Second White Terror

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  eBook - ePub

  The White Terror

  Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921

  • Béla Bodó(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  The Hungarian interpretation of the Red and White Terrors closely mirrored the contemporary Italian and German narratives about their own civil wars; in both fascist Italy and interwar Germany, bourgeois commentators and the veterans of the militia movements habitually portrayed extralegal violence attributed to the arditi (Italian special forces during the First World War) and the German Freikorps as an understandable and mild reaction to Socialist and Communist crimes.3 The idea of right-wing political violence as a reaction to Communist atrocities did not die with the end of the Second World War, but found its way into the conservative liberal interpretation of fascism in the 1960s.4 Its last echoes could be detected in debates on the rise of Hitler, the place of Nazism in German and European history, and the behavior of German troops in the final phase of the Second World War during the Historikerstreit in the mid-1980s.5

  The left-wing interpretation of the civil war was in many respects the mirror image of the conservative and right radical narratives. Exiled Communist functionaries, such as József Pogány, defended the excesses committed by the Red militias as justifiable acts of self-defense. The White Terror, in his opinion, served a different purpose. The goal of the White paramilitary groups and the counterrevolutionary regime, Pogány argued, was to “exterminate the working class,” destroy its organizations, and turn the clock back on progressive social policy. The right-wing militias were the hirelings of the bourgeoisie and the elite, and “The Hungarian White Terror [wa]s nothing more than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Its [specific] form [wa]s determined by the fact that the leaders of the dictatorship [we]re professional soldiers.”6 Already in 1923, Pogány’s comrade and the future Minister of Culture József Révai called this new type of regime fascist.7 Marxist scholars after 1945 identified the White Terror as the founding moment of European fascism and the “fascist” Horthy regime; as a prelude to the Second World War and Jewish genocide, and a model for the “counterrevolution” of 1956.8

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  Red Terror and White Terror

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 4 White Terror White Terror is the violence carried out by reactionary (usually monarchist or conservative) groups as part of a counter-revolution. In particular, during the 20th century, in several countries the term White Terror was applied to acts of violence against real or suspected socialists and communists. Historical origin: the French Revolution The name derives from the traditional use of the colour white as a symbol of the Bourbon monarchy, as opposed to the red used by revolutionaries/republicans as in their Phrygian caps and red flag. The original White Terror took place in 1794, during the turbulent times surrounding the French Revolution. It was organized by reactionary Chouan royalist forces in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror, and was targeted at the radical Jacobins and anyone suspected of supporting them. Throughout France, both real and suspected Jacobins were attacked and often murdered. Just like during the Reign of Terror, trials were held with little regard for due process. In other cases, gangs of youths who had aristocratic connections roamed the streets beating known Jacobins. These bands of Jesus dragged suspected terrorists from prisons and murdered them much as alleged royalists had been murdered during the September Massacres of 1792. Again, in 1815, following the return of King Louis XVIII of France to power, people suspected of having ties with the governments of the French Revolution or of Napoleon suffered arrest and execution. Marshal Brune was killed in Avignon, and General Jean-Pierre Ramel was assassinated in Toulouse. These actions struck fear in the population, dissuading Jacobin and Bonapartist electors (48,000 on 72,000 total permitted by the census suffrage) to vote for the ultras.

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  The History of Terrorism

  From Antiquity to ISIS

  • Gérard Chaliand(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  9. Izvestia, September 4, 1918, cited in ibid. 10. As opposed to the “White terror” carried out at the same time, less sys-tematically but equally brutally, by the monarchist Whites in the civil war. 11. Izvestia, September 10, 1918, cited in Baynac, Les socialistes-révolutionnaires, 59. 12. Ibid., p. 75. 13. Mostly by execution (by firing squad, hanging, beating, gas, poison, and “accidents”), as well as by hunger and deportation. See Courtois et al., Livre noir du communisme, 8. 14. Steinberg, “L’aspect éthique de la revolution,” in Baynac, Les socialistes-révolutionnaires, 363–64. 15. Baynac, Les socialistes-révolutionnaires, 142 16. Werth, “État contre son peuple.” 17. See Carrère d’Encausse, Staline, 41. 18. For more detailed figures on the Great Terror, available since the open-ing of the KGB archives, see Werth, “État contre son peuple,” 216–36. Also see Conquest, Great Terror. 19. Werth, “État contre son peuple,” 68–69. World War II marked a strategic break with the past and changed every-thing, among other things transforming terrorism into an instrument of resistance. Contemporary terrorism did not hit its stride until the 1960s, but it was born in World War II and in the wars of national liberation that followed upon it and continued throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (and even beyond in the case of Portugal). Throughout that pe-riod, which also marked the apogee of the cold war, terrorism was above all a terrorism of war, serving, through one technology in particular, a strategy of attrition. Whereas World War II represented both the apex and the end of the era of mass warfare, the ensuing decades saw a great strategic upheaval with, on the one hand, the evolution of nuclear strategy and, on the other, the emergence of limited warfare, the latter being in part a conse-quence of the former.

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  Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe

  The Deluge of 1919

  • Eliza Ablovatski(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Hungarian counterrevolutionaries found that a high estimate for the number of victims of Red Terror, such as the one Váry provided, proved useful in later justifying the levels of White violence. In the eyes of these triumphant conser- vatives, the deaths at the hands of the White forces were not the result of an antisemitic policy of the National Army or, later, the Horthy government. For them, the White Terror was unfortunate but predictable, given the extremes of the Red Terror. White “excesses” flowed naturally from the natural desire for revenge among the White soldiers. The Horthy-era historian Albert Kaas explained the White Terror as a sort of “people’ s justice” or a “thirst for vengeance, for retaliation” on the part of the counterrevolutionary militias, and thus “the statesmen with foresight and vision [i.e. Horthy] were quite unable to impose their own sane and rational judgment on these impetuous elements.” 75 By putting the blame for the violence on the White troops rather than their leadership, Kaas not only exculpated the Horthy government from legal responsibility for the murders but he also shifted the blame to the revolutionaries themselves, who he claimed had created this natural and insati- able “thirst for vengeance” by their actions while in power. At the low end of estimates for White Terror victims in Hungary is the one provided by Gusztáv Gratz, another member of the Horthy government. In his 1935 history of the “revolutionary era,” Gratz estimated that only 202 people died as a result of actions by the Whites after the fall of the revolutionary government. He did not propose an estimate for the period of struggle between the two sides that preceded this date. 76 Additionally, according to Gratz, ninety- seven death sentences were imposed by the counterrevolutionary government, sixty-eight of which were carried out.

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