A little more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Warsaw Pact countries became free to develop their own form of democratic government and reclaim their national identities. Yet today, many Westerners have no sense of this history, no memory of how desperately citizens of Soviet-occupied nations fought for the right to control their own destinies, exemplified by East Germans—women, children, and men—machine-gunned down as they fled over fences to the West, choosing death rather than to live under totalitarian control.
A healthy fear and utter rejection of totalitarianism and communistic behavior are waning in the Western world. Forced obedience and conformity, a basic characteristic of Marxist communism, is showing up in Western governments, education, and social structures. At the same time, political and academic elites promote a self-loathing of national sentiment, history, and the foundations of Western civilization. Do our citizens even realize it? And how long can we remain free?
Reagan’s last bastion for freedom, the United States, “with no other source of power except the sovereign people” is currently ruled by the Biden administration and its ‘state-controlled’ media that rejects most American constitutional principles and the rule of law, applying leftist illiberal ideologies as the only one truth. Civil liberties are trampled under vaccine mandates and selective FBI raids against political opponents. The government infiltrates private citizens on Facebook and Twitter to suppress freedom of speech and conscience. January 6th protestors remain in jail for exercising their First Amendment right to dispute an election. Yet BLM, Antifa, and repeat criminals ransack our cities and go unpunished.
To our north, Canada’s Justin Trudeau rewrites history by claiming his despised vaccine mandates were only “incentives” and “protections,” making his public admiration of China’s dictatorship more understandable. Across the Atlantic, European governments label social and religious differences as ‘hate speech’ or ‘discrimination,’ using legal force to control what people say and do.
The European Union applies sanctions to (punishes) sovereign nations like Hungary that promote traditional marriage, family roles, and parental rights. The U.S. ambassador to Hungary shuns diplomacy and antagonizes Hungary for this stance, and for protecting Hungarian prosperity and promoting peace to end the war in Ukraine. In many countries and in many ways, national sovereignty has been handed over to the EU, and member states have lost control over borders, economies, and communities.
Despite the trend, Hungarians have not forgotten the value of their recently acquired freedom, or their reclaimed national identity. I am writing a book about Hungarian national sovereignty for the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest, and have interviewed Hungarians from all walks of life about this very subject. And, according to them, it is the West that left them, and not the other way around. While under Nazi (1944-45) and then Soviet (1945-1991) occupation, Hungarians longingly dreamt of the life of freedom found in the U.S. and Western Europe—they could not wait to be a part of it. But perhaps the most striking thing Hungarians told me is that the rhetoric coming out of the U.S. reminds them of “the Soviet days.”
Despite the woke world’s obsession with the glorification of ‘identities,’ our national and God-given identities are under attack all over the West—biological sex, religion, and family structures in particular. Social lies like ‘misgendering’ and ‘critical race theory’ have become truth mandated by government institutions. Educational systems and political activists sideline parents, taking control of children’s bodies and mental health. A characteristic of communism, in its evil, is its devaluation of tradition and history, and deconstruction of the truth until there is nothing relevant, nothing to believe in or hold sacred. This is exactly what the Soviets did to Eastern Europe.
Historian Mária Schmidt writes in From Country to Nation: Thirty Years of Freedom, that as the Soviet Union weakened, “nations under their yoke felt an ever-increasing urge to take possession of what belongs to them—their national pasts.” Occupied states had had their histories “expropriated” and reinterpreted by communists obsessed with
possessing the past. Communists claimed an exclusive right over it and clung to it tooth and nail. They imposed their Marxist-based view of history everywhere as compulsory, undisputed, and unrivaled.
Cultural symbols, national heroes, and holidays were replaced; pride in national achievements was taken away; social institutions and private businesses were suppressed or abolished; intellectual curiosity and achievement were driven into underground hideaways, where people met secretly to read books. The state replaced tradition, family, and religious authority. Communism dictated one political party, one national language, one history, one ideology, one truth.
In Against the Tide, Sir Roger Scruton writes about present-day Eastern Europe saying, “It is hardly surprising … that people cling to their national sentiments, because these were the only form of belonging that the communists could not extinguish.” Resistance of member states, like Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, to the EU’s top-down decision-making power, must be understood in this historical context. Sovereignty and freedom, when the memory of their absence is achingly fresh, are more precious.
Nationalism, the outcome of nurtured national identity, is in its truest form an essential part of building and maintaining democracy; nationalism is based on common identity, common values, and the acceptance of a shared responsibility by the citizens of a nation. Scruton wrote:
Political wisdom, [Edmond] Burke argued, is not contained in a single head. It does not reside in the plans and schemes of the political class, and can never be reduced to a system … It is a partnership …a continuous trust that no generation can pillage for its own advantage.”
