Timelines of History

[lugan]

2014 Jul 17, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 with 298 people on board was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Officials strongly suspected the Boeing 777 was downed by a missile fired by Ukrainian separatists backed by Moscow. More than half of the dead passengers, 189 people, were Dutch. Twenty-nine were Malaysian, 27 Australian, 12 Indonesian, 9 British, 4 German, 4 Belgian, 3 Filipino, one Canadian, one New Zealand and 4 as yet unidentified. All 15 crew were Malaysian.
(Reuters, 7/18/14)

[lugan]

2011 Dec 6, Facebook started making its Timeline feature available to the approximately two million Facebook users living in New Zealand. The new application takes everything you’ve ever done on Facebook and creates a digital scrapbook that is simultaneously eye-pleasing and addicting.
(http://tinyurl.com/42y7nsq)

[lugan]

2011 Oct 20, Libya’s National Transition Council said that its fighters found and shot dictator Moammar Gadhafi (69) in Sirte, which finally fell to the rebels today after weeks of tough fight-ing. Gadhafi was cornered by insurgents in the town of Sirte, where he had been born and a stronghold of his supporters.
(AP, 10/20/11)

[lugan]

2009 Dec 1, President Barack Obama shared his new US strategy for Afghanistan with President Hamid Karzai, spending an hour discussing troops levels, security, political and economic elements of his revised war plan. Obama planned to send 30,000 more troops to be deployed over the next six months, escalating the 8-year-old war. In his prime-time speech to the nation, Obama laid out a rough timeframe, for when the main US military mission will end. Obama proposed an 18-month timeline for starting to bring troops home.
(AP, 12/1/09)(Reuters, 12/2/09)

[lugan]

Top story of the day;
2009 Feb 9, In Australia police declared incinerated towns crime scenes. PM Rudd spoke of "mass murder" after investigators said arsonists may have set some of the country's worst wildfires in history. The death toll rose to 135.
(AP, 2/9/09)

[lugan]

Top story of the day:
2008 Nov 16, Iraq's Cabinet approved a security pact with the United States that will allow American forces to stay in Iraq for three years after their UN mandate expires at the end of the year. 7 people died and 7 others were wounded in a suicide car bombing at a police checkpoint in Diyala province. A roadside bomb in a Sunni enclave of Baghdad killed three people and wounded 7 at a checkpoint belonging to US-backed fighters. The US military said Iraq's Shiite-dominated government is making good on promises to pay thousands of US-backed Sunni fighters in Baghdad, despite some government unease over the alliance.
(AP, 11/16/08)

[lugan]

Today, Sunday, 11/11/07, the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle posted a report on the Timelines of History web site:

http://www.timelines.ws

in the Chronicle Magazine as part of the ongoing "Bright Ideas" column by reporter Sam Whiting.

[lugan]

All data from the timelines.ws stie is being transferred to a Database format at:
http://www.timelinesdb.com

[hurley cruppers]

History Lesson
from a email received, take it fwiw

> >
> >Have a history teacher explain this----- if they can.
> >
> >Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
> >John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.
> >
> >Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
> >John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.
> >
> >Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
> >Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.
> >
> >Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.
> >Both Presidents were shot in the head.
> >
> >Now it gets really weird.
> >
> >Lincoln 's secretary was named Kennedy.
> >Kennedy's Secretary was named Lincoln.
> >
> >Both were assassinated by Southerners.
> >Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.
> >
> >Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, wa! s born in 1808.
> >Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.
> >
> >John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.
> >Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.
> >
> >Both assassins were known by their three names.
> >Both names are composed of fifteen letters.
> >
> >Now hang on to your seat.
> >
> >Lincoln was shot at the theater named 'Ford.'
> >Kennedy was shot in a car called ' Lincoln' made by 'Ford.'
> >
> >Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran and hid in a =
>warehouse.=20
> >Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran and hid in a=20
> >theater.
> >
> >Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.
> >
> >And here's the kicker...
> >
> >A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland
> >A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe.

