Hugi Magazine #33: MP3 Power

Introducing...

I am Tamas Polgar, aged 30, Hungarian, male, extremely sexy. Known as the author of the Big Scene History Book, at least Volume 1 (Vol. 2. is being written as we're speaking), main organizer of FLaG Parties in Budapest from 1996 to 2002, 3D modeller, graphist, blogger - for the private life, #1 blogger of Hungary, with 10,000+ readers a day, public enemy for leftist and liberalist circles - loving dogs, especially German Shepherds. Umm... what else... yeah, a certified, award-winning racist, but the prize was a fake, I am not a racist.

Tomcat's political ideas and the Hungarian system..

It's a hard thing to explain if you're a Hungarian nationalist, because the common European political jargon defines everybody according to post-Renaissance standards, therefore you can be either a leftist or a rightist and nothing else, but the ancient Hungarian social order, the so-called Holy Crown Order, cannot be defined on the grounds of Renaissance, as it pre-dates it. The Renaissance was when the Western civilization realized that some things should be defined, like human rights, democracy and such. It brought more problems than solutions, as you can see nowadays, but well... The Hungarians had a working and stable social system from at least the 7th century. It is based on the Holy Crown, which is the Royal Crown of Hungary, which is not merely a jewel, as other nations' crowns. OK, so the Order of Royal Crown is a collection of unwritten rules, a constitution that defines the Hungarian state. The Crown itself, now guarded in the Parliament, and also part of the coat of arms, is a material manifesto of this constitution. The Crown is a system of symbols which you can read, if you are educated enough. For example, you can see pictures of certain saints on it if you know who were these saints, and what are they known of, you can identify certain pairs of them, each defining a rule, which the ruler and the people must follow but I could write megabytes about this thing... So, the constitution based on the Holy Crown Order was suspended when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 and it is still suspended to our present days in 1947. A new, written constitution replaced it. On the order of Stalin this one was slightly modified in 1956, and later in 1989, but it's still the same one, and now our legal system is a total wreck which leads to a moral disaster, which Hungary is in. We have the same problems - mass media, consumer culture, etc - like Western countries, but the difference is that we have the solution; however, it is next to forbidden to talk or learn about it. Hungarian nationalists are bound to bring back the Holy Crown Order, and build a new constitution based on it because the Order is timeless, technical civilization cannot outdate it. It is basically a harmony between Christian moral values (more precisely: White Christian, also known as Manichean) and material necessities. Through a modern Western eye, it can be defined as a general leftist view, but with strong religious values and English-like respect towards historic traditions.

The first arrest.

This was in September 2006. Well, as you perhaps know, we have a PM who admitted lying (this is the short story). The longer: It was earlier proven that the PM committed various crimes. First, he created a phantom company, forging official papers, and cheated millions, then he cheated tax and what else... ah yes... he married the daughter of Antal Apro, who ordered the Kossuth square massacre in 1956. Some 350 people died in front of the Parliament in 1956 when State Security forces opened fire at peaceful demonstrators. Up to this day, the PM and his family live in a villa that was robbed from its previous owners by Apro. Those owners were sent to work camps and died. So, this is the dude... nice, huh? A great Hungarian writer, Sandor Marai once wrote: "Communism has failed in every aspect. But it'll be much harder to get rid of communists themselves. Now they have nothing to fear, as they are not protecting the ideology, only the prey they collected." Quite fitting here. Whatever... So this PM guy, Ferenc Gyurcsany, delivered a speech in May, at a Socialist Party conference, held in secrecy. In this speech he said: "We lied, day and night, lied for years... We almost died of trying to look like if we were governing, and we did nothing. We haven't many choices, because we fucked it up... This country is a bitch, and now it's fucked..." Literally, I mean, including the obscene words in Hungarian it's much more upsetting, as calling the Motherland a "bitch" is something of the worst offenses. The recording of the speech was leaked on 18th September by an unknown person. It was aired on all media channels on that evening. Thousands gathered in front of the Parliament, demanding the resignment of the PM and the government, but they denied. On 19th September there were even more people, hundreds of thousands, the entire Kossuth square filled from wall to wall. It was totally unorganized, although some organizations brought PA system, a stage and such. No political parties were involved. Some sort of organization was done by 64 Counties Movement, a radical revisionist youth organization; it is practically a "clone" of the Irish 32 Counties. While we were there, news came that the state TV lies about us they said that "a few hundred Neonazi extremists" are demonstrating at the Parliament and did not cover anything more. You have to know that almost 100% of the Hungarian media is controlled by the government coalition socialists + liberals. When this news came, people were outraged and wanted to march to the TV station.

