The Eighth Tribe, 1979 (6. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1979-04-01 / 4. szám
April, 1979 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 11 For several years now, the Transylvanian World Federation, the Transylvanian Committee, the American Transylvania Federation, the American Hungarian Federation, the Polish-American World Federation and Affiliates, and the Committee on Human Rights in Rumania have been informing our government, week by week, and month by month, of all that’s going on in Transylvania today. Hungarian teachers are being beaten to death by the dreaded SECURITATE, the political police, for refusing to sign petitions asking in the name of “all Hungarians” for the closing of Hungarian schools, and the elimination of Hungarian-language education. Hungarian school children by the hundreds are being beaten and tortured for using their mother-tongue in public. Old cemeteries are torn up or simply “Rumanized”. Old books, documents, church registers, even private letters are being confiscated and burned in an all-out effort of the Ceausescu-government to erase the more than thousand-year-old Hungarian past of this Rumanian-occupied part of the ancient Hungarian homeland. Our protests, our screams seem to be falling on deaf ears in Washington, D.C. The agony of three million Hungarians, the largest ethnic minority in Europe, escapes the attention of those who embarked on the issue of “human rights”, degrading a worldwide noble cause to a fast-fading political slogan. In the meanwhile, cunning representatives of the Socialist Republic of Rumania, the most oppressive and the most repulsive of all communist governments, smile benevolently, and utter the most ridiculous lies without blinking an eye. They even try to claim their “legal birthright” through the fabricated theory of a “Daco-Roman” origin to the country into which they moved in slowly as migrant workers five hundred years after it was already settled by Hungarians, and which they occupied only eighty years ago, by treason and deceit. It is sad, indeed, that the spiritual heritage of the founder of the American cavalry, who gave his life for the freedom of this country, does not seem to weigh enough to make our government sympathetic to the plight of the very people who gave this man to the American history. When a free nation reaches the place of complacency and selfishness where the sacrifices of those who achieved that very freedom are forgotten: freedom begins to crumble away. When a free nation reaches the place, where it sides with the oppressors against the oppressed: that nation denies its heritage, and the very purpose of its existence. Every one of us, citizens of this great country, no matter how small or how big, how low or how high, share an obligation to those who gave their lives in order that we may live in the sunlight of liberty. This obligation includes the defense of freedom, justice, and the rights of man, not just at home, but everywhere. This is the price tag of liberty. May God have mercy upon our souls. APRIL 11, 1979, Office of the White House Press Secretary HUNGARIAN AMERICAN NAMED CHAIRMAN OF COMMISSION President Carter has appointed Dr. John Kemeny, a Hungarian American who has been a pioneer in the field of mathematical models and computer programming, chairman of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. The President has placed the highest priority on the Commission’s work, which will review the entire sequence of events at the nuclear facility in Harrisburg, PA., and report its finding to him. The 12-member Commission’s task, according to an Executive Order signed by the President, also includes an assessment of “how the public’s right to information concerning the events at Three Mile Island was served and of the steps which should be taken during similar emergencies to provide the public with accurate, comprehensible and timely information.” The study also will include an evaluation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing, inspection, operation and enforcement procedures as applied to Three Mile Island. Kemeny’s appointment was announced personally by the President, who met with the new chairman at the White House. Dr. Kemeny is president of Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. He is a native of Budapest, Hungary and came to this country in 1940 and began a distinguished career as a mathematician, computer science expert and philosopher. His early career included work as a researcher on the Los Alamos project and two years as a research assistant to Dr. Albert Einstein. He was a professor of mathematics and philosophy at Princeton and became professor of mathematics and philosophy at Dartmouth in 1954 and became the college president of Dartmouth in 1970. The Eighth Tribe had a special article on Dr. John C. Kemény in the January, 1977 issue. — editor.