[lugan]

The timelines website has been selected by the folks at
Coolsiteoftheday.com as the Cool Site of the Day.
Please log on and cast a favorable vote on the Cool Site logo:
www.timelines.ws

[lugan]

It is often difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. In a humble effort to continue this venerable tradition I would like to submit the following: The regular "Hair Today" column will not appear as my star reporter StarLa is out on assignment studying the grooming practices of American house cats. In lieu of *La’s featured piece I would like to bring you up to date on the back-office affairs here at www.timelines.ws.
Due to the diminishing value of the US dollar, the general uncertainties of the international economic picture and mounting local expenses, it has become necessary to re-organize and restructure all com-pany operations. I have laid off my employer, eliminated all corporate perks and destroyed all corporate credit cards. My human resources dept., plant engineering, and employee deli have all been closed down. I have also outsourced all my data collection operations to the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, American History magazine, The Economist, National Geographic, Archeology magazine and the Organization of American Historians (OAF). To ensure quality control I have decided to retain all copy-selection and editing privileges. I have also decided to out-source all marketing and sales operations to my offshore subsidiary www.timelines.ws/offshore. However, I have decided keep the communications operations fully intact and accessible 24/7/365.25 at [e-mail].
In order to obtain capital for further growth my financial officer has recommended that I consider tap-ping into the private equity markets. I am now rewriting the company business plan to accommodate this change in direction and expect to soon launch a request for $500,000 in equity capital as a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). This amount represents the current approximate value of company operations. Shares in the new LLP will be available in increments of $1000. Should you be interested in a prospectus please contact me via the communications center listed above.
It is a bit lonely here, now that operations have been sheered to the bone, but in honest truth it’s been that way for ten years now. As I see it the current layoffs and cutbacks can always be reversed. The new restructure will allow me devote full time to company operations and long term growth. Needless to say I have provided an exceptional severance package for those I was forced to let go. I also had them all sign legal documentation with quit claims and guarantees not to disclose company secrets or harbor ill will.

Please bear with us through this difficult period.

Algis Ratnikas
Sole Proprietor www.timelines.ws LLP

[lugan]

From the WAVX board #41499

Upanishads, speculative and mystical scriptures of Hinduism, regarded as the wellspring of Hindu religious and speculative thought. The Upanishads, which form the last section of the literature of the Veda, were composed beginning c.900 B.C. Of the 112 extant Upanishads, about 13 date from the Vedic period and the remainder are later, sectarian works. The principal early Upanishads develop answers to questions posed in the Rig-Veda and the Brahmanas regarding the real significance of the Vedic sacrifice and the source and controlling power of the world and the individual. They are best known for their doctrine of brahman, the ultimate and universal reality of pure being and consciousness, and the identity of brahman with the inner essence, or atman, of the human being. This equation is expressed in the famous utterances “That art thou” and “All this is brahman.” The Upanishads are not a systematic exposition of concepts but a heterogeneous compilation of material from different sources. In addition to brahman-atman teachings, they contain information about allegorical interpretation of the sacrifice, death and rebirth processes, and yogic practice and experience. They are the basis for the later philosophical schools of Vedanta

http://www.lotussculpture.com/bronze_sculpture_upanishads.htm

[lugan]

Timelines of History
http://timelines.ws
Newsletter #60
May 1, 2004

"Entry of the Week"
1929 Apr 22, Harold E. Jones, director of research at the Univ. of Cal. Institute of child Welfare reported that children doing poor schoolwork and those most often exhibiting objectionable traits were found to be those who attend motion picture shows frequently.
(SFC, 4/16/04, p.F5)
------------------------------
Special thanks also to Dennis Myers for his ongoing corrections to numerous items in the Timelines.
Special thanks also to Larry, a rock shop owner in Missouri, for his ongoing corrections and supplements to numerous items in the Timelines.
Thanks also to Michael O'Brien of Texas for his suggested corrections.
And a big thankyou to Colonel Michael Kelley of Texas for clarification on the 1862 Confederate win at Fort Pillow.
-------------------------------
New files include: 2004 March, Romans,
Updated files include 300-599, 1300-1399, 1600-1625, 1661-1699, 1700-1724, 1725-1749, 1750-1770, 1780-1789, 1790-1799, 180-1810, 1841-1849, 1850-1854, 1862-1863, 1864-1866, 1867-1870, 1898-1899, 1914-1915, 1918-1919, 1922-1923, 1931, 1969, 1989, 2000 (Jan-Feb), 2003 (Nov)
Countries: Littles, Burma, Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bavaria, Belgium, Colombia, France (1650-1795)(1870-1920), Germany (1821-1916), Gt. Britain (to 1799)(1800-1859), India (thru 1990), Scotland, Slovenia, Switzerland, Uzbekistan, Wales.
Cities: Chicago, NYC (1900-1949)
States: California (1860-1922), New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia
Subjects: Black History, Labor, Nobel Prizes, Technology
--------------------------------
No Hair Today!
My star reporter Starla (aka *la) is off on assignment.

