Civizational clash: nationalism and stereotypes

The trip to Eger on Sunday was an educational one even before we arrived, in that I learned how the main roads work. Turning into an exit, we encountered highway patrol parked there to check whether drivers had paid the fee to use the highway. Luckily my friends had, because I think it's similar to the hit-or-miss enforcement of the metro. Speaking of which, the subway is slightly less enigmatic now, and I bet Hungarians have figured out how to cheat the system because it's not difficult over time to get a sense of where guards will be checking tickets - the exception being the one time I came across a guard who actually hopped onto a train to see our tickets.

Anyway, the highway procedure should not be so surprising, I'm just used to U.S. tax policy. What my friends did on the other hand was buy a day pass at a gas station. You can buy passes for any range of times, and by SMS as well, which is funny because you could theoretically have to keep your confirmation SMS for a year to show as proof.

The remaining enlightenment that I derived from Eger was similarly not direct nor immediate, creeping up on me days later.

I was glad to have known about Egri Csillagok, the nationally required reading about Eger's uniquely successful defense against the expanding Ottomans in 1552. It means Stars of Eger, but is for some reason translated as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, and the writer Geza Gardonyi's grave can be found at the castle in Eger. I didn't learn much from the Hungarian tour guide, depending instead on what my friends could translate. While deciding on the obligatory wine (the city is known for it), one friend insisted I buy Egri Bikaver, i.e., Bull's Blood of Eger. The legend goes that in the days preparing for the Ottoman attack, Hungarians drank this red wine, which dripped down their lips and convinced the Ottomans that they had drank bull's blood, and that was why they were strong enough to defeat them.

The story, along with the history as a larger context, joins other sources of national pride (the unsuccessful 1848 rebellion against the Habsburgs, the disastrous 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, the smooth 1989 shedding of communism, etc.). These, in turn, have their part in the even larger context of the overall idea of any country's national legacies, which I have started to wonder about lately. Brainwashing is just the extreme form of a universal practice in national education systems of conditioning citizens to understand and support their countries. At least at a basic level this means emphasizing achievements over mistakes as proof of greatness. Doesn't a country founded on liberty sound better than one founded on tax evasion?

It's true that the events of 1989 and 1956 and 1848 durably shape the Hungary we see today. And if anyone is to inherit these legacies, mustn't it be the Hungarians? But my problem, or at least what I question, is whether and how much anyone has a right to claim these legacies. Yesterday I read this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure."

The Spain of today is not the Spain of the conquistadors. That is to say Prime Minister Zapatero's government had no say in the country's colonization decisions in the 16th century. What fidelity, then, do Latin Americans owe Spain? What accountability, then, does Spain owe them? I thought of this in more recent history when hearing that a French court blamed the country for deporting Jews during the Holocaust, and (in an Eastern/Central European class) that Polish people in the town of Jedwabne killed the Jewish half of their neighbors. In class my professor distinguished between guilt (as Sarkozy should not feel guilty for the choices of de Gaulle) and responsibility (as the Polish should admit historical accuracies).

If we take it for granted that, indeed, Belgium is liable for its colonial past or that Italians rightly take pride in the roots of the Renaissance, I think this implies some credence to Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. It divides the world and much of its history into seven main civilizations, which define conflict along cultural lines. It's not the best way to examine the aforementioned legacies, but in my mind there's a relevantly deterministic outlook. His theory has generally met resistance (including from me), probably because we dislike the idea of simplifying cultures so much that we say Germans behave that way because they're German. In this way it's 'wrong' to stereotype peoples, and yet right to identify them according to histories dating back decades, centuries, or millenniums. I'm still trying to reconcile this.

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Listening to: Dru Hill, "We're Not Making Love No More"
Reading: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Travel literature

Next on my reading list is Hungarian literature, which would happen to be perfect for later today when I visit Eger, a historical city within two hours northeast of Budapest. Somewhere I had heard vaguely of Geza Gardonyi's Egri Csillagok (Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, or technically, Stars of Eger), required reading for all Hungarian students. That's precisely what I wanted to read, the country's equivalent of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird. But I wasn't clearly reminded of it until a few days ago, not enough time to find a copy in English (let alone read it) before the day trip.

The best I could do was stumble upon an online, Hungarian version of the novel and translate it section by section through Google - wait, I've just realized I could have used the URL to translate the entire page instantly. No matter. I couldn't even get past the first of five sections, realizing that it was not enough to read a spotty computer translation, even just to get the gist of the plot. Naturally, plenty of words didn't make it through the translator (average of one per sentence, maybe more), and sometimes those that did were incorrectly translated. But I did learn that what a Hungarian friend told me was true, that English is simpler than Hungarian in that the latter has more precise words for ideas, which is why Hungarian texts are generally longer than their English counterparts.

Guess I'll have to wait to get a hard copy, but Egri Csillagok does seem worth reading. Among other topics, the book, published in 1899, is set in the historical context of the 1552 Siege of Eger, in which the city and its sturdy castle mark the rare achievement of fending off an Ottoman invasion.

On a related note, I just finished The History of Hungary After the Second World War, 1944-1980. That is to say, I reached the last page of the book, skimming or even skipping whole pages at a time. The problem I hadn't realized when checking out the book was that it was published in 1986, and as relatively progressive as Hungary was at the time, this didn't prevent the authors from propagating the party line. I could find no criticism of the Communist party, just applause for its successes, scant retelling of the 1956 Revolution, and even omission of the execution of Imre Nagy, the prime minister arrested during the Soviet crackdown on the revolution and not properly buried until 1989. The Hungarian writers also had some minor translation difficulties and focused far too much on political scheming and statistics, rather than events and implications. The search continues.

Meanwhile, off to Eger!

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Listening to: Supertramp, "Bloody Well Right"
Watching: Muhammad Yunus' speech at Columbia