Academic literature on the topic 'Hungarian Communist Party'

The “Ex-communist party” label has often been used to describe the political ideas and political behavior of the former ruling communist parties operating in post-communist political systems. Yet, the former ruling communist parties have not only followed diverse paths of organizational transformation, but also have developed very different strategic visions of their role in the politics of post-communism. By comparing the political environments faced by the former ruling organizations of East Germany and Hungary and then utilizing content analysis to identify the strategic visions of each of the two organizations, this article demonstrates how different post-communist national political settings have resulted in divergent strategic visions for successor parties in Germany and Hungary.

The recent electoral performances of the Bulgarian Ataka, Hungarian Jobbik, and the Slovak National Party seem to confirm the pervasive appeal of the populist radical right in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike their Western counterparts, these parties do not stem from a ‘silent counter-revolution’. Populist radical right parties in the region retain features sui generis, partly in relation to their historical legacies and the idiosyncrasies of the post-communist context. After distinguishing between pre-communist, communist and post-communist issues, this article discerns commonalities and differences in the ideology of the three parties by a content analysis of the party literatures. The analysis shows that populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe are fairly ‘like minded’, yet they do not constitute an entirely homogeneous group. While a minimum combination of ideological features reveals that only clericalism and opposition to ethnic minorities are shared by all three parties, a maximum combination would extend this to irredentism, anti-corruption and Euroscepticism.

Imre Nagy, Prime Minister during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, was above all a politician. In his frame of mind, his mentality and his actions, he largely conformed to the archetype of a ‘functionary’ that typified leading figures in the Communist movement at the time. The two main features of this mentality were belief in the infallibility of the Communist Party, and belief in the role, mission and vocation of the Party and its functionaries to redeem the world, according to András Hegedüs (member of the Hungarian Politburo 1951–6, and Prime Minister 1955–6 and a dissident sociologist in the 1960s). Another important trait of functionaries in East-central Europe was to see themselves as local representatives of a worldwide Soviet empire, not just of the Party. Although the life and personality of Nagy resembled this pattern, it departed from it in a number of ways that became dramatically manifest, most of all in his final years. One explanation for this departure lies in the ‘intellectual attributes’ or leanings of Nagy as a leading Party functionary. This side of his character prompted him to undertake an intellectual appraisal of political problems on several occasions in his life. In the period leading up to the Hungarian revolution, it made him the leading figure in an expressly intellectual movement: the opposition among the Party intelligentsia. This study is an attempt to trace the specific intellectual path taken by Nagy as a politician.

In the late 2000s far-right parties made significant gains in numerous countries of the European Union. Sharing the same agenda and discourse of discrimination, many of these parties collaborate today at the European level as well. Yet, it is unclear whether the contemporary European far-right is indeed homogenous in terms of ideology. This project in critical discourse analysis shows that the far-right in the EU is actually characterized by ideological diversity. The paper compares and contrasts how China, an emerging great power with a booming economy, has been portrayed in the early 2010s by far-right parties in the UK and Hungary. By identifying major references, metaphors, frames and argumentation schemes, the article concludes that despite belonging to the same party family, and being actual political allies, the British National Party (BNP) and the Jobbik party in Hungary construct fundamentally different images of the “Chinese Other”. The far-right in the UK, a major Western power, presents China clearly in hostile terms, mainly as a “dangerous, threatening intruder” into the British market. Additionally, in the discourse of the British far-right China is primarily identified as a communist dictatorship and used as a metaphor of oppression in the domestic UK context. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe and a relatively recent member of the European Union, an opposite picture of China is constructed by the far-right. Here, China serves as a tool to distance Hungary from the West. China is positioned by the Hungarian far-right as a state where communism has lost its significance. By stressing the Asian origin of Hungarians, brotherhood is claimed among Hungarians and Chinese and China is presented as a “role model country” which successfully resisted “Western dominance”.

The elite of the Hungarian volunteers of the Spanish Civil War became victim of the Communist terror after World War II (1949-1950). The main role was played by the brigadist, László Rajk, who, before the trial, was the secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Minister of the Interior, and then Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was charged with spying for the “imperialists” and Tito as well as with high treason and anti-Semitism. In the show trial of “Rajk and his associates” 155 people were charged and convicted, 15 of them, including Rajk, were condemned to death. In the indictment Rajk was condemned for his activity during the Spanish Civil War: he was accused of being a fascist, and then an imperialist agent, as well as a “Trockyist”, just like the twenty other Hungarian Brigadists. The background of the trial has been thoroughly analysed in Hungarian historiography, but the accusation connected to the Spanish period has not been examined or criticized. The present study, based on new sources, such as the reports of the Hungarian Communist Secret Service, the papers of the KGB Archives in Moscow, and the Comintern, raises the issue emphasizing the negative role of Ernő Gerő (“Pedro”), who was the representative of the Comintern and the PCIA (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), in the process.

