Addressing the crowd on October 31 at the re-inauguration ceremony of the “Martyrs of the Nation” Memorial, László Kövér, the president of Hungary’s National Assembly, began his speech by stating that “We, Hungarians – whom the communists called a sinful nation, whom their intellectual, political descendants still, up to this day, hold sinful – won’t let the Bolshevik sins committed against us become complete.” Because, according to Köver, “sins do not become complete when they are committed, but once they are forgotten.”
And the sins committed during the 133 days of the Council Republic dictatorship, Kövér said, will not be forgotten.
“Today, we remember the victims of political terror,” he said, adding that the Council Republic was the consequence of a Hungarian “civil war”: a civil war that took place on Hungarian land, where people with a Hungarian mother tongue and Hungarian last names fought against their fellow countrymen. Therefore, the speaker of Parliament continued, the Council Republic that began with the murder of the late Prime Minister István Tisza was not simply the result of Hungary’s World War I defeat.
In Kövér’s view, the fact that the original memorial, erected in 1934 and torn down by the communists in 1945, was replaced by a statue of Imre Nagy by the post-communists in 1996 sends a message that “only a person who shared in the communists’ sins could become a national martyr who was murdered by the communists.”
“The Lenin boys are still here,” László Kövér said, and Hungary can only prevail for good if “those that oppose us experience that they can no longer gain a majority through foreign-financed godlessness, treason, and national denial.”
Prior to offering a prayer, Slomó Köves, Executive Rabbi of EMIH Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation, pointed out that the “Council Republic was the first occasion in a thousand years of Hungarian history when it openly refused God.”