Hungarian Nationalism And The Ghosts Of Turan, por Razib Khan
Hungary is unique in Europe because the people speak a language that is only related to two groups in western Siberia, the Mansi, and Khanty. Most linguists place these Ugric languages as a distant sister clade to the Finno-Permic group. But it seems incontrovertible that the modern Magyar people are culturally descended from a group of people who were in close association with various Turkic nomads (e.g., the Khazars) in the lower Volga region. Their migration westward seems to have recapitulated the movement of the ancient Huns, who were likely Turkic. Additionally, not only did the Magyar tribes absorb Turkic tribes as they moved out of Khazar territory but in later centuries gave they refuge to Turkic groups fleeing the Mongols.The Call of the Drums - Hungary’s far right discovers its inner barbarian, por Jacob Mikanowski (Harper's Magazine):
The Turanism described in the article is a real thing, but much of it seems to consist of the co-option of the lifestyle of the Altaic nomadic peoples, Turks, and Mongols, to add glamor to Hungarian history. In fact, the inclusion of groups such as Scythians and Sarmatians (Indo-European Iranians) indicates that what is common is not descent or ethnolinguistic affinity, but a lifestyle. It’s the lifestyle and ethos that Christopher Beckwith writes about in Empires of the Silk Road. (...)
This reality, that what Turanism celebrates is the idealization of brutal martial past, mitigates the fact that genetically modern Magyars descend overwhelmingly from the conquered, not the conquerors. The conquest elites did have an eastern affinity. But the best recent data indicates that modern Hungarians are only a few percent enriched for this ancestry. Rather, the ancestors of modern Hungarians probably are Slavic peasants as well as the post-Roman peoples of Pannonia.
The Great Kurultáj, an event held annually outside the town of Bugac, Hungary, is billed as both the “Tribal Assembly of the Hun-Turkic Nations” and “Europe’s Largest Equestrian Event.” When I arrived last August, I was fittingly greeted by a variety of riders on horseback: some dressed as Huns, others as Parthian cavalrymen, Scythian archers, Magyar warriors, csikós cowboys, and betyár bandits. In total there were representatives from twenty-seven “tribes,” all members of the “Hun-Turkic” fraternity. The festival’s entrance was marked by a sixty-foot-tall portrait of Attila himself, wielding an immense broadsword and standing in front of what was either a bonfire or a sky illuminated by the baleful glow of war. He sported a goatee in the style of Steven Seagal and, shorn of his war braids and helmet, might have been someone you could find in a Budapest cellar bar. A slight smirk suggested that great mirth and great violence together mingled in his soul.Aparentemente, esse festival (o "Kurultáj")[1] teve a participação de azeris, avares, basquires, búlgaros, bálcaros, buriates, chuvaches, gagaúzes, cabardinos, carachais, caracalpaques, cazaques, madjars, quirguizes, cumiques, mongóis, nogais, uzbeques, madzsares[2], tártaros, turcos, tuvanos, uigures, iacutos e, claro, húngaros. .
Inside, I watched a procession of riders—Azeris, Avars, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Karakalpaks—take turns galloping around the amphitheater, a vast oval of trampled earth. Then, after each brother nation had been announced, the Battle of Pozsony began. Four hundred and fifty-four years after Attila’s death, in 907, a Frankish army came charging out of Bavaria into the heart of the nascent Hungarian kingdom. The Hungarians beat them with an old nomad trick: they fooled the Franks into thinking they were on the retreat, wheeled around at the last second to spring a trap on their unsuspecting foes, and showered them with arrows when they were too close to escape. The original bloodbath took place over the course of three days, but that day at the festival the Hungarian troops needed to wrap things up in thirty-five minutes. (...)
This is the key to the political message behind the Kurultáj: that the truth of the Hungarian past has been suppressed, obscuring the Hungarian people’s origins as a nomadic race of pagan warriors, born for conquest but forced into submission by treacherous neighbors, liberal ideologues, even Christianity itself. Given its nationalist orientation, it’s no surprise that the Kurultáj was established in close association with Jobbik, Hungary’s onetime ultra-nationalist political party. (It has since slightly tempered its message.) Today, the festival’s patron is Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which now occupies the rightmost spot on the political spectrum. Fidesz gives the event around a million euros a year, which is the reason admission is free and why, in the absolute middle of nowhere, it takes an hour of waiting in traffic to get in. (...)
