The communist party officials regarded all their subjects as an undifferentiated gray mass: the people, a collective noun, like the herd. The officials liked to flaunt their Soviet people, their Czechoslovak people. Everything they did was on behalf of the people and for their benefit, and all their decisions were ostensibly based on the will of the people.  Weighing and measuring the will of the people was, of course, impossible, but that’’s what we had the officials for, so that they could predict it in retrospect and interpret it. The mantra of our present-day politicians and their election slogans is […]

Slovak-Hungarian relations and the atmosphere between the two nations have been through one of their worst weeks in recent history.The Slovak Minister of Education (Slovak National Party) insists that Hungarian children in Slovakia must learn all geographic names in Slovak. The Romanian Euro-MP László Tőkés used the opportunity of a one-minute speech to inform the European Parliament that the Hungarian minority in Slovakia suffers humiliation and lives in constant fear. Slovak media reported his speech as the main event of the day. The Chairman of the Slovak National Party, part of the ruling coalition, has now shed the last vestiges of […]