It is within this system, Yoram Hazony explains in The Virtue of Nationalism, that nations take an “independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference” within an international order. The loyalties we maintain to our own nation and heritage, our common traditions, community, and country, all guide and inform how we make laws, shape norms of religion and education, regulate our economy, and defend our nation.
Like many things, national sentiment can also be exploited by bad actors and political movements. Nazism and ethnic cleansing are evil perversions of national sentiment, driven by a lust for power. Both Nazis and communists used national sentiment for their own accumulation of power, while suppressing the nationalist uprisings that did not suit their agenda in Eastern Europe. From the Baltics to the Black Sea, nationalist anti-communist movements persisted despite Soviet oppression that killed, imprisoned, and displaced hundreds of thousands.
For today’s leftist leaders adhering to communist and totalitarian behavior, the rising nationalism of the past eight years clearly contradicts their pursuit of a homogenous, international order that would sweep communist control around the world. As Schmidt wrote, “nationalism is the Achilles heel of Communism.” And so, within modern-day communist propaganda, national identity and sentiment become code words for “Nazi.”
So where are we—thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union?
Hungarian-born-turned-American-citizen Balint Vazsonyi warned us about our slide into communism twenty-five years ago. Vazsonyi escaped to America after the failure of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation. He experienced firsthand the socialism Nazis and Soviets “used as a pretext for just about anything—for the confiscation of people’s belongings, for determining what could and could not be taught in the schools, for pronouncing what did or did not happen—and what should have happened—in the course of history.” And he watched as both dictatorships “interned or executed the leadership of all other political organizations.”
In 1998, in America’s Thirty Years War: Who is Winning? Vazsonyi wrote about growing hostility in the U.S. toward American traditions of English origin and warned against embracing the communism he escaped. He explained that Anglo-American political philosophy, on which democracy and Western civilization are based, holds people as ultimately sovereign, and the state serves the people; in contrast, Franco-Germanic political philosophy (speaking from a historical, not ethnic, perspective), from which communism and totalitarianism stem, places the state over individual rights and dignity, and people derive their rights from the all-knowing state.
So, which one will we choose? As Vazonyi concludes, “As yet, our hands are on the controls. The tools are there, we still retain our national memory, and tens of millions remain in possession of their common sense.” So true for us today! But we must awaken from the slumber of complacency or ignorance, and choose the freedom, liberty, and sovereignty that our Western nations, though never perfect and always perfecting, have been built upon. Our freedom, and the freedom of generations, depend upon it.
Nationalism and Freedom: Thirty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
In Budapest, anti-communists and nationalists place a Hungarian national flag atop a demolished statue of Josef Stalin.
Photo: Raphaël Thiémard
A little more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Warsaw Pact countries became free to develop their own form of democratic government and reclaim their national identities. Yet today, many Westerners have no sense of this history, no memory of how desperately citizens of Soviet-occupied nations fought for the right to control their own destinies, exemplified by East Germans—women, children, and men—machine-gunned down as they fled over fences to the West, choosing death rather than to live under totalitarian control.
A healthy fear and utter rejection of totalitarianism and communistic behavior are waning in the Western world. Forced obedience and conformity, a basic characteristic of Marxist communism, is showing up in Western governments, education, and social structures. At the same time, political and academic elites promote a self-loathing of national sentiment, history, and the foundations of Western civilization. Do our citizens even realize it? And how long can we remain free?
Reagan’s last bastion for freedom, the United States, “with no other source of power except the sovereign people” is currently ruled by the Biden administration and its ‘state-controlled’ media that rejects most American constitutional principles and the rule of law, applying leftist illiberal ideologies as the only one truth. Civil liberties are trampled under vaccine mandates and selective FBI raids against political opponents. The government infiltrates private citizens on Facebook and Twitter to suppress freedom of speech and conscience. January 6th protestors remain in jail for exercising their First Amendment right to dispute an election. Yet BLM, Antifa, and repeat criminals ransack our cities and go unpunished.
To our north, Canada’s Justin Trudeau rewrites history by claiming his despised vaccine mandates were only “incentives” and “protections,” making his public admiration of China’s dictatorship more understandable. Across the Atlantic, European governments label social and religious differences as ‘hate speech’ or ‘discrimination,’ using legal force to control what people say and do.
The European Union applies sanctions to (punishes) sovereign nations like Hungary that promote traditional marriage, family roles, and parental rights. The U.S. ambassador to Hungary shuns diplomacy and antagonizes Hungary for this stance, and for protecting Hungarian prosperity and promoting peace to end the war in Ukraine. In many countries and in many ways, national sovereignty has been handed over to the EU, and member states have lost control over borders, economies, and communities.
