State Secretary Bence Rétvári attended a commemoration in Budapest on Wednesday marking the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes.
“Once guided by the motto ‘God, homeland, and family’, we will avoid extremism and save our nation from dictatorship, and prevent it from losing its freedom,” Rétvári said in his address at the ceremony. “There is little difference between Nazism and Communism: both reject Christianity and bourgeois democracy, therefore it is justified to commemorate the victims of both kinds of dictatorship on the same day,” he said. The goal, he added, was “not to distinguish between victim and victim … and to prevent those ideologies from being revived or redistributed anywhere in the world.” Mária Schmidt, director of the House of Terror Museum, pointed to “increasing efforts in recent years to separate Communist and Nazi ideologies, as if those two vile world views did not have anything common … as if their nature were different.” Fascism, Nazism, and Communism are all “leftist, Socialist ideologies … walking hand-in-hand, relying on each other and utilising each other’s components,” she said.