So in lieu of "Hair Today" let me present to you the following short essay:

The Eve Dilemna: Apple, Oranges or Chocolate!

Have you ever wondered how the world might have turned out if Eve had rejected Satan's 1st temptation.
c4000BCE Apples (Malus Sieversii) similar to modern day varieties began to appear around Almaty, Kazakhstan. These ultimately produced the Red Delicious and Golden Delicious in America. The Red Delicious was hybridized into the Fuji and the Empire. The Golden Delicious was hybridized into the Gala, the Jonagold, the Mutsu, Pink Lady and Elstar.
(WSJ, 7/3/03, p.A1)
Do you suppose that had Eve said no, Satan would have just said ok, see you later. Or might he have come back and made a 2nd offer, say: How about this lovely orange?
1744 May 11, In Britain Elizabeth Robinson of Middlesex and 2 other women were tried and convicted at the Old Bailey on charges of stealing 104 imported China oranges from a grocer’s warehouse with the intent to sell them. She was sentenced to transport for a term of 7 years. She was pregnant and gave birth on ship.
(SFEC, 10/27/96, p.T9)
Now had Eve reached this point would her courage continue? Would she take the orange and change the course of history, or would she again just say no and change the course of this essay? Do you suppose that Eve at this point had any inkling of how the whole future of humankind might develop based on her simple decision for lunch? Of course Eve was no Nostrodama and she could not foresee how poor Hypatia would be treated a few millennia later:
415 Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria sent a mob of religious police to stop Hypatia, an eccentric pagan ascetic and scholar. The mob kidnapped her, dragged her to a church, stripped and tortured her with broken shards of pottery. Her body parts were then butchered, put on public display and burnt to a crisp. In 2004 Jonathan Kirsch authored "God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism."
(SSFC, 3/21/04, p.M1)
Let us suppose for the sake of this essay that Eve was gaining strength of character from "just saying no." Satan, being the devil he was, would certainly have upped the ante. Though not as omniscient as god, he would certainly have known about chocolate.
1893 At the Chicago Exposition Milton Hershey was impressed with an exhibition featuring chocolate-making machinery from Germany and commented to his cousin, Frank Snavely, "Caramels are only a fad. Chocolate is a permanent thing." With that, Hershey decided to go into the chocolate business, purchasing the German-made machinery and installing it at his Lancaster Caramel Company in Pennsylvania. With the help of expert chocolate makers, Hershey was soon producing chocolate-covered caramels, called "novelties." In 1900, Hershey sold the Lancaster Caramel Company for $1 million, but retained the chocolate-making machinery. Soon thereafter, he launched the Hershey Chocolate Company and built a town around it, Hershey, Pennsylvania.
(HNQ, 10/31/00)
Poor Eve. No to apples, no to oranges and now confronted with chocolate. What in god's name should she do. If there was only a good woman's magazine to consult. But forsooth that was ages away.
1693 Jun 27, The 1st woman's magazine "The Ladies' Mercury" was published in London.
(SC, 6/27/02)
Of course she might have resorted to consulting the stars, a technique later made popular by the wife of a famous US president.
1988 May 3, The White House acknowledged that first lady Nancy Reagan had used astrological advice to help schedule her husband's activities. The unflattering revelations surfaced in a yet-to-be published memoir by former chief of staff Donald Regan.
(AP, 5/3/98)
Perhaps she might consider at this point to consult with that pain in the rib husband of hers, that ne'er do well Adam. They were after all in this together. Thought I suspect that by this time their initial afterglow had waned a bit and that she was more of a mind in tune with that famous plate-maker, Francesco Urbini.
c1531-1537 Ceramicist Francesco Urbini was later believed to have created a plate that shows a male head made up entirely of phalluses. In 2003 a British museum paid $317,000 for it. The head is framed by a garland carrying the inscription: "Ogni homo me guarda come fosse una testa de cazi" (Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead).
(Reuters, 9/18/03)
Refuse chocolate? Hey, the devil made me do it!
Eve! We shout. Stand firm. Wait for the whole 9 yards. Hell, call for the 50-yard line. Use your cell phone. Call god. Better yet read:
2003 Leonard Shlain authored "Sex, Time & Power: How women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution."
(SSFC, 8/17/03, p.M1)
Alas poor Eve, one bite of a lousy apple and she was banished.
"Cruel and Unusual" I do believe. Definitely a case for the Supreme Court here.
1992 Feb 25, The Supreme Court ruled prison guards who use unnecessary force against inmates may be violating the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment even if they inflict no serious injuries.
(AP, 2/25/02)

