Honourable President of the Republic, Distinguished Leaders from the Ecclesiastical and Lay Communities, Dear Citizens from Geszt and Békés County and even from beyond the border,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is safe to say that today, on the Day of National Cohesion, in the looming shadow of another war, history is distilled here in Geszt: here, next to the Tisza family’s renovated mansion, a stone’s throw from the family crypt, which has received the restoration it deserved. Here is a nation that, following a devastating war just over one hundred years ago, lost two thirds of its country, leaving one third of its people behind foreign borders. Yet this nation did not choose resignation and demise, but struggle and survival. Today this nation is capable of more than commemorating every year the unjust horrors that have befallen it: it is capable of reaffirming every year its boundless will to live, and its unity. And finally it is able to pay tribute to the family that has given it so much.
Because here, too, is a family whose history is intertwined with the ideal of a free, independent and sovereign Hungary. Today we are paying the Hungarian nation’s debt to them by providing their home and the family’s resting place with the care they deserve, and by entrusting it to the safekeeping of the church – which has perhaps never had more devoted adherents than the Tiszas. The family was on the side of the Transylvanian princes in the battles against the Turks. Then, after the battles were over, they had to fight for almost a century to regain their ancestral possessions – but to no avail. We should not be surprised: even the Western empire of the time was not accustomed to recognising and granting the Hungarians their rightful claims. Thus the family settled in Geszt, and once again became engineers for the cause of the Hungarian nation. Their figures appear in literature, and later two of them committed themselves to the political leadership of the country. The Tisza family is inseparably associated with the last strong and successful period of the Kingdom of Hungary. Kálmán Tisza went down in history as a steadfast and successful general of dualism. His son, István Tisza, was remembered by the future Prime Minister István Bethlen thus: “He died as a martyr of the nation’s great cause, and with him died the nation, the country, the throne, the monarchy, and the glory of a thousand years.” His death marked not only the loss of an outstanding man and a great prime minister, but also the painful end of a historical era. For here is the inescapable date: the fourth of June, the day of the attempted assassination of the Hungarian nation. With István Tisza, not only did the historical role of a family come to an end, but also nine hundred years in the history of the Hungarian Kingdom.
Fellow Commemorators,
One hundred and four years ago we were subjected to a cruel, merciless and unjust diktat. Millions of Hungarians became foreigners in their own homeland. Hungary’s prime industrial and agricultural areas, our great universities, our most beautiful cities, our cultural assets, and the sites of defining moments in our national memory were lost to us beyond our borders. The wounds that are most painful to a nation are those that are invisible to the human eye. Those whom the national wound of Trianon hurts the most are Hungarian. All these years later, it is clear that the Dictate of Trianon was intended to kill our nation. But the great powers, accustomed to colonialism, did not know the character of the Hungarians. They wanted to bury us, but they did not realise that we were seeds. They dug our graves with great care. They killed the homeland’s good masters, or forced them to escape. In those darkest hours, our homeland was delivered into the hands of men of incompetence and malice; and, a hundred years later, it is still difficult to decide which of those two characteristics was a greater scourge on the country. As Sigmund Freud wrote at the time, “I wonder whether it is a sign of political wisdom that, of the many counts, the most intelligent [István Tisza] has been murdered and the most stupid [Mihály Károlyi] has become Prime Minister.” Let us take this as a lesson.
Fellow Commemorators,
The loss of our country 104 years ago was brought upon us by a war: a war that the then Prime Minister István Tisza opposed with every ounce of his being. He opposed it in secret imperial deliberations, and he opposed it in the Hungarian parliament. But the country did not have the strength to stay out of the war. We were chained to an empire that granted itself sole discretion on the question of war and peace. Vienna and Budapest had more than their fair share of warmongers, false messiahs and foreign agents. The forces of responsibility and prudent concern for the future of the nation lost the day: Hungary had to march into a war that was forced upon it. Tisza knew that there was a tragedy even greater than dragging the nation into a war against its interests. An even greater tragedy would be for the nation to lose the war. So, when there was no other choice, Tisza did everything he could to win. If we had possessed sufficient strength, the peace and the crown would have remained, and the nation would have suffered less.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The war that István Tisza opposed was a war lost not only by the defeated, but also by the victors. Peace in Europe ended on the day that the Dictate of Trianon was signed; for the result was not peace in Europe, but new fear of another war, which two decades later caused an even more immense world conflagration. The diktats that ended the war brought the Carpathian Basin not peace, but new devastation. New countries were created, and soon the ethnic tensions that flared up were far greater than any in the former monarchy. State formations that were artificially cobbled together disintegrated at the first opportunity. What belongs together will come together – but what does not will fall apart. The result was the emergence of countries which were barely able to survive on their own and more interdependent than ever; but the invisible wounds of history caused them to view one another with hostility, and eventually they became vassals of foreign empires. Thus the Carpathian Basin became a zone of influence and occupation – first for the Germans, and then the Soviets. And this is why the voice of Central Europe is not sufficiently audible in today’s European Union.
