New Hungarian Guard ensures peaceful passing of commemorative events

Unarmed unbowed

They were there, in their thousands. Lurking down every side street and alley way, armed to the teeth and waiting only for the order to strike. How many hundreds upon hundreds of Hungarian village communities paralyzed by crime, yearn to this day to see a mere one of their number? But the Hungarian police know that catching criminals is not the reason they exist, exerting political control is.

In a week marked by a succession of doom laden predictions, each guaranteeing more violence than the one preceding it; perhaps most notable was a survey by the Magyar Nemzet newspaper which spoke of over 50% of people expecting this year’s events on October 23rd to be marred by violence.

In fact with the Fidesz opposition so convinced and petrified at the prospect that their own commemorations took place almost as far from the centre of Budapest as it was possible to be, by the afternoon of this past Friday the Socialist governments’ Ministers were no doubt all congratulating themselves on a job well done.

The absurdity of their own “celebrations” having taken place at a cordoned off Kossuth Square, attended only by politicians barely able to disguise their discomfort at being forced by international expectation to commemorate the overthrow of their ideological predecessors; they could at least console themselves that no actual Hungarian citizens would dare defy them by coming together en masse in the centre of the country’s capital.

Their scare mongering and threatening had done its job, and by midday almost empty metro trains passed without even stopping at Kossuth Square station. Yet by three o’clock, tens of thousands had gathered in the shadow of St Stephen’s basilica in the very heart of the city. On the very paving stones in fact, which three years earlier had been mottled with the blood of demonstrators.

The very young, the old, families, all gathered to hear speeches, songs and national poems. To fly flags and cheer. They came, and they came unafraid. Unintimidated by the forces that were amassed a few metres from them, they thronged, safe under the protection of the new Hungarian Guard.

Those that would intentionally and internationally mislead over the defining characteristics of the new Hungarian Guard movement are forced to resort to insinuation and dark hints. They purposefully and absurdly misuse words like “paramilitary” which are incapable of surviving even a moment’s scrutiny by the actual facts.

How else, unless armed, unless potentially violent, they imply, could the Guard have so successfully prevented the government, and restrained the police from exercising their true natures, and brutally repressing their citizens?

Leaving aside for a moment that the new Guard, like its legally distinct disbanded predecessor, strictly prohibits the carrying of any arms whatsoever. Or that no single new Guard member has ever been charged with a criminal offence, as was also true of the two year history of the Guard which preceded it. Two facts whose omission is always so glaring from certain pieces of journalism which take the Guard as their theme.

How, if so completely opposed to violence and utterly unarmed, could the Hungarian Guard possibly prevent officers so keen on once again riding down families with sabres drawn? Just by being there? Just by acting as a physical barrier, clearly and unambiguously willing to take the blows that would be rained down upon them, for as long as it took the young and defenceless, the old and infirm, to reach safety?

Exactly so.

For the best defence against terrorism, even politically motivated state terrorism, is defiance.

Jobbik would like to extend its gratitude to all the volunteers of the legally constituted new Hungarian Guard for all their help and assistance in ensuring that the citizens of Hungary were able to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Third Hungarian Republic in the centre of their own capital city, Budapest, without a single violent incident taking place.