Best Regards to all,
Algis Ratnikas
[e-mail]

[lugan]

Posted by: greg s (on the WAVX board)
In reply to: orda who wrote msg# 36535 Date:4/6/2004 1:56:11 PM
Post #of 36595

Both. Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and god of gates and doors who has two faces, one looking inward and one lookng outward:

Janus is the Roman god known as the custodian of the universe. He is the god of beginnings and the guardian of gates and doors. He is lord over the first hour of every day, the first day of the month and January, the first month of the year. Two heads back to back represent Janus, each looking in opposite directions. His double-faced head appears on many Roman coins. Originally, one face was bearded and one was not, most likely representing the sun and the moon. In his right hand he holds a key. He was worshipped at the beginning of planting time, harvest, marriages, births and other important beginnings in a person’s life.

The Romans believed you could ensure good endings if you began an endeavor with prayers to Janus. His principle temple in the Forum had doors facing east and west to mark the beginning and end of the day. Between the doors stood his statue gazing in opposite directions. In every home, the morning prayer was addressed to him and in many domestic undertakings, his help was sought.

Janus also represents the transition between primitive life and civilization, between rural and urban existence. He also maintains the balance between peace and war and youth and old age. Janus was considered to be a great king during the Golden Age and brought the people peace and great wealth. He introduced money, cultivation of the fields and the law. He was considered the protector of Rome.

When Romulus and his associates kidnapped the Sabine Virgins, the Sabines sought revenge. The daughter of one of the guards on Capitolian Hill, one of the Seven Hills of Rome, betrayed her country and guided the enemy into the city. The Sabines attempted to climb the hill but Janus made a hot spring erupt from the ground and the would-be attackers fled. After this, the gates of his temple were always left open in times of war so the god could intervene as necessary. In times of peace, the gates were closed.

http://www.meridiangraphics.net/janus.htm




greg.

[thepennyking]

Kossuth and the Hungarian Liberation Fight of 1848


Hungary, having been ruled by the Habsburgs since the 16th century, was often subjugated and treated much like a colony. (There had beeen exceptions..) In an attempt to regain its freedom as a self-governing country, in 1848, encouraged perhaps by the revolts in Paris, Milano, Vienna, Hungarian lawmakers and broad sections of the populace asked Ferdinand V (Habsburg monarch) to grant specific freedoms for their country. At first acceeded, later rejected, the country rebelled against absolutism, as the ruling Habsburg monarchy sought to deprive it of democratic institutions and in effect annex the country into the Austrian empire.

Hungarians demanded instead preservation of their institutions, freedom of expression and the levelling of classes: rescind the nobility's tax exemption and- in effect- create a universal citizenship by abolishing serfdom. The throne had in the interim passed to a very young Franz Joseph, reputedly strongly influenced by his mother Sophie.When these demands were refused. the country took to arms. When Austria refused to accede, Hungary declared itself a republic and elected Lajos Kossuth (pronounced Lawyosh Koshoot) governor.


"Battle flag from the Hungarian Liberation Fight of 1848.With bear-claws of the Hungarian tricolor (red-white-green) around the perimeter, it has the 'Kossuth Coat of Arms' in the center with clusters.
Inscription : 85th Honvéd Battalion.
The day of June 1 1949
Long live the freedom of the independent Hungarian Fatherland.

The ensuing war, which has become known as The Hungarian Liberation Fight of 1848, seemed to be successful until the young Emperor asked for (and received) massive help from Russia,where the Tsar feared the spread of democracy and a Polish revolt. In mid-1849, overwhelmed, the Hungarian armies were crushed and repression followed. Kossuth went into exile in Turkey with a number of his followers,but the Western world took notice of the heroic struggle and Kossuth, his cause, became the symbol of freedom especially in Britain and the USA.

While Austria and Russia demanded his extradition, the Sultan was persuaded by the Western powers to refuse. Kossuth did not give up, but planned to force Austria to respect Hungarian independence. He travelled in the West and tried to exert pressure via other countries, e.g. France.

Though neither the 1848 revolt, nor the planned Western alliances brought success, the cause eventually prevailed:
In 1867 - after negotiations and compromises - many of the 1848-49 objectives were realized, as the Kingdom of Hungary, became a partner in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Kossuth died in Italy. His remains were later repatriated in an impressive mausoleum in Budapest (1905).


The Hungarian National Museum, the people join in ...


"Kossuth Window" (stained glass) in staircase of "Gresham Building" (a.k.a. Gresham Palace) in Budapest. Erected cca 1910 by a British insurance company for its offices.