During the early post-war years (1944–1948), the newly established communist regimes in Eastern Europe followed the Soviet example. They honoured figures and events from their respective national pasts, and celebrated holidays dedicated to anti-fascist resistance and popular uprisings, which they presented as forerunners of the new, bright and prosperous “democratic” era. Hungarian communists celebrated 15 March and commemorated 6 October, both recalling the national struggle for independence in 1848; they celebrated a martyr cult of fallen communists presented as national heroes, and “nationalized” socialist holidays, such as May Day. In the centenary of 1848 they linked national with social demands. In the “struggle for the soul of the nation,” Czech communists also extensively celebrated anniversaries and centenaries, especially in 1948, which saw the 600th anniversary of the founding of Prague's Charles University, the 100th anniversaries of the first All-Slav Congress (held in Prague) and the revolution of 1848, the 30th anniversary of the founding of an independent Czechoslovakia, and the 10th anniversary of the Munich Accords. National holidays related to anti-fascist resistance movements were celebrated in Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia; dates related to the overthrow of fascism, implying the transition to the new era, were celebrated in Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria.

The socio-economic reforms of the government of Károly Grósz, his activities as secretary general of the Communist Party, are analyzed. The peculiarities of the world-view vision of the Hungarian “young reformers” of the urgent problems of social development of the country and the ways of their solution proposed by them are revealed. Sharing the prevalent in Hungarian and Russian historiography of critical perception of K. Grósz’s work at the highest state and party posts, an attempt is made to give a more balanced assessment of his role in the country’s transition to a new social and political phenomenon – multiparty, parliamentary democracy, human rights, that is, the actual change of system. The article illustrates the international activity of K. Grósz, estimates of his reforms by M. Gorbachev and R. Reagan. K. Grósz’s activities are characterized by the deterioration of key indicators of the country’s development, the crisis of one-party socialism, and international challenges. Considerable attention is paid to the characterization of the process of the ideological and organizational breakdown in the ruling party, the activities of radical reformist forces, which were grouped around I. Pozsgay, clarifying the circumstances of reducing the influence of “young reformers” and removing K. Grósz from politics. He failed to overcome the inheritance of the errors of the HSWP, defending it in renewed clothes, not supported by the Hungarians in the 1990 parliamentary elections.

Three years after Stalin's death, Khrushchev shocked the world by revealing much of the truth about the crimes of Stalin. Most affected by the revelations were the Communist Parties, who had held Stalin in god-like reverence. This thesis examines the effects, both of these revelations on the British Communist Party, and of the second cataclysmic event of that year - the Hungarian Uprising and its suppression by Soviet tanks. It appears that to many members, an opportunity was presented by Khrushchev's frankness, to renew the Communist movement and set aside the old dogmatic ways; this desire for real change did not, unfortunately, permeate the ranks of the British Party leadership. At all points, whilst allowing open debate to proceed, the leadership took positions and expressed views designed to consolidate and continue in the old mould. Demands for a rigorous analysis of the Stalinist period, including the role of the system of democratic centralism, were never fully taken up; the British Party leadership persisted in taking the Khrushchev line - that Stalin, and the cult of the personality, were responsible for the abuses. The questioning of basic Communist principles, such as democratic centralism was not permitted. Considerable debate did take place, however, within the Party press and in the unofficial journal 'The Reasoner', on many topics including Inner-Party Democracy, the rewriting of 'The British Road to Socialism', anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and unrest in Eastern Europe. The leadership eventually responded to demands for a Special Congress in recognition of the cataclysmic nature of the events. The British Party leadership sought primarily to defend what it knew best - the structures of the Party, and its unthinking loyalty to the Soviet Union. This latter feature proved a heavy strain on the Party when the leadership unconditionally supported the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. The combined effect of the events of 1956 led to a membership loss in the region of 7,000. 1956 appears to have been a tragically wasted opportunity for the international Communist movement. Having exposed and rejected the distortions of the Stalin period, the possibilities were not taken up. The man had gone, but the system remained unaltered. This thesis attempts to show, however, that whilst the British Party had been nominally independent since the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, it was, because of its historical development, psychologically subordinate to Moscow. For the leaders of the British Communist Party to have gone against the Soviet line, no matter how appalling their decisions, no matter now reasonable the arguments of the British Party dissidents, would have been inconceivable. For many British Communists, Marxism-Leninism had become an article of faith, rather than a political philosophy and practical tool; for many others however, the events of 1956 demonstrated that faith and reason could no longer be reconciled. Despite the departure of many, this dichotomy was to remain within the British Communist Party, along with the structures of democratic centralism, until its dissolution in November 1991.

