Anti-semitism, Hungarian style
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The reason why I was inspired to write about this is in the entry of last week. It seems like I caught a cold, so I'll be breaf, but there is one point that really interests me as a wannabe gender researcher. My colleague Krisztian sent this link as a backgrounder on Magyar Garda.
What caught my eye was this ridiculous comment by Jobbik's spokesperson Krisztina Morvai:
Jobbik’s public face is Krisztina Morvai, a blonde, telegenic law professor, noted for both her forthright feminism and her vituperative attacks on Israel [!]. A message posted under her name on an internet forum demanded that Hungarian [!] Jews should play with their “tiny circumcised tails” instead of attacking [!] her. Ms Morvai declines to discuss the matter. Jobbik says it will not comment on private correspondence.
Above is a Jobbik poster saying "Hungary for Hungarians", with K.M. in the middle.
I inserted exclamation marks to show her logical shortcomings. But the passage in general speaks about what I would call the general masculinisation of "evil". I would not exclude that Ms Morvai may have had 'relevant' personal experience here in Hungary, but the interesting part of this statement is that when she imagines her "enemy", she thinks of a bunch of middle-aged male Jews with black hats and beards, discussing politics. It's way beyond her imagination that along the way she may as well insult Hungarian Jewish women who may work in the same office with her at her university.
Have you noticed, whenever nationalists have a problem with someone they perceive comparable in power with themselves or even stronger, they, obviously, see men, for example, a masculine Middle Eastern or African immigrant (uncle Freud would nod his head saying he knows what they are jealous of). Meanwhile, demasculinisation of local men was a common practice in British, French, etc colonies. Anthropological writings of the time also show how the faithful servants of the establishment at the time toiled to prove their societies that colonial men are anything but masculine (I remember reading some interesting text on Vietnam). Some European men also make fun of Japanese men being supposedly feminine, which compensates for the Japanese often being economically superior
A typical psycho-social (I must admit though, I know nothing about psychology) mechanism evident in nationalists is very simple: if they feel helpless and more or less powerless against a group they don't like, they start issuing claims that this ethnic, social or whatever group absolutely must fail in masculinity (otherwise the world would be too depressing :)). But coming back to Morvai, it's probably the first time I hear such a narrative from a woman. Not like I've come across many Nazi women in my life... It certainly must have been tough for a woman to become a Nazi leader, so she has developed certain strategies that allow her asserting herself both as a Nazi and as a woman. I mean, the quote above mixes her political orientation with a statement on her sexual preferences, which probably in her world symbolically strengthens her as a Nazi woman who can supposedly totally ruin the "enemy's" lives by rhetorically rejecting them as sexual subjects (as if she's deadly attractive...). Typically it's not very likely that a woman makes a career in a skinhead movement or a nationalist party (both are usually very macho-pacho) by trying to be like men. Her choice is to emphasise and utilise her femininity in a very bizarre way.