Converted into the "Four Seasons" luxury class hotel, opening in 1902. Location: "Roosevelt tér"

[thepennyking]

LAJOS KOSSUTH 1802-1894



Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian political reformer and leader of the 1848-1849 revolution for Hungarian independence, was one of the greatest statesmen and orators of the mid-19th century. He was a prominent figure, well known in the United States and Europe for his leadership of the democratic forces who sought Hungarian independence from Austrian domination. During his triumphal tour of the United States in 1851-1852, American journalist Horace Greeley said of Kossuth: "Among the orators, patriots, statesmen, exiles, he has, living or dead, no superior."

Kossuth was born in Monok, in northeastern Hungary in the year 1802. At that time Hungary was legally a separate kingdom but practically a part of the Austrian Empire ruled by the Habsburg Dynasty. Kossuth was born in modest circumstances, a member of the lower nobility. Young Lajos, following his father's profession, became an attorney and began his career as an agent for a local noblewoman.

In 1832 he was designated a substitute to represent another local noble in the Hungarian Diet (national parliament) in Pozsony, then the capital of Hungary, (now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia). Kossuth produced an unofficial record of the Diet’s proceedings, continued as a kind of “samizdat” political journal. His advocacy of political reform resulted in his imprisonment for three years by the government. During his confinement, he taught himself English by studying the Bible and Shakespeare.

In 1847 Kossuth was elected to the Diet as a representative of the county of Pest, which included the twin cities of Buda and Pest. He became the leader of the opposition Reform Party, which was urging an extensive program of political and social reforms. The outbreak of the 1848 revolution in Paris in February gave the Hungarian reform movement new impetus. On March 3, in a powerful speech to the Diet, Kossuth demanded the removal of the dead hand of Habsburg absolutism as the only way to protect the liberties of the Hungarian and other peoples of the Monarchy. The outbreak of a popular uprising in Vienna on March 13 gave the Hungarian reformers new resolve to implement their goals. In another masterful address to the Diet on March 14, Kossuth voiced the popular demands for a new Hungarian government responsible to elected Hungarian representatives, and that liberal political and social reforms, similar to those being introduced in other parts of Europe at the time, be implemented throughout the Habsburg Monarchy.

The road to revolution

On March 15, in response to events taking place in the Diet at Pozsony and elsewhere throughout Europe, Hungarians in the city of Pest staged a massive peaceful uprising demanding radical political reforms. In recognition of the importance of these events, March 15 subsequently became the Hungarian National Day. On that same day in Vienna, Kossuth joined the Hungarian parliamentary delegation to Vienna which presented the demands of the Diet to the Vienna Court. The proposals gave Hungary virtual independence from the Austrian Empire, except for a “personal union” of the Habsburg Emperor, who was also the King of Hungary.

The Hungarian demands were accepted by the panic-stricken Court. Emperor Ferdinand I (King Ferdinand V of Hungary) appointed a Hungarian government responsible to a popularly elected Parliament, led by Count Lajos Batthyány as Prime Minister. When the new ministers took office on March 17, Kossuth was sworn in as minister of finance. Kossuth’s popularity among the Hungarian people was one of the greatest assets of the government.

Initiated by the new government, the last act of the old-style Diet was passing a set of reform laws, known later as the "April laws" or the "1848 legislation," which eliminated the vestiges of feudalism and transformed Hungary into a modern constitutional state. The reform program, however, failed to deal with two critical issues - the pending issues of the relationship of Hungary to Austria and the rights and status of the non-Hungarian ethnic population in Hungary. The plan was to resolve these two issues later through further negotiations, but the failure to resolve the first intensified the confrontation with Austrian authorities, and failure to resolve the second led to national discontent among non-Hungarians and resulted in a serious weakening of the government.

In July Kossuth played a major role in the final break with Austria. He convinced the Diet to link the sending of 20,000 Hungarian troops to the imperial territories in Italy under Austrian command with political demands for Hungary. Vienna found this demand unacceptable. On that same occasion, Kossuth urged the Diet to mobilize a national military force of 200,000 to defend Hungary against the threatening of Croatian and Serbian military units of the Habsburg Army.

