Magyar Egyház, 2009 (88. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
2009-02-01 / 1. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 17. oldal The main reason for WW1 was the fear of France, England and Russia, that Germany would become the leading power of Europe. Simultaneously, Germany and Austria-Hungary were afraid of the military and economic domination of Europe by the Triple Entente. Initially, the plans of the Entente did not include the dismemberment of Hungary, although in 1916 (in secret), they did offer Eastern Hungary to Romania in exchange for joining the Triple Alliance. In spite of all that, in 1917, - when Emperor Charles I came to power -, the Entente offered a separate peace treaty to Austria-Hungary, which would have guaranteed all her borders. During the war, the Czech allies of Serbia, Eduard Benes and professor Thomas Masaryk, transformed themselves from consultants into architects of allied policy for Central Europe. They had a difficult task, because the English and the Americans were against the “balkanization” of Central Europe by the creation of small nation states. The Czech emigrants organized a propaganda campaign for the dismemberment of Hungary and succeeded to obtain the support of two criminally ignorant French politicians, Georges Clémenceau and Raymond Poincaré who were only interested in the military and economic domination of Europe. Later, the Czech emigrants exploited the fact that in 1917 Lenin came to power in Russia and in 1917, for a short time Hungary also fell under Communism. The Czech emigrants also exploited the nationalistic desires of the Czech and Slav soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army. They bombarded them with leaflets, showing the maps of their proposed nation states. Still later, the Czech emigrants also argued that the dismemberment of Hungary will help saving Europe from Communism. President Wilson of the United States refused to cooperate in this conspiracy. He wanted Europe's new borders to correspond to her ethnographic boundaries and he wanted the principle of self-determination to prevail. When in October, 1918 the Austro-Hungarian army capitulated, it did that under the expectation that President Wilson’s “Principles” will prevail, but his views were disregarded by the French. Hence, Hungary’s borders were not defined by the armistice she signed on the 3rd of November, 1918 in Padua, but by the Czech and French armies entering from the North and South. In addition, five days after signing the armistice, Romania too “reentered” the war, and occupied Transylvania. So, most of Hungary was already occupied on the 18th of January, 1919, when the Paris Peace Conference began. On January 24, 1919, President Wilson issued a statement, protesting the illegal occupation of parts of Hungary and on March 31, 1919, President Wilson called the proposed dismemberment of Hungary “absurd”. He also objected to the French, Serb and Romanian occupation of Hungary, but he was overruled by the French, who argued that this occupation will prevent the spread of Communism. After Count Michael Károlyi’s government resigned in 1919, Béla Kun established a Communist dictatorship, raised a Red Army and temporarily occupied the approximate area of today's Slovakia. Fearing the emergence of a Red dictatorship, French, Romanian and Slavic anti-communist armies invaded Hungary. The French ordered the Hungarian Red Army out of Slovakia, Romania occupied Budapest and the counterrevolutionary leader, Nicholas Horthy, -while avoiding any military engagement with either the Communists or with the foreign occupiers, took revenge on the civilian Red sympathizers. The Treaty of Trianon On the 4th of June, 1920, one of the crudest treaties of human history was signed. Never before had a peace, imposed by violence, been more brutal in its bias, madder in its destructiveness, more forgetful of the lessons of history and better calculated to create future upheavals. The treaty cut mercilessly into the flesh of compact Hungarian populations. Hundreds of towns were separated from their suburbs; villages were split in two; communities were deprived of their parish churches or cemeteries; townships were cut off from their railroad stations and their water supplies. A 1000-year-old European country was made into an invalid as its territory was reduced by 72%. In the process, millions of Hungarians were turned into foreigners without moving from the towns, which their fathers built, as the borders were redrawn around them. In this way, the Hungarians became and still are one of Europe's largest minorities. In comparison, to the fate of Hungary, the leader of the central powers, Germany lost only 9.5% of her territory. From the fragments of Hungary, the Successor States of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and greater Romania were created. These artificial entities forced Croats to live with Serbs and Czechs to live with Slovaks, which demonstrated both the arrogance and the ignorance of Trianon's architects. These Successor States were not only geographic monstrosities but also economic absurdities and therefore their self-destruction was just a matter of time. As we know, by now, two of the three successor states have already disintegrated. The French goal was to establish dominance over the whole of Europe by creating a power vacuum in Central Europe through the creation of these insecure client states out of the carcass of Hungary. France was also successful in turning the nations of Central Europe against each other, because of the nationalist governments of these new client states felt endangered by their large minorities. Thereby, the whole of Europe was destabilized. The United States could not stop these events. All the American Congress could do, was to refuse the signing of the Trianon Treaty. Therefore, this product of Neronian insanity, this plan, unjust in substance and tragic in consequence, was implemented anyway. The plunder which the Successor States received was too large to digest. It was for this reason that democracy could not evolve within these multinational states. Their governments were afraid that they could not survive, if basic democratic rights were granted to their minorities. This fear of their own minorities prevented them to become true democracies and also caused their populations to develop a racist, anti-Hungarian mentality. Self-Determination Through Plebiscites The very foundation of the 14 Wilsonian Principles was that people have the unalienable right to determine their own destiny. Yet in drawing up the new borders at Trianon, selfdetermination and the use of plebiscites were not allowed to be held. Although Field Marshall Ian Smith recommended to hold plebiscites in Transylvania, Slovakia, Ruthenia, Croatia and Slavonia, his advice was rejected. Therefore, he was correct in declaring: “A plebiscite refused is a plebiscite taken.” By not allowing plebiscites, the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the redistribution of her 48 million citizens resulted in the creation of 16 million ethnic minorities. These minorities were not emigrants who voluntarily left their countries, but people who never moved from the towns, which their fathers built and became foreigners, just because Clémenceau and Benes decided to redraw the borders around them.