I was on the stage right that moment and managed to calm them down. We agreed that we'll send an emissary and ask them to stop lying about us. Two guys were picked for this task, one is the leader of 64 Counties, the other is a member of the World Federation of Hungarians, a nationalist organization founded in the 30s by Pal Teleki, our martyr PM. When they entered the building, security guards tried to arrest them. They caught one of them, the other fought his way out, and ran back to Kossuth square. He told what happened, and the crowd marched to the TV. Still there was no violence. The crowd demanded that the guy should be released, riot police was called in, and they blocked the gate for more than an hour, nothing happened, people stood there yelling, and the TV refused to show pictures. The police also denied cooperation, although the capture of the emissary was kidnapping by legal term. Besides, it was quite similar to what happened at the State Radio in 1956; back then it was the same: an emissary was sent, whom the guards of the Radio captured, and then people sieged the building. It seemed that nothing would happen at the TV, and I walked to the nearby Soviet memorial now.

That's another story: a huge concrete obelisk stands on the Szabadsag ter (Square of Liberty), between the US embassy and the TV, with a sickle and a hammer, commemorating "the fallen Soviet heroes" who "liberated" Budapest. This is the last standing Communist memorial. The government protects it at all costs. A triple fence is surrounding it, and there's a constant police guard there, always there were huge demonstrations for its removal, but without avail. Sometimes people tossed bottles filled with paint to it, that's why the government built a fence. It's not the single example of the government protecting Communist relics. For example, Josif Stalin is still a premium citizen of Budapest, even to this present days. Despite there were uncountable demands to cancel his status, the Mayor denied it, and he still does.

So I walked to this memorial and took a look. Thousands were there already, trying to bring it down. They had no tools, so I jumped in a taxi and brought them a ********* and a ****** umm... better not write this in a diskmag :) (we removed it -ed) Actually I am accused of this now :) So... better... They had no tools, and later I was accused of bringing them a sledgehammer and a metal saw but I deny everything, of course. Nevertheless, with these tools they soon broke off the Soviet coat of arms, destroyed the marble stones, and quite re-decorated the memorial. As a matter of fact, the same happened in 1956 here. The memorial has its own story anyway: Before the war, the so-called Shrine of Hungarian Flag stood there. So the Shrine was a huge Hungarian flag, with samples of land from all the Trianon territories, the areas that were robbed with the 1920 Trianon peace pact. Surrounded with the Trianon Statues, four statues, one for each direction: north, south, east and west, depicting people from these frontiers. This was demolished by the Russkis in 1945, and they put their obelisk to its place. So, now it was brought down, at least partly. Suddenly I heard loud bangs, like shots, and when I looked towards the TV, I saw cars burning. There the bangs were the sound as some guys beat other cars with sticks, cars of the directors of the TV. It later turned out that riot police stormed the crowd, peppersprayed and beat people without warning. Some guys grew upset and defeated them. According to their good traditions, the policemen did not dare to attack the hard core, only bystanders, young kids, elder people, women... When they pulled a teen girl on the ground by her hair, some boys grabbed a park bench and smashed two of them. This is where all started.

Finally a company of riot police was defeated, they fled like chicken from hawks. The TV's gate was broken, and the crowd entered the building. The TV still denied showing pictures, they didn't even report, and while other TVs reported "the police already defeating the riots", the state TV abruptly stopped broadcasting. Finally we found the commander of the police, who was also wounded, and told him we would like to read a petition on TV. He agreed to withdraw his men, and so we did later the media tried to spread word about the "vandals" who burnt the building and vandalized equipment. So I was the only journalist who dared to enter the building with the first wave of the riots, and photodocumented everything. There was nothing broken or stolen - nothing at all. No studios vandalized, not even a window broken. The media had to quit lying about this after I published my photos and it came to light that policemen broke everything after they took back the building. Ah yes, there was another iconic moment. A water cannon truck attacked the siegers earlier. It was stopped, blocked, and disabled. The policemen inside yelled in fear, they thought it's their end. It would've been in another country maybe but the rioters opened the truck, removed them, and escorted them back to their colleagues, unharmed - only their guns were taken. Later it came to light, although not confirmed officially, that the PM personally ordered the police to act as stupid as they did - deploying the water cannon without infantry - and also he ordered to give up the building, as he expected the "vandals" to destroy everything and kill policemen, so they can have a reason to "reform" the penalty system and also get rid of the rightist opposition. Our PM is building a Milosevichian regime, but yet he is not too far with it. He did not expect riots to be peaceful. This is what they did not expect of us in 1956 either. That day, the spirit of 1956 returned to Budapest. In 56, boxes were put on the streets, with signs: "Please donate to the children of fallen fighters!" and nobody ever stole a penny of these boxes though nobody guarded them on the deserted streets. This was the example. The riots followed, and not those doing the festival in Paris or so. OK, so... the riot was over. That evening we won, everybody went home but the PM denied to resign... and launched a retaliatory campain. The police started to arrest people countrywide for whatever was the reason. If you were there, or you were suspicious, they broke the door and took you. I was suspicious enough, as I wrote about the TV siege in my blog. They broke my door, wrestled me down in my own house, and took me away. They searched my place, without any order, denying the presence of witnesses, and took my girlfriend, too. She was interrogated for 8 hours, threatened with everything from jail to raping. It was really not an European scene. I was taken to the infamous address: 60th Andrassy road. This was once the center of the Nazi party, later the HQ of the Secret State Police. Today it's a museum... well, yes, the front office is, but the rest of the block works as usual. I was locked up for 3 days, then they said that I am accused of "armed assault on police personnel, as leader of a group" - this is 5 to 12 years. They accused me of leading the assault on the water cannon.