Earlier King Ferdinand had appointed Baron Joseph Jellacic the Ban (governor) of Croatia, an autonomous kingdom under the Hungarian crown. Count Batthyány's government attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate with Jellacic, while the Vienna government incited the Croats against Hungary. On June 5, the Croatian-Slavonian legislative assembly rejected the authority of Batthyány's Hungarian government. In September, with the blessing of the Vienna government, Jellacic's army invaded Hungary in an effort to suppress the Hungarian “rebellion”, i.e. the independence of Hungary. Batthyány's government resigned and the new Parliament (elected in the summer) appointed Kossuth President of the newly formed Committee of National Defense and gave him almost full powers.

A leader is born

Kossuth's personal magnetism and courage, his unparalleled oratorical skills, his organizational talent, and his genius for leadership enabled him to mobilize the Hungarian nation against these overwhelming odds. No one but Kossuth could have given the Hungarians the heart to face threat before them. Kossuth established the new Hungarian military force, called “Honvéd” (Home Defence) which was aided by contingents of Slovaks and Ruthenians, as well as by volunteers from abroad, who came to the aid of Hungary from Vienna, Italy, and Poland.

Jellacic was made commander-in-chief of all imperial forces against Hungary, but the quickly-mobilized Hungarian troops drove him out and forced him back to within sight of Vienna, where a revolution, sympathetic to Hungary, broke out. The forces under Jellacic then joined other imperial troops and suppressed it, taking control of Vienna. By the end of 1848, the imperial government (which had fled to Innsbruck) succeeded in putting down the revolutions throughout the empire, with the exception of Hungary. Ferdinand, who had sanctioned the Hungarian Diet's April Laws and whose coronation oath obliged him to recognize the substantial measure of independence Hungary had achieved, was forced to abdicate in favor of his nephew Franz Josef I. The new emperor and his government did not consider themselves bound by the previous promises and agreements with Hungary. On March 4,1849, the Imperial Court issued a new constitution which annulled the Diet's April Laws of 1848 and abolished Hungary's independence.

In January an imperial force succeeded in occupying Buda and Pest and won a further victory at Kápolna in February. The Hungarian troops under the leadership of General Arthur Görgei, however, rallied and, in a brilliant campaign, won a series of spectacular victories against the Habsburg Army by April of 1849 they had again forced the imperial troops to evacuate nearly all of Hungary.

Elected Governor

On April 14, the Hungarian Parliament meeting in Debrecen, inspired by Kossuth, proclaimed the complete independence of Hungary from Austria and deposed the Habsburg dynasty. The Hungarian Declaration of Independence was inspired and influenced by the American document. At this same time the Parliament elected Kossuth "governor-president". Hungary was the last bastion of the democratic revolutions of 1848 to remain standing against the forces of absolutism, and Hungarian developments were carefully followed with considerable sympathy by the governments and people of Europe and the United States.

The inability of the imperial government to reestablish its authority over Hungary was of great concern to the autocratic government of Russia. Czar Nicholas I offered to aid Franz Josef in suppressing the Hungarian revolution. The offer was accepted. On June 17-18, a powerful Russian army of more than 200,000 invaded Hungary from the north, while at the same time an Austrian army began to move against Hungary from the west. The imperial government in Vienna continued to stir up discontent among the Croats, Serbs, and Romanians within Hungary. The exhausted Hungarian army of only 152,000 men was no match for this massive gathering of forces, but troops under General Görgei put up a vigorous resistance. The Russian army swept through eastern Hungary and Transylvania and defeated the Polish general Bem, at Segesvár, and the major Hungarian army at the Battle of Temesvár. The situation was hopeless. Kossuth transferred government authority to Görgei who surrendered to the Russian commander at Világos on August 13.

Despite promises of clemency by the Russian commander and subsequent demands by the governments of Great Britain and France the surrender led to savage reprisals, carried out with imperial authorization by the Austrian commander, General Haynau. Former Prime Minister Batthyány was executed, as were thirteen generals and hundreds of other Hungarian military officers. The execution of the generals on October 6 at Arad (now in Romania) later became a Hungarian day of commemoration. Hungary was put under military occupation and subjected to an absolutist rule from Vienna, carried out by a foreign bureaucracy under the Imperial Minister of the Interior.

Life in exile

At the time of the Hungarian surrender, Kossuth with many of his loyal followers and thousands of Hungarian troops and some Polish volunteers fled to the Lower Danube, which was then a part of the Turkish Empire, to escape Russian and Austrian forces. Kossuth spent two years in exile in Kutahiyah in Asia Minor.

