TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/112789/11278900.032

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 4KB | 68 lines

WORLD, Page 53

American Abroad

Freedom's Ugly Underside

By Strobe Talbott


    For more than 40 years, the dead weight of domination by the
U.S.S.R. and repression by Stalinist regimes crushed political
culture in Eastern Europe. Now, with the encouragement of the
Kremlin, reformers are lifting the boulder. But in the midst of
burgeoning democracy, personal freedom and national independence,
some verminous creatures are crawling into the sunlight. The
ugliest and most poisonous is anti-Semitism, which has a long and
robust history in that part of the world.

    A recent issue of the Soviet weekly Ogonyok, which has
campaigned against anti-Semitism, printed some of the hate mail it
has received: "You Jews started this damn revolution, and now your
plot to ruin Mother Russia has succeeded" and "We must not let you
slink out of the country, or we'll have to hunt you down like
Trotsky. We'll get you here, because that way it will be cheaper."

    Earlier this year Poland's Primate, Jozef Cardinal Glemp,
objected to an agreement among four of his fellow prelates and
Jewish leaders to remove a Carmelite convent that had been
established at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Although he later
backed down, Glemp compounded the insult to Jews, charging "Your
power lies in the mass media easily at your disposal."

    "The Glemp episode is a reminder of the genteel anti-Semitism
that has always been just below the surface and, in the current,
more permissive climate, can come poking through," says Charles
Gati, an expert on Eastern Europe at Union College in Schenectady,
N.Y. Gati has found thinly disguised Jew baiting back in fashion
in his native Hungary. One of the top-ranked soccer teams, MTK, was
heavily financed by Jews in the 1930s before more than half of the
Jewish community was murdered by the Nazis and their Hungarian
offshoot, the Arrow Cross Party. Now, half a century later, the
historical association lingers: when the team runs onto the field,
the crowd sometimes shouts, "Goose merchants!" -- a barnyard
variation on the odious stereotype of Jews as moneygrubbers. Fears
Gati: "It is far from certain that post-Communist Eastern Europe
will fully embrace Western values."

    When George Lorinczi, a Hungarian-born Washington lawyer,
visited Budapest last month, he heard racial epithets on the street
directed at people around him. In the anti-Communist tirades of
self-professed liberals, there were pointed references to the
predominance of Jews in the regime of dictator Matyas Rakosi in the
early 1950s. "People are now rolling words off their tongues that
would have made them jailbait two years ago," says Lorinczi.

    Nor is the phenomenon confined to the snarls of the lumpen
proletariat or the cafe chatter of polite society. Western
diplomats in Budapest say some leaders of the opposition Hungarian
Democratic Forum have made Glempish noises about the undue
influence in the media of "alien forces" -- code words considerably
less obscure than "goose merchants."

    Mark Palmer, the U.S. Ambassador in Budapest, has earned high
marks for warning that a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Hungary
could jeopardize Western support for democratization there. The
message is getting through. During recent visits to Washington,
Hungarian politicians have promised that "there will be no place
for extremism of any kind" in the Democratic Forum's campaign
before next year's election. And on his own triumphal tour of the
U.S. last week, Lech Walesa assured an audience of American Jews
that Polish anti-Semitism "will not be tolerated" in the future.
The new leaders of Eastern Europe should keep saying that, and
saying it back home. Above all, they should make sure it turns out
to be true.