Zombori István (szerk.): Magyar cserkészet - Világcserkészet = Hungarian Scouting - World Scouting (Szeged, 1989)

Előszó

Foreword It is a great acknowledgement for the museum of Szeged that the conference was held here. It is not a coincidence, however, since the first exhibition presenting the history of the scout movement in Hungary was organized by the collaborators of the museum (May, 1988—February, 1989) which wished to show the history of the national movement frankly and objectively. We had the same intentions in organizing both the exhibition and the conference: to reveal what the Hungarian scout movement really ment, what role it had in the Hungarian intellectual life of the 20th century, what place it took among those movements which undertook organising youth, what sort of goals it had and how they could accomplish these. We think that by now the conditions are adequate in our public thinking that make the objective treatment of the issue possible. The reason for this is that that official classification which referred to scouting as an association established to find a pass-time for bored, young noblemen, not to mention that extreme definition which claimed that scouting tried to get the Hungarian youth to serve on behalf of the Horthy-Hungary politics of destroying the nation, including the war on the side of the Nazis is not valid any more. The problem with these opinions is not only that they are essentialy not true and not even the fact that these false arguments served as a basis for the liquidation of the scout movement. The real mistake was that with the help of these invented accusations demanded by current political events, that positive traditional system, which could have been used through the democratic transformation of the country, was destroyed. There are no doubts today about the consequences of the above mentioned. Giving a real picture of scouting is one of the responsibilities of historical science and this conference can be considered as the first attempt at revealing this. It would be far too unrealistic to believe that this can be done in a day, we do not intend to do that. We shall start working on it by inviting those who did research and achieved results in this field. It has to be noted that there are not many such people but the truth is that not long ago dealing with scouting was almost considered a sin. We hope that the work we have started will be continued. 8