balkan state, of a Balkan nation that it makes no difference what they sign on any treaty, they act as they please as soon as they are in possession. This made Hungarians considerably uneasy, because they are well aware of the morality of the Balkans and of the practice of maltreating minorities and foreigners.

There is a well known historical reason for this. Byzantium was always in close contact with the absolutism of the Eastern peoples, the ideas of despotism derived from there.

In Byzantium they could never separate religion from Imperial politics. The religion began under the patronage of the emperor, interwoven with the empire, with the realm, with the political power. The Orthodox Church's servility derives from here. This situation has not changed during the last one and a half thousand years, it produced the state-church in all Orthodox countries, executing the power of government administration and supervision, almost as an organ of police. In such a political system, the clergy cannot progress and remains on a low level, the state does not develop either, life becomes rigid. This is the cause of the amazing primitiveness one notices when crossing the border of Orthodoxia.

In Balkan fashion, lies are considered virtue and to cheat someone is a glory. It would be a mistake to believe that these acts would cause some sort of remorse.

The Byzantines wanted to dominate the world. They elevated this concept to the rank of messianism in the Balkans and later in Russia, where the Greek Orthodox faith was gaining ground. Ever since, in the ethos of Orthodoxia, the East is the incarnation of morality, perfection, truth, it is itself the light, as opposed to the West, which is the nest of sin and decay. The West has to be conquered. In the New Testament the chosen people are the Byzantines whose duty it is to guard the Ortho-dox faith and to prepare the redemption of humanity.

Professor Hans Kohn writes in his book Pan-Slavism (New York: Vintage Books 1960): "Khomyakov (1804--60) a leading Slavophile thinker was convinced by the events of 1848 that hope resided only in Orthodox Slavdom. He predicted in 1848 the end of Austria and of the last Charlemagne's Empire, and the disappearance of papal power 'in the archives of history, followed by Protestantism and by Catholicism... Now it is the turn of Orthodoxy, the turn of the Slav races to enter the stage of the world...'."

In the East, religious ceremonies are held in each country's language. Today this sounds quite natural, but during the Middle Ages when the Church (of Rome) had a definite role in uniting and reconciling people, the Latin liturgy played a great part in making it possible for the Church to became universal and international, and without doubt, this lead to the develop-ment of European spirituality. In the Balkans the Greek-language Church was established and with its assistance the Gothic- the Armenian-, the Syrian-, the Coptic-, and the Slavic national Churches arose. However the uniting strength and authority over individual nations and churches was missing from this system.

The Orthodoxy in every country remained on the level of its surroundings due to its rigid isolation. Basically it cultiva-ted bold nationalism, however in the early stages more accent was placed on religion than on language. This is well manifes-ted in the historic Serb--Croat hostility, which also serves as a good example of the type of thousand year-long religious ground-conditioning which cannot dissolve even with the decline of the importance of religion.

The frontier of Western culture has stood for one thousand years alongside the southern and eastern borders of pre-Tria-non Hungary. The Orthodox powers regarded Hungary as the main obstacle in their desire to introduce Orthodoxy into Europe. Every such effort has been halted at the gates of Hungary. This has been long forgotten in the West, and the greatest problem is that it is not felt in Europe that in the appearance of 19th century nationalism Orthodoxy in fact gained new momentum by the Panslav Movement.

"Panslavism in the first half of the nineteenth century was a movement of the Western Slavs born out of their cultural awakening and their political weakness. In the second half of the century it became a predominantly Russian movement, rooted in a feeling of spiritual and material grandeur and in a consciousness of historical destiny." (Hans Kohn).

The revolutionary nature of Slavophilism was pointed out by Prince Ivan Sergeyevich Gagarin (1814--82). In his pam-phlet La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? (Paris 1856) he wrote: "In their foreign policy, they wished to fuse all Orthodox Christians of whatever nationality, and all Slavs of whatever religion, in a great political unity, in a great Slav and Orthodox empire..." (Hans Kohn -- Pan-Slavism).

As a result of the Trianon Peace Treaty the Orthodox East (or by the Russian term the Pravoslavs -- Real-Slavs) broke into the Carpathian Basin, actually into the Occident -- ful-filling the long dream of the Orient -- after many hundred years of trying.

In the middle of the Twentieth Century, led by Bolshevik Russia, Slav nationalism conquered Central Europe, but that was all it has achieved: it could not give more than what is its essence: hardly anything more than Byzantinism manifested as Bolshevism. The Slav "salvation of Europe" was foredoomed to failure, it compromised even the Panslav idea of unification of all Slavs. From the "Great Slav Orthodox Union" Yugoslavia deserted first, then Rumania and at the end of 1989 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, or more correctly, the Russian Empire fell apart.

The USSR did not deliver the glory of the Slavs, neither of Orthodoxy, nor that of the Russians. They lost everything they had gained with US help. The Slovaks are fed up with the Slav brotherhood of the Czechs. The Ukrainians do not appreciate the brotherhood of the Russians. The Serbs cast off the Catholic Croats ending the South-Slav Union (but certainly wanting to keep Croat and Hungarian territories).

Almost everything that was done against the order of nature, now returns to normal in the Eastern part of Europe except the division of the Carpathian Basin by the Peace Treaty of Trianon.

The Treaty of Trianon delivered one third of the Hungarian nation into the practice of the liquidation of nations. This slow but rather effective "final solution" is the product of the amalgamation of Byzantine-originated xenophobia, the incur-able desire for territorial expansion of the Slavs and the "nation-state" ideology of French-origin. This creates a hopeless future for Hungarians now living in the Successor States.

For a long time now the issue has not been a dispute of the frontiers, nor any demands for minority rights. The issue is a large-scale cultural genocide which cannot be stopped by any international treaty or by the nowadays fashionable bilateral "fundamental" pacts.

None of these solutions will succeed because they are contrary to the very nature of the conquerors, and no treaty is respected by the partners anyway. Any treatment of the symptoms is worthless: the inherent cause, the source of the crime must be eliminated.

This problem cannot be handled between the interested parties, as it could not be handled during the past 75 years.

The Hungarians are not simply in quarrel with their neighbours, which can be ended by some mutual compromises. Hungary was attacked militarily in 1919 after the Armistice by the forces of the neighbouring countries with the assistance of the Great Powers. Seven neighbouring countries hold Hungarian-populated territories in captivity and they are not interested in settling the "quarrel", they are only interested in keeping Hungarian territories. They know very well, they can only keep the loot eternally if they clear the land of Hungarians. In this simple equation Hungary is not in a bargaining position, consequently there are no reasonable grounds for any bilateral treaty. The Hungarian people desire peace, but possess none of the elements required to achieve it. The Successor States are not interested in making sacrifices for the desired peace. That historical task should be assumed by the Great Powers who are responsible for creating this situation by imposing the Trianon Treaty 75 years ago and forcing Hungary to sign it on the sorrowful day of 4th June, 1920.

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Endre Csapó : Peace to end Peace