The deposed Head of the Hungarian State, whose inclination to act never abated when it came to a cause concerning his country, elaborated a plan while in exile, which became famous under the name “The Kutahiyan Constitution”. It was a model of a civil state based on comprehensive individual rights, freedom of associaton and local self-governments. The specialty of this model from a constitutional point of view was that Kossuth, about half a century ahead of his time, drew up the idea of an independent body, the “Guard of Constitution” (a precusor of the European Constitutional Courts of today), which would set limits to central power, its legislative and executive branches.

Kossuth realized that the hostile behavior of the different ethnic groups living within the territory of Hungary contributed to the failure of the War of Independence. Therefore he proposed various national groups living on the historic territory of Hungary full collective rights, alongside with equality before the law, and unrestricted use of their mother tongue. In the relations of Hungary and its neighbors he drew up a plan of a Danubian Confederation. That is how, upon Kossuth’s ideas, the notion of a United States of the Danube evolved, to have been cited so often in the course of history.

The governments of Great Britain, the United States, and other West European nations successfully pressured the Turkish Sultan to refuse the Austrian and Russian demands for Kossuth's extradition. The President of the United States invited him for a visit and sent a ship to fetch him to the United States. On September 10, 1851, Kossuth steamed from the Turkish port of Smyrna (now Izmir) aboard the U.S. Navy’s frigate Mississippi.

Glorious visit to the US

After brief stops in France and Britain, he arrived in New York City on December 5, 1851, to great public acclaim. His triumphant six-month tour throughout the country was an unprecedented popular success.

Although Kossuth did not achieve his goal of winning official United States Government support and recognition for continuing his struggle for Hungarian independence, his visit did leave a permanent legacy in America. He gave several hundred speeches in all parts of the United States, including separate addresses to both Houses of Congress.

During his trip Kossuth expressed his view on many occasions that the young Republic as a model for freedom and democracy should end its isolationism, should play an active role in international politics and, in the name of self-determination, should help the oppressed peoples against the dictatorial, autocratic powers. More than half a century later Kossuth’s ideas were adopted by President Wilson and became part of the foundations of foreign policy in the 20th Century. Various representatives of the American people were right in claiming that Kossuth was “a most genuine European representative of freedom and democracy” and, alongside George Washington, a symbol of “universal human values”.

During Kossuth’s tour 250 poems, dozens of books, hundreds of pamphlets, and thousands of editorials were written about him and his democratic ideals. His achievements were praised by English and American political leaders and intellectuals, such as Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Griscom, William Lloyd Garrison, James Russell Lowell, John Edward Massey, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley.

Kossuth left the United States after six months, returning to Europe in July 1852 in an effort to rally support there for the Hungarian cause. He lived for a period of time in London, and eventually settled in Turin in exile, he continued his efforts for Hungarian independence, but he did not return to Hungary.

Following his death in Turin in 1894, his body was returned to Hungary, where he was buried amid nationwide mourning. After his death, Kossuth continued as the popular symbol of the aspirations of the Hungarian people for independence.

[thepennyking]

LAJOS KOSSUTH 1802-1894



Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian political reformer and leader of the 1848-1849 revolution for Hungarian independence, was one of the greatest statesmen and orators of the mid-19th century. He was a prominent figure, well known in the United States and Europe for his leadership of the democratic forces who sought Hungarian independence from Austrian domination. During his triumphal tour of the United States in 1851-1852, American journalist Horace Greeley said of Kossuth: "Among the orators, patriots, statesmen, exiles, he has, living or dead, no superior."

Kossuth was born in Monok, in northeastern Hungary in the year 1802. At that time Hungary was legally a separate kingdom but practically a part of the Austrian Empire ruled by the Habsburg Dynasty. Kossuth was born in modest circumstances, a member of the lower nobility. Young Lajos, following his father's profession, became an attorney and began his career as an agent for a local noblewoman.

In 1832 he was designated a substitute to represent another local noble in the Hungarian Diet (national parliament) in Pozsony, then the capital of Hungary, (now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia). Kossuth produced an unofficial record of the Diet’s proceedings, continued as a kind of “samizdat” political journal. His advocacy of political reform resulted in his imprisonment for three years by the government. During his confinement, he taught himself English by studying the Bible and Shakespeare.

In 1847 Kossuth was elected to the Diet as a representative of the county of Pest, which included the twin cities of Buda and Pest. He became the leader of the opposition Reform Party, which was urging an extensive program of political and social reforms. The outbreak of the 1848 revolution in Paris in February gave the Hungarian reform movement new impetus. On March 3, in a powerful speech to the Diet, Kossuth demanded the removal of the dead hand of Habsburg absolutism as the only way to protect the liberties of the Hungarian and other peoples of the Monarchy. The outbreak of a popular uprising in Vienna on March 13 gave the Hungarian reformers new resolve to implement their goals. In another masterful address to the Diet on March 14, Kossuth voiced the popular demands for a new Hungarian government responsible to elected Hungarian representatives, and that liberal political and social reforms, similar to those being introduced in other parts of Europe at the time, be implemented throughout the Habsburg Monarchy.

