“Undoubtedly, leftwingers exist who can find excuses for the Soviet penal universe. But I don’t regularly discuss matters with them”. The Hungarian political scientist Gáspár Miklós Tamás responds to Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu’s assertion in “Dilema veche” 243 (2008) that “The Left […] hides the Gulag behind a veil of intelligence, nuance, and ‘historical necessity’.”
Gáspár Miklós Tamás
(1948) served in the Hungarian parliament between 1989 and 1994. He was head of the Hungarian Academy’s Institute of Philosophy and is recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Soros Foundation in Hungary.
Articles
Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
Eastern Europe today
State socialism in eastern Europe, though intolerably authoritarian, offered security and the opportunity for upward mobility, writes G.M. Tamás. Members of the middle class resist becoming déclassé but cannot identify with the communist institutions to which they owe their status. In order to defend social relations before 1989 without losing face, they portray the neoconservative destruction of the welfare state as the work of communists. The new counter revolutionaries can, then, be described both as left- and as rightwing – as the anti-communist enemies of communist privatizers and globalizers.