Despite the trend, Hungarians have not forgotten the value of their recently acquired freedom, or their reclaimed national identity. I am writing a book about Hungarian national sovereignty for the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest, and have interviewed Hungarians from all walks of life about this very subject. And, according to them, it is the West that left them, and not the other way around. While under Nazi (1944-45) and then Soviet (1945-1991) occupation, Hungarians longingly dreamt of the life of freedom found in the U.S. and Western Europe—they could not wait to be a part of it. But perhaps the most striking thing Hungarians told me is that the rhetoric coming out of the U.S. reminds them of “the Soviet days.”
Despite the woke world’s obsession with the glorification of ‘identities,’ our national and God-given identities are under attack all over the West—biological sex, religion, and family structures in particular. Social lies like ‘misgendering’ and ‘critical race theory’ have become truth mandated by government institutions. Educational systems and political activists sideline parents, taking control of children’s bodies and mental health. A characteristic of communism, in its evil, is its devaluation of tradition and history, and deconstruction of the truth until there is nothing relevant, nothing to believe in or hold sacred. This is exactly what the Soviets did to Eastern Europe.
Historian Mária Schmidt writes in From Country to Nation: Thirty Years of Freedom, that as the Soviet Union weakened, “nations under their yoke felt an ever-increasing urge to take possession of what belongs to them—their national pasts.” Occupied states had had their histories “expropriated” and reinterpreted by communists obsessed with
Cultural symbols, national heroes, and holidays were replaced; pride in national achievements was taken away; social institutions and private businesses were suppressed or abolished; intellectual curiosity and achievement were driven into underground hideaways, where people met secretly to read books. The state replaced tradition, family, and religious authority. Communism dictated one political party, one national language, one history, one ideology, one truth.
In Against the Tide, Sir Roger Scruton writes about present-day Eastern Europe saying, “It is hardly surprising … that people cling to their national sentiments, because these were the only form of belonging that the communists could not extinguish.” Resistance of member states, like Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, to the EU’s top-down decision-making power, must be understood in this historical context. Sovereignty and freedom, when the memory of their absence is achingly fresh, are more precious.
Nationalism, the outcome of nurtured national identity, is in its truest form an essential part of building and maintaining democracy; nationalism is based on common identity, common values, and the acceptance of a shared responsibility by the citizens of a nation. Scruton wrote:
It is within this system, Yoram Hazony explains in The Virtue of Nationalism, that nations take an “independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference” within an international order. The loyalties we maintain to our own nation and heritage, our common traditions, community, and country, all guide and inform how we make laws, shape norms of religion and education, regulate our economy, and defend our nation.
Like many things, national sentiment can also be exploited by bad actors and political movements. Nazism and ethnic cleansing are evil perversions of national sentiment, driven by a lust for power. Both Nazis and communists used national sentiment for their own accumulation of power, while suppressing the nationalist uprisings that did not suit their agenda in Eastern Europe. From the Baltics to the Black Sea, nationalist anti-communist movements persisted despite Soviet oppression that killed, imprisoned, and displaced hundreds of thousands.
For today’s leftist leaders adhering to communist and totalitarian behavior, the rising nationalism of the past eight years clearly contradicts their pursuit of a homogenous, international order that would sweep communist control around the world. As Schmidt wrote, “nationalism is the Achilles heel of Communism.” And so, within modern-day communist propaganda, national identity and sentiment become code words for “Nazi.”
So where are we—thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union?
Hungarian-born-turned-American-citizen Balint Vazsonyi warned us about our slide into communism twenty-five years ago. Vazsonyi escaped to America after the failure of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation. He experienced firsthand the socialism Nazis and Soviets “used as a pretext for just about anything—for the confiscation of people’s belongings, for determining what could and could not be taught in the schools, for pronouncing what did or did not happen—and what should have happened—in the course of history.” And he watched as both dictatorships “interned or executed the leadership of all other political organizations.”
In 1998, in America’s Thirty Years War: Who is Winning? Vazsonyi wrote about growing hostility in the U.S. toward American traditions of English origin and warned against embracing the communism he escaped. He explained that Anglo-American political philosophy, on which democracy and Western civilization are based, holds people as ultimately sovereign, and the state serves the people; in contrast, Franco-Germanic political philosophy (speaking from a historical, not ethnic, perspective), from which communism and totalitarianism stem, places the state over individual rights and dignity, and people derive their rights from the all-knowing state.
So, which one will we choose? As Vazonyi concludes, “As yet, our hands are on the controls. The tools are there, we still retain our national memory, and tens of millions remain in possession of their common sense.” So true for us today! But we must awaken from the slumber of complacency or ignorance, and choose the freedom, liberty, and sovereignty that our Western nations, though never perfect and always perfecting, have been built upon. Our freedom, and the freedom of generations, depend upon it.
Dr. Bradley-Farrell is a featured speaker at CPAC Hungary 2023.
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