Tibor Varady, on Tying Ideals to Some Meaning and Introduction of President Madl

• Citation: Vol. 22 No. 1
• Publication year: 2008

ON TYING IDEALS TO SOME MEANING AND INTRODUCTION OF PRESIDENT MÁDL

Tibor Varady^*

Our morning session has again a keynote speaker and again a former President, President Mádl from Hungary. Let me say a few words in endeavoring to introduce the topic, and if you permit me, I will start with a personal note.

I have lived in quite a few nations under quite a few systems. When I was a small child, it happened to be the time of World War II. When I was pushing seven and started going to elementary school, I encountered the first of many switches of system and ideology. Each day, after the end of classes, we lined up. The tallest among us was supposed to say, "God protect," and the rest of us in chorus said, "Our teacher." And this went on for a couple of months, but after about three months the words changed. The pattern was the same, the scene was the same. The tallest guy was still the tallest guy in the class, but instead of saying "God protect," he said, "With comrade Tito." The rest of us, the chorus, said, "Forward." So this is the way I learned that communism came to the country in which I lived. This was the way I experienced the arrival of communism. My parents experienced it in a somewhat more painful way, but let me rush to say that the Yugoslav brand of communism was relatively the most liberal one, but still it was communist.

When I was about to finish high school in 1958, I visited Hungary for the first time. I visited my uncle. This was nearly two years after what I would say was the only armed revolution against communism that ever took place; this was the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was crushed by Soviet tanks. At that time, the Budapest buildings were bullet-ridden. Budapest was pretty gray, dark, and I would say depressive-completely different from the wonderful city you could experience today.

But why am I saying this? I am saying this because Tito's communism and its rhetoric had a very strong reliance on human rights. In Hungary, the Hungarian revolutionaries who stood up against communism and fought for ideas had human rights on their banner. But the oppressive regime, which was imposed by Soviet tanks, was also speaking of human rights. In 1968, I had the luck of getting a Fulbright scholarship and became a student of Harold Berman at Harvard. This was a quite interesting year in this country; this was the year of peace movements, and of course all peace movements had human rights on their banner, and it was the time of the Black...