A liberal on book shredding
November 3rd, 2020A liberal pundit warns that far-right policies should be confronted on their substance rather than on formalities.
On hvg.hu, Sándor Révész disagrees with the dominating left-liberal rhetoric according to which far-right MP Dóra Dúró should be condemned because she publicly shredded a book of fairy tales one of which had gay protagonists. (See BudaPost, October 19.) The mainstream left-wing and liberal argument against Ms Dúró is that destroying books recalls the fascist treatment of so-called ’Jewish books’, which were regularly burned in public squares in Nazi Germany. Révész warns that during the Hungarian revolution in October 1956, people set fire to communist propaganda books on several occasions, and after the revolution had been crushed, the Kádár régime used such cases to substantiate its claim that the revolution was ‘a fascist coup’. He strongly disagrees with Ms Dúró, but he does so because he sees her as fomenting hatred against gays, rather than because she shredded a book.