But however dark the clouds over Central Europe may be, around their edges there is a glimmer of hope. We have now reached the point at which – despite all the imperial intrigue, all the geopolitical confrontation and the burden of unsolicited pacts – the peoples of the Carpathian Basin finally want to be sovereign and free. One hundred and ten years ago the peoples of the Carpathian Basin fought the Hungarians for their sovereignty. One hundred and ten years ago the war was welcomed and celebrated by them all: by the Czechs, the Austrians, the Slovaks, the Romanians, the Serbs and the Croats. Today, when war threatens again, the peoples here are sending a clear message to the great powers: “We have learned our lesson, and we do not want war!” The will of the peoples of the Carpathian Basin is clear: they do not want to again be sacrificial pawns on an imperial chessboard, vassals to be sent to war – not for the sake of Brussels, not for the sake of Washington, and not for the sake of George Soros. We Hungarians – the members of the largest community in the Carpathian Basin – say this most loudly, but we know that the others think the same. It is now also clear that the people living here do not need to fight against the Hungarians for their sovereignty, but can fight for it together with the Hungarians. Today the rights of the peoples of Central Europe should not be defended against the Hungarians, but in unity with the Hungarians. On the Day of National Cohesion, not only should we Hungarians stand together, but the peoples of the Carpathian Basin should also see one another as partners in fate. For we are bound together not only by rigid geopolitical necessity, but also by a shared history and a strange and inexplicably similar world view: the Central European quality of existence here.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow Commemorators,
This fact also gives us Hungarians a serious task. National cohesion is not only a fact, but also a programme. We need not only togetherness, which is a state of being; we also need interconnectedness, which is a goal. Our programme is in fact a programme of national consolidation. It is not enough to remember the shared past that binds us together, but we must also want and plan for a shared future. First of all, however, we must dream of it – we must dream of a glorious future: the future of a great nation, the national sections of which do not dwell on the fate of a numerical minority condemned to defeat, but follow the path of greatness, of spiritual greatness. They will not be on the promenade of pomposity, boastfulness and bombast, but on the carriageway of quality and achievement. We Hungarians must never enumerate, we must always ponder. Intellectual achievement, culture of high quality, Nobel prizes, Olympic gold medals and first-class policy; because, contrary to our experience which sometimes give us reason for doubt, politics is also an intellectual and spiritual discipline. Those who say that we should “dare to be small” are committing a crime against the Hungarians. We are the nation that has a home in every country of the Carpathian Basin. We are the ones who make the whole more than the sum of the parts. We are the ones who must again and again urge cooperation and solidarity, and rejoice – yes, rejoice – at the successes of our neighbours.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Central Europe is facing the same threat today as it faced 110 years ago. Another imperial interest wants to drag us into war. Here again are the warmongers, false messiahs and foreign agents serving imperial interests, who proclaim that the use of arms is inevitable. But we know that they are wrong. War is never inevitable. War is always the result of human decisions. And in the shadow of weapons, it is not life and justice that grow, but only death and injustice. This is why today we must undertake to do what Prime Minister István Tisza failed to do: to prevent Hungary from taking part in another European war. Our chances today are better than they were in the final days of dualism. We are sovereign now, and sovereignty is both the cause and the right of every Hungarian. We elect the government, the powers are in our hands. We Hungarians decide our own destiny. Nowadays decisions are not made at secret talks in imperial chambers, where we are always weaker, but with the greatest possible publicity, in national and pan-European elections. Five days to the elections! Now we can do what we have not had the chance to do for 110 years: in a clear, democratic framework, the entire Hungarian nation can say “no” to war.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow Commemorators,
The memory of the Tisza family and their stature, even in death, justifies – and even demands – plain speaking from us. We – today’s national government and the powerful majority and force behind it – are not redecorating, but restoring. Look around you! We are not patching the walls, we are not scraping off the paint: we are restoring, renewing, rebuilding, building again. We want to repair the time that has been put out of joint, to mend the tear in the fabric of Hungarian time. We are taking revenge on communism by stepping over it as if it had never existed. We are taking revenge for the forty-five years stolen from us by linking the Hungary before the German and Soviet occupations with the Hungary of today. Exactly as is stated in the Fundamental Law. Reaching back to the era of old Hungarian greatness, we are drawing an arc to and into the modern Hungary of the 21st century. This is the original and deepest meaning of the transition from communism to democracy, and every day since we received it in 2010, our two-thirds mandate has been used for this very purpose. Today’s commemoration is an important and telling milestone in this huge mission, which will perhaps extend beyond our generation. Anyone who comes here, now and in the next century, can see and understand what the Tisza family wanted, and what our generation wanted. Anyone who enters will gain a precise understanding of the motto of our generation: “No contest is over until we have won.”
God above us all, Hungary before all else! Go Hungary, go Hungarians!