By the end of the nineteenth century, the search for Hungary’s Hunnic past had gradually coalesced into a theory called Turanism. (The name ultimately derives from Old Persian, in which Turan meant something like “the land of darkness” and designated a fringe region of the Sassanid Empire inhabited by unruly nomads.) Part political movement and part religious revival, Turanism was big-tent nationalism in the style of pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism, born of Hungary’s nineteenth-century imperial ambitions. It held that the Hungarian people hailed from Asia, were related to Turks and other Central Asian peoples, and that their nomadic and pagan history should serve as the basis for Hungary’s cultural life and foreign policy, rather than being subordinate to the concerns of their nominal Austrian Hapsburg overlords.
After Austria-Hungary’s defeat in World War I, Turanism became an ideology of resentment, serving as inspiration to Hungarian fascist movements. It offered a way for Hungarians to become equal competitors in the racialized violence of the interwar years—in a world in which Nazis were proclaiming their historic mission as leader of the Aryan nations, it made sense for Hungary to cast a wide net in search of friends. In the Turanist imaginary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan were all possible allies whose support could be used to claw back the greatness (and territory) that had slipped away after Hungary’s defeat. Beginning with the postwar communist takeover of Hungary, however, Turanism was banned. (...)
Since Orbán and Fidesz came to power for a second time, in 2010, Turanism has been made into something of an official ruling ideology, with little room for dissent.(...)
Under Orbán, Hungary has also pursued something like a Turanist foreign policy, seeking strategic partnerships with the governments of Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. At a meeting of Turkic-speaking states held in Kyrgyzstan last fall, the prime minister declared that “Hungarians consider themselves late descendants of Attila, of Hun-Turkic origin.” That same day, Zsolt Bíró, the Kurultáj founder and head of the Hungarian Turan Foundation, was on hand to lead Hungary’s delegation at the World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan. (The Hungarian team, whose specialty is mounted archery, won 12 medals—an impressive showing, though far behind Kyrgyzstan’s 103.)
Uma coisa que me desperta a atenção nisto é que se por um lado o governo húngaro até gosta de cultivar a imagem de defensor da Europa e da Cristandade contra uma suposta invasão islâmica, por outro parece ter adotado uma ideologia que até vê a Hungria como mais asiática do que europeia e que considera como aliados naturais muitos povos que até são atualmente muçulmanos.
Um aparte - nomeadamente nas redes sociais, há quem diga que a Hungria é contra a imigração islâmica porque terá a memória da dominação pelos turcos muçulmanos; mas Viktor Orbán não deve ter nenhuma memória da opressão turca - ele é protestante, e os protestantes húngaros eram aliados dos turcos nos tempos das guerras entre o Império Otomano e a Aústria (em compensação os tártáros muçulmanos da Polónia - os antepessados do Charles Bronson... - combatiam ao lado da Aústria católica).
Diga-se que em praticamente todos os livros que falam do assunto que passei os olhos é apresentado como um facto que existirá um grupo linguístico chamado "uralo-altaico", que se subdividiria em "línguas urálicas" (que se sub-subdividiria em línguas fino-úgricas - finlandês, húngaro, estónio, lapão, etc. - e samoiedo) e "altaicas" (línguas turcas, mongóis e tungúsicas, e talvez até mesmo o coreano e o japonês); em compensação, na internet (nomeadamente na wikipédia) o "uralo-altaico" é apresentado como uma hipótese totalmente abandonada e mesmo o "altaico" como algo largamente abandonado; o que concluo disso é que no século XX (quando os livros foram escritos) era considerado ponto assente um "parentesco" (se não biológico - a ideia de que os finlandeses seriam mongóis louros de olhos azuis nunca deve ter sido muito levada a sério - pelo menos cultural) entre húngaros, finlandeses, turcos, mongóis e mais uma carrada de povos da Ásia central e da Sibéria, e que no século XXI terá sido abandonada (abandono esse que já se vê na internet); de qualquer maneira, isso significa que a teoria dos nacionalistas húngaros de que serão parentes dos turcos e dos mongóis não será assim tão exótica como o artigo da Harper's dá a entender, já que isso seria quase o consenso no século passado.
Já agora, ver também Os nazis mongóis - combinação absurda?
[1] enquanto escrevia este post estava-me a a tentar lembrar de onde conhecia este nome; entretanto lembrei-me: foi (com uma grafia ligeiramente diferente) num livro sobre o Gengis Khan, em referência à assembleia dos chefes tribais mongóis
[2] parece ser uma tribo do Usbequistão tão obscura que mal se encontra referências a ela além desse festival; provavelmente é convidada por causa do nome (tal como os madjars do Casaquistão), que sendo parecido com "magiar" serve para dar apoio à teoria de que os húngaros são parentes dos povos turcos e mongóis
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