Category: History

The year 2020 marks the centennial of John Paul II, the 100th birthday of Karol Wojtyła, future Pope, poet, Polish patriot and saint. He was born in a Poland where Mary was revered as the Eternal Mother and the regnant Queen, and the love of country was a function of

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism,when hate for people other than your own comes first.Charles de Gaulle1 You have enemies? Good.It means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Winston Churchill On 18 June 1942, the second anniversary of his great Appel to the

“AT THE GATES OF HEAVEN OR HELL?” THE SOVIET UNION IN THE 1930s Only with some knowledge of the political environment into which he arrived on 22 June 1934 is it possible to understand Illyés’s Russia. Around the world, narrow, insular circles of far left and Communist intellectuals had been

By most historical standards 1989 should have been a year of triumph for Margaret Thatcher – and judged in a historical perspective, it was exactly that. It was the year that saw the fulfilment of her main political and personal hopes with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse

“Reagan realised that it was possible, even necessary, to collaborate on a friendly footing with the new Soviet leader who sincerely embraced a policy of openness. Indeed, he went so far as to magnanimously subscribe to the role in which Gorbachev sought to cast him before the Soviet leadership and,

On 29 April 2020, the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis (a Transylvanian Saxon, i.e. German, by birth) came up with the charge that the Social Democratic Party of Romania was ready “to give Transylvania away to the Hungarians”. The accusation would be considered ridiculous if it were not coming from

DEPORTATION OF GERMAN HUNGARIANS – AFTER POTSDAM At the Potsdam conference in July and August 1945, the specific deportation of ethnic Germans received the decisive approval of all three major powers. While the decision would certainly be distorted and manipulated, its substance gave a foundation for what followed. “Hungarian opposition

AN ALLIED SUPERVISED ECONOMIC COLLAPSE It was the economic unravelling of post-war Hungary in which Soviet machinations and Western acquiescence were initially most damaging. Economic crisis, of course, had begun with the German occupation of March 1944, the resulting ruthless exploitation of Hungary by a desperate Reich, and the cataclysmic

Conversations on the Philosophical Restoration of Liberty under Law Part I The English philosopher and man of letters Roger Scruton has long argued that French intellectual life was taken over by “imposters” in the 1960s. There is much evidence to support this claim. Sartre’s political commitments were perverse and even

Budapest like London offers both the appeal of a former imperial centre and the opportunity for reflection on the continued value of the particular empires in question and of empire in general. Now, however, let us stop for a minute and appreciate that this approach is scarcely one that is