Radical Politics and Neo-Fascism

17 Aug

After reading and researching the Hungarian economic position I kept thinking about the goals of the Jobbik party and the troubles facing Hungary.  It is interesting to me how similar these goals and problems are to the climate that allowed Hitler to gain such popularity.  I am not saying that anything similar would occur in Hungary or could occur in our modern world but the parallels are definitely there.  The greatest tool Hitler had for rallying support was the weak and humiliated state Germany was in after losing the first World War.  I dont think it was the losses that rankled the German people so much but that they could blame their lose of people and territory on foreign powers that cared nothing for them and only wanted to profit from their defeat.  Likewise Hungary is much smaller because of the actions of foreign powers that did not care about maintaining territory for ethnic or historic reasons.  During the rise of Nazi Germany Hitler used  self-determination, the idea that any country or part of a country should be able to decide its sovereignty free of foreign interference, to invade and pressure territories into Greater Germany.  The Nazi argument was that foreigners were segregating ethnic Germans into countries they did not want to belong to.  Therefor it was Germany’s right to take action to bring their people back under one country.  This very same term, not surprisingly, appeared during my research of Jobbik political goals.  The break up of the Kingdom of Hungary resulted in ethnic Hungarian families that had lived in the same town for generations suddenly becoming the minority in new countries and being ruled by non Hungarians.  The economy in Hungary has obviously suffered from this huge lose of territory, people to tax, and natural resources to profit from.  A massive number of unemployed could only lead to further resentment of the interference of foreign powers.  It must be especially frustrating because of all of the Axis powers Hungary seems to me to be the only one to have lost territory. Italy , Germany, and Japan lost colonies but seemingly no other land.

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