Terror and Loyalty

A few years ago, the building which served as Hungary’s version of Lubyanka was officially opened as a museum: the Terror Haza (House of Terror). That it’s situated on lovely Andrassy Avenue in the heart of Pest somehow makes even more repugnant what went on inside. Like if Guantanamo were underneath Lincoln Center or the Eiffel Tower, a place where, years later, visitors would wonder how such things could be going on right under everyone’s noses. Yet it wasn’t a case of people not knowing what was happening there; blacked-out basement windows were insufficient cover for the torturous madness within. It was also, in the main, something of an officers’ club. The vibe inside is mostly grey, a very dull grey, except in the club rooms which are all red, as in Red Star, or Gestapo-esque cabaret veneer.

The Terror House offers these succinctly captivating (no pun intended) themes: Nazi occupation, Soviet occupation, deportation, internment, gulag, surveillance. In the dungeon one enters the cells and torture chambers, a few with victims’ photos lining the walls, some of whom went from torturer to tortured as the needle of power swung awry in the years following WWII and Hungarians struggled to get their communism right. (Szabo Magda called it “the circus” and the more i learn the history, the more on the mark she seems to be.) A few years ago, i met a British diplomat who’d attended the opening and said that by the end of it, many photos had walked. The history of totalitarianism remains fresh here, and there may well be former interrogators ambling down the streets with silver-tipped canes whose families would prefer the past stay buried in the realm of historical immunity... or perhaps that of irreparable pain. Tényleg,egy cirkusz volt.

In what initially struck me as a nice example of Orwellian doublespeak, the head of the fascist Arrow Cross had called 60 Andrassy the House of Loyalty. This is a side of the terror cube that i don’t normally think about, although the connection now seems obvious. It brought to mind Tali Fahima’s account of how, during her interrogation, Israeli Shabak tried to recruit her as a spy using the loyalty card... Do you want to be responsible for your people dying? Then there’s all the rhetoric spewed out since 9/11/2001 about being with the terrorists if you’re not against them. We’ve got candidate for change Obama announcing that he’d bomb Pakistan if there was actionable intelligence: give us your loyalty or we’ll give you death. The same model, recycled over and over again. Anyone who rejects torture on the grounds that it doesn’t produce useful information anyway is not necessarily rejecting the paradigm (which in my humble opinion, is no way to run the world in this or any other century).

Is loyalty an essential component to terror? No, i wouldn’t say that. Yet it does come into force in a number of nationalist struggles today, such as in Kosovo, Palestine, Pakistan, where we find psychological terror vis a vis national or religious loyalty used as a precursor to internal violence. This is the dangerous road down which many believe the US is now travelling, and brings me to the final thing i want to say about the Terror House and it’s current exhibit on the deportation of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia in 1947. Specifically, the use of terror against ethnic minorities as a way to cement nationalist fervor for whatever other insanities those in power want to actualize.

A Hungarian friend recently pointed me towards the continuing question of safety for the Hungarian community living in Slovakia. This stuff is like a vignette out of an early Woody Allen film in its preposterousness: putting up giant crosses to remind Hungarian-Slovaks which country they live in? A Christo vision run amok. Can anyone in their right mind actually believe that Hungary is mobilizing to threaten the sanctity of Slovakia’s borders, starting with the arming of its little ethnic enclaves in the south? More to the point, does an ethnically pure Slovakia offer the Slovaks some intrinsic benefit they can’t currently wrap their arms around? Of course not. Yet the terror of deportation is hardly a distant memory in European history. People here, i’m learning, take this kind of politics quite seriously, even though it comes from a minority. i’ve had otherwise reasonable Hungarians tell me they think Chinese-living here should be kicked out, and i won’t even get started on the things i’ve heard said about Roma, who aren’t treated well anywhere in Europe.

So, i left the House of Terror more viscerally convinced that internationalism is a dream hanging out there in the far distant future. Too much divisive baggage still being carried around, not enough people willing to look honestly at history’s replicating nature. However, i must add that with all the fervor being given to Naomi Wolff’s current stomp speech, the US seems far away still from the kind of fascism that swallowed up Europe in the 1930-40s. You wouldn’t find as many people at the Super Bowl as there were at Hitler’s super rallies. The zombie factor in America remains small, by comparison. A tinge of hope mixed with a bit of fear? Ok ok, i know the rap: we must remain ever vigilant.