Hundreds of people were in the prison, who were mainly just snatched from the streets. In the next days, policemen wore ski masks, and did not have any ID badges. They shot at people with rubber bullets and beat them with steel batons. They just collected around 500 people, most of them weren't even there at the TV. The next day I was in, they attacked a legal demonstration, again using tear gas, batons and cavalry. We were transferred to a prison, where I spent 10 days. The National Attorney Foundation fought for us like lions and managed to get some of us out, mostly those with ridiculous charges like me, but some are still in. My "preliminary custody" was changed to home custody, meaning I was forbidden to leave my place for 30 days. Every day a police patrol came to see me, sometimes in the middle of the night. Some policemen were friendly and cooperative, some enjoyed what they are doing. Some said it's a scandal, others were trigger-happy. Whatever... Then came 23rd of October, the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution and the day of the biggest scandal in Hungarian "democracy" - simply put: there was a commemoration, organized by the parliamental opposition, with 400,000 people. The police attacked it, again beating people. Some lost their eyes, fingers, or received other serious injuries. They even beat up a member of the parliament. They shot gas grenades to everyone, once even at a baby cart. Flats were burnt citywide, as they fired these grenades into open windows, just for fun. Riot police stormed restaurants, beating and arresting people just having their dinner, even foreign tourists - there is a documentary about it, made by my friend, Laszlo Pesty, which has been just released. It's also in English, you got to watch it: http://pestylaszlo.com/megsebzett_eng.php

The PM just laughed and denied resignment. The city police chief denied that they shot at people, or beat them, despite of the clear TV images. Again hundreds went to jail. Policemen stated false accusations at court. These cases are still fresh and running, so I don't know where it will end, but there's a huge fight in the Hungarian judical system between ex-Communist and "normal" judges. The very judge that released me from prison said that "it's a legal horror what they were doing at the first level". Frankly said, for example the first level judge did not allow my lawyer to say a word. That is, I had no right for defense whatever. That's why I was arrested first.

The second arrest.

The second one is funnier. The 15th of March 2007, the anniversary of the 1848 revolution and the old 1956 slogan came back: MUK! MUK == Marciusban Ujrakezdjuk, azaz: We Come Back in March! The goverment was scared of a possible revolution. They built a fence around the Kossuth square, set new rules for having public demonstrations, and so on. Completely against the constitution, but whatever. 15th March had a special meaning though it was somewhat forbidden to celebrate that day in the Communist times. There were commemorations, but the police beat up those who wore a Hungarian ribbon, or did anything suspicious. On that day it was an organized programme every year that the university students went to the statue of Sandor Petofi to commemorate, and the Communists brought truckloads of drunk proletars from the outskirts of the city to beat them up. Such a March was about to happen. The media successfully scared off people from the streets. Budapest was as abandoned as if it were an air raid practice or something. So on 15th march, we did not let them speak. The Mayor of Budapest, Gabor Demszky, ended up the worst. Some 3000 ppl gathered to toss eggs and rotten tomatoes at him. It was ridiculous... and he still tried to deliver a speech. His bodyguards tried to protect him with umbrellas, without much avail. It was the funniest thing of all whatever...

Some hours later I was biking around the city, as a reporter of a net radio, with my girlfriend. We stopped at a pizzeria to have some lunch when six civilian dressed detectives surrounded us and arrested me. Allegedly they did that because they received an anonymous phonecall, stating that I organized the "attack" on the city mayor. I was taken to the police station and detained for 8 hours, which mostly passed with interrogations - and then they came to my place, to search for - no kidding! - eggs! Supposedly that'd be a proof but the entire thing was dead from the beginning. First off, the accusation could not even get times right. They had it that I tossed eggs at the mayor at 16:00, while his speech was between 13:00 and 13:30. Later they accused me of organizing a riot, which actually happened that night, when news of capturing a widely respected leader of a riot group spread, but they accused me of spreading news of his capture at 13:30, while he was caught at 15:00, so the entire accusation immediately broke, and I was released. Now I will sue the police for a huge compensation, along with the other hundreds who were taken custody without any proof, or even any charges. This is the short story.