Through comparative case studies of Slovakia and Hungary, I explore the competitive relationship between governing parties and radical right parties in post European Union accession parliaments. This research highlights the roles of ethno-nationalism and populism and employs Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian minority, as manifested through the 2009 Slovak language law and the 2010 Hungarian citizenship law, as a focal point of competition between party groups. I argue that this competition reveals a more influential role than typically attributed to radical right parties. The first half of the article tests these cases against Meguid’s (2008) position, salience, and ownership theory of competition between unequals. The second half of the article analyzes this competition and points to electoral strategies, coalition and opposition policy payoffs, governing party reputations, and each country’s legal landscape as areas affected by the radical right’s presence.

Keywords: Radical right; Hungarian minority; language; citizenship; accommodation, issue ownership, issue salience; competition.

This thesis explores the pervasive political divide within Canada’s Hungarian communities between communists and nationalist conservatives. Both sides in this conflict struggled for ownership of Hungarian national symbols and the right to be seen as the “true” guardians of Hungarian identity in Canada. While religious differences between Roman Catholic and Calvinist Hungarian immigrants served as a divisive force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the arrival of a massive wave of new immigrants from the lands of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War introduced into Canada the fiery political divisions between the far left and right that engulfed Hungary in 1918/19. Throughout the interwar period, during the Second World War and in the Cold War era, successive regimes in Budapest intervened, further politicized and divided Canada’s Hungarian communities, separating them into “loyal” and “disloyal” camps. But both communist and conservative Hungarian-Canadian leaders demonstrated a significant level of agency by often charting their own course and thus confounding their allies in Budapest. This thesis argues that Hungarian-Canadian communists only paid lip service to the Marxist language of class conflict, while national self-identification trumped class-based identity or internationalism, and conservative nationalists represented a large, politically heterogeneous camp, divided by generational conflicts and tensions between immigrant cohorts.

1956 was punctuated by a series of events that shook the world, and is seen as having been not only a watershed for the international communist movement but also a turning point in the Cold War. This thesis is an in-depth study of a specific and under-researched aspect of French and Italian communism i.e. the responses of ordinary Communist Party members of what were the two largest and most important non-ruling Communist Parties to these historic events. Its aim has been to recover thoughts, feelings and responses of those 'on the ground' to these events via a series of personal interviews supported by national, regional and local archive evidence in a multiple case study.

This chapter demonstrates the profound and continuous influence that Milton’s works have exerted on Hungarian literature and culture since the first part of the eighteenth century. This chapter surveys the texts and paratexts of Hungarian translations of Paradise Lost and details some of the most successful renderings through the twenty-first century. These translations have significantly shaped Hungarian audiences’ responses to English literature as a whole and engaged them in more general critical debates about the sublime, the role of translation in the development of national literature, and prosody. The chapter concludes noting the curious Hungarian career of Milton’s other works: the dearth of modern translations of Paradise Regained, the two versions of Samson Agonistes from the communist era, a general preference for the shorter poems in recent years, and the several modern attempts to translate Milton’s prose tracts.

This chapter focuses on historical writing in three central European states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. It looks at the long-term trends and phenomena in historical writing in the region. The first is the coexistence during the immediate post-war years of communist policy, together with more or less nationalistic historical interpretations. The next stage is typified by attempts to control education and research, and to reshape the organizational structure of historiography. An output of both of these phenomena was the ‘final’ or mature Marxist interpretations of Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak history. The next regional stage to have a considerable impact on the region’s historiography is the ‘golden age’ of the 1960s, when most of the innovative and influential books were published, and historians from East Central Europe came into closer contact with their colleagues from the western part of the continent.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

This chapter argues that the same factors that made the Bolshevik Revolution possible in Russia—above all, the catastrophe of World War I—had the opposite effect in Europe. There are four key cases discussed here: Germany, Hungary, Great Britain, and France. In different ways, communist leaders sought to present their ideas about the path to socialism as uniquely suited to move Europe forward. But for equally different reasons, each ended up accepting the Communist International's (Comintern) directives. The communist party in Germany advocated a mass-based conception of revolutionary action that contrasted sharply with Lenin's advocacy of a conspiratorial vanguard. Hungary's communist leaders attempted to transform their society according to a radically voluntarist conception of party rule during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Well before the British Communist Party was even formed, the party's founders were overshadowed by the postwar popularity of the reform-minded Labour Party. Finally, France's communists seemed to have the greatest chance of establishing an independent identity.

This chapter discusses Marshal Tito's return from Russia in November 1919, during which he led a group of twenty-five prisoners of war (POW) to Yugoslavia via Stettin and Vienna. It recounts how the Romanian army, supported by the Serbian army, crushed the Hungarian communist uprising and overthrew the Hungarian Soviet Republic. It also highlights Tito's demonstrations against the “Obznana” (Proclamation), a decree promulgated in December 1920 to protect the state, which puts the Communist Party outside the law. The chapter explains how the Belgrade Socialists, who held their Second Congress in Vukovar in April 1920, formally dropped the “Socialist Workers” label and became the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It investigates the formation of the Independent Workers' Party of Yugoslavia, a division in the Communist Party after the “Obznana.”