Impaled upon his own sword: the Bayer Grampaw Files
Orbán's friend and ideologist faces some hard truths about his grandfather
This morning (01/29/2024) the server at telex.hu sent an 503 Service Unavailable message. Telex is of course one of the leading opposition media outlets. It was founded by the journalists of index.hu when Index was taken over by the NER.
So an 503 can be a warning sign. There was a wave of DoS attacks from unidentified attackers According to “sources” the attackers like pickled herring and vodka, so Hungarian police are on the Finns…no I’m just joking, they did nothing.
So is it another attack? Nope. There is a viral thing going on.
It’s about Zsolt Bayer.
Zsolt Bayer is the proud owner of membership booklet #5 of Orbán’s Fidesz party. He is an intellectual and a journalist. For a brief period in the mid 90s he was a critic of the Fidesz party but by the time Orbán won the 1998 elections he was back in the barn.
Since then he is one of the influential ideologues of Fidesz. He is a regular guest in propaganda TV programs and writes op-eds in propaganda press.
His style is outright rude. He uses words like idiot, c*nt, the f-word and so on. But he is best at doing in personam attacks. He delightedly points out if someone’s father was a member of the ÁVÓ or the department III/III. (the secret police, like the East German Stasi). He also likes to write stories about how his grampaw the good ol’ doctor was robbed by the “Jews” (The “bad” Jews of course. Like any good antisemite he knows good and bad Jews and has a lot of Jewish friends.)
Couple of years ago (in 2021) he wrote an article about how the Arrow Cross Party goons were quickly accepted into the newly set up communist ÁVÓ as the new dictatorship urgently needed brutal and experienced henchmen.
Fast forward to last weekend.
Historian Krisztián Ungváry presented some documents about Bayer’s grandfather.
Ungváry is a well-known expert of the 20th century history of Hungary, especially Miklós Horthy’s regime between 1921-1945.
After the fall of communism Horthy and his regime was rediscovered by the Hungarian far right and he quickly became a legendary figure of good conservative leadership.
Ungváry, a buster of toxic myths
Ungváry’s work was instrumental to bust those myths and uncover the dark secrets of the Horthy era. He also published works about the secret services and secret police of the communist era.
But Ungváry is not just your average historian. He has a reputation to call bullshit when he sees bullshit. And call it loud and clear. It’s suicide tactics to pick a fight with him when it comes to sources and history of the 20th century Hungary.
Telex went down this morning because of an article written by Ungváry about Bayer.
Bayer’s grandfather: Arrow Cross Party, then communist secret police
In this article, citing and analyzing 32 sources and references, Ungváry shows that Bayer’s grandfather, Károly Gyimes was a member of the Arrow Cross Party. Bayer acknowledged this earlier but he stated that Gyimes enlisted out of necessity. The documents cited by Ungváry tell a different story.
They show that Gyimesi, a doctor at the town of Kiskőrös was a keen “nyilas” (member of the Arrow Cross Party, literally “arrowist”). A statement of a Jewish survivor from Kiskőrös says that he picked two young and pretty Jewish girls (by the name of Magda Schwarc and Klári Grün) to demonstrate how vaginal search shall be performed at the ghetto. (Anal and vaginal searches were standard practice in Hungarian ghettos).
After the war Gyimesi was only briefly detained and he could practice as a doctor. The reason? Of course he was an agent of the Communist secret police. Again, Bayer acknowledged this earlier but also stated that his grandfather was forced to enlist. Again, Ungváry presents documents that show that Gyimesi produced a lot of reports (not as many though as his superiors wanted) and was “keen to cooperate”.
Why do people rush to read this story so the server can’t hold up with the requests?
Other countries also have these kinds of scandals. Imagine a loud anti-LGBTQ politician being caught at some gay orgy. Imagine a white supremacist having sex with a black person. Imagine a communist turning out to have a luxury life. Imagine an evangelical pastor having multiple lovers.
Given how our 20th century looked like, many Hungarians have monsters in the family. A nazi, an officer deporting Jews, a communist reporting on their friends. The records of the internal security services were partially destroyed in 1989 and there is only a limited access to the remainder. This is why some people like Bayer have the opportunity to discredit people with their fathers’ feats.
And Bayer did that, and did that in a particularly rude, and many times antisemitic manner.
Bayer is impaled upon his own sword.
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones as they say in English. A pitcher is taken to the fountain until it breaks as they say in Hungary. Pick your proverb as you want, Zsolt Bayer definitely broke it in a big way.
The thing is, besides a relatively small number of hardcore fans, no one really likes Bayer. Right now friends and foes alike rush to read Ungváry’s article. To have a laugh and then to judge. Like Bayer usually does.
By the time I finished editing this, Bayer reacted: He thanked Ungváry for uncovering the monster that his grandfather was. The good ol’ grampaw’ of a doc’ is now of course a very superficially known and distant grandfather. Bayer of course stabs at opposition politician Klára Dobrev (granddauther of a Communist leader) saying that her family still lives in a villa taken from killed Jews. So he reacted in a typical Bayer fashion.
Megafon, the organization of government-backed social media influencers came up with this. The woman on the picture is Anna Donáth, president of the opposition party “Momentum”. The news clipping is about her great-grandfather, a lawyer, who was convicted for stealing client money in the 1920’s.
Since 1989, this is the 8th parliament. Neither of them voted for complete and unrestricted publicity of communist secret police records. This is why, 35 years after the fall of communism we still have these scandals. I hope that sometime in the future they will be replaced by regular scandals involving sex, drugs and rock and roll. Having to read about tortured people and friends reporting each other to the commies is quite depressing.
Közben a HVG előkerítette Bayer 2016-os nyilatkozatát is, amiben kicsit másképp emlékezett meg nagypapiról, és az együtt töltött időről is. Illetve akkor még azt mondta, kikérte az iratokat a Történeti Hivataltól. Tehát hazudik továbbra is.
Nincs ebben semmi meglepő, nem is kéne elszámolnia a családi múlttal, de az a MN-es cikkből is kiderül, hogy nincs olyan, hogy Bayer Zsolt, mint magánember. Csak Bayer Zsolt pártkatona és propagandista van, aki még akkor is beleszövi az ideológiát és a pártpropagandát a mondandójába, ha személyes ügyről van szó. Jóval intelligensebb és értelmesebb annál, ahogyan az a cikk meg van írva, de kényszeresen igazodik az elvárásokhoz. Ez a ciki, nem a nyilas/ügynök nagypapi.
Én, őszintén szólva kitűnően szórakozom. Süt, sugárzik a jobboldali morális fölény, na. Újra ráerősítve a kb 2000-ben (a legszebb Orbán-Torgyán-polgárkormány-érában) kialakult benyomásra, hogy aki ezt a tábort gyarapítja, az civilizált ember nem lehet, sőt, kifejezetten fáj neki az ilyesmi.