Ottawa’s Saint Paul University was the site of the opening day of a conference organised on the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of the vast majority of Hungarian refugees to Canada and in the year of the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation. Mike Molloy, President of the Canadian Immigration Historical Society, opened the conference by reading the greetings from Ahmed Hussen, […]
Sir Karl Raimund Popper’s astute observation that “[t]rue ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it” is especially relevant to how some belittle or deny Col. Ferenc Koszorus’ action that prevented the more than 250,000 Jews living in Budapest from being sent to the German death camps in July 1944. Ignoring the historical record (e.g., […]
I am neither a writer nor a historian, but in 1944 my father (Kálmán József) was more than an acquaintance of Admiral Horthy and has been a friend of Horthy’s Senior Aide-de-Camp, General Gábor Gerloczy. In November 1944 I was 18 1/2 years old, a labor camp escapee surviving in Budapest in a self designed military uniform and having freed […]
Bálint Magyar, Hungary’s former Minister of Education and author of the book Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary, gave a well-attended talk at Concordia University in Montreal on September 11, 2017. The lecture was hosted by the Department of Political Science and moderated by a familiar voice from HFP, namely Professor András Göllner. The discussion focused on how one might […]
Documents uncovered this week suggest that the Orbán government’s motivation for handing back to Azerbaijan Ramil Safarov, the Azeri axe murder convicted of killing an Armenian army lieutenant in Hungary, may have been financial gain. In 2012, Hungary earned global scorn for transferring the murderer to a country where he was welcomed as a hero. Here in Ottawa, Canada, the […]
On June 21, 2017, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that the Hungarian nation was able to survive in the 1920s and 1930s due to “some exceptional statesmen like Regent Miklós Horthy.” Never before did the Hungarian Prime Minister identify pro-Hitler Horthy, who served as Hungarian head of state from 1920 to 1944, as an “exceptional statesman.” The attempt to […]
According to Paul St. Clair[1]’s report dated 2007, about the Migration of Hungarian Roma to Canada (and back), In comparison to about 5,000 Czech Roma, close to 25,000 Hungarian Roma made Refugee Claim in Canada, between 1997 and 2002. In contrast to the Czech, the Hungarian Roma migration had a much more fluid form. This was mainly because there […]
I. I first met Mr. S in the early spring of 1997 at a Hungarian cultural event. The organizer of the event brought him to my attention, as a newly arrived Roma from Hungary, claiming refugee status in Canada. I asked him if he had a lawyer to represent him, and he said with a confidence that he was planning […]
One of the hallmarks of the Orbán regime is the systemic and blatant nature of corruption involving key Fidesz political leaders, their oligarchs and the party’s media empire. In this context, one can only imagine how frustrating and infuriating it must be for someone like Zsolt Császy, the victim of a show trial, to have to serve a prison sentence […]
Lest our readers begin to think that I only get involved in issues pertaining to Hungary and East/Central Europe, I wanted to share some observations from a highly charged and exceptionally well attended public forum in Ottawa’s Vanier ward on the proposed move of a Salvation Army emergency shelter and social service centre to this area of the city. The […]