The road to revolution

On March 15, in response to events taking place in the Diet at Pozsony and elsewhere throughout Europe, Hungarians in the city of Pest staged a massive peaceful uprising demanding radical political reforms. In recognition of the importance of these events, March 15 subsequently became the Hungarian National Day. On that same day in Vienna, Kossuth joined the Hungarian parliamentary delegation to Vienna which presented the demands of the Diet to the Vienna Court. The proposals gave Hungary virtual independence from the Austrian Empire, except for a “personal union” of the Habsburg Emperor, who was also the King of Hungary.

The Hungarian demands were accepted by the panic-stricken Court. Emperor Ferdinand I (King Ferdinand V of Hungary) appointed a Hungarian government responsible to a popularly elected Parliament, led by Count Lajos Batthyány as Prime Minister. When the new ministers took office on March 17, Kossuth was sworn in as minister of finance. Kossuth’s popularity among the Hungarian people was one of the greatest assets of the government.

Initiated by the new government, the last act of the old-style Diet was passing a set of reform laws, known later as the "April laws" or the "1848 legislation," which eliminated the vestiges of feudalism and transformed Hungary into a modern constitutional state. The reform program, however, failed to deal with two critical issues - the pending issues of the relationship of Hungary to Austria and the rights and status of the non-Hungarian ethnic population in Hungary. The plan was to resolve these two issues later through further negotiations, but the failure to resolve the first intensified the confrontation with Austrian authorities, and failure to resolve the second led to national discontent among non-Hungarians and resulted in a serious weakening of the government.

In July Kossuth played a major role in the final break with Austria. He convinced the Diet to link the sending of 20,000 Hungarian troops to the imperial territories in Italy under Austrian command with political demands for Hungary. Vienna found this demand unacceptable. On that same occasion, Kossuth urged the Diet to mobilize a national military force of 200,000 to defend Hungary against the threatening of Croatian and Serbian military units of the Habsburg Army.

Earlier King Ferdinand had appointed Baron Joseph Jellacic the Ban (governor) of Croatia, an autonomous kingdom under the Hungarian crown. Count Batthyány's government attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate with Jellacic, while the Vienna government incited the Croats against Hungary. On June 5, the Croatian-Slavonian legislative assembly rejected the authority of Batthyány's Hungarian government. In September, with the blessing of the Vienna government, Jellacic's army invaded Hungary in an effort to suppress the Hungarian “rebellion”, i.e. the independence of Hungary. Batthyány's government resigned and the new Parliament (elected in the summer) appointed Kossuth President of the newly formed Committee of National Defense and gave him almost full powers.

A leader is born

Kossuth's personal magnetism and courage, his unparalleled oratorical skills, his organizational talent, and his genius for leadership enabled him to mobilize the Hungarian nation against these overwhelming odds. No one but Kossuth could have given the Hungarians the heart to face threat before them. Kossuth established the new Hungarian military force, called “Honvéd” (Home Defence) which was aided by contingents of Slovaks and Ruthenians, as well as by volunteers from abroad, who came to the aid of Hungary from Vienna, Italy, and Poland.

Jellacic was made commander-in-chief of all imperial forces against Hungary, but the quickly-mobilized Hungarian troops drove him out and forced him back to within sight of Vienna, where a revolution, sympathetic to Hungary, broke out. The forces under Jellacic then joined other imperial troops and suppressed it, taking control of Vienna. By the end of 1848, the imperial government (which had fled to Innsbruck) succeeded in putting down the revolutions throughout the empire, with the exception of Hungary. Ferdinand, who had sanctioned the Hungarian Diet's April Laws and whose coronation oath obliged him to recognize the substantial measure of independence Hungary had achieved, was forced to abdicate in favor of his nephew Franz Josef I. The new emperor and his government did not consider themselves bound by the previous promises and agreements with Hungary. On March 4,1849, the Imperial Court issued a new constitution which annulled the Diet's April Laws of 1848 and abolished Hungary's independence.

In January an imperial force succeeded in occupying Buda and Pest and won a further victory at Kápolna in February. The Hungarian troops under the leadership of General Arthur Görgei, however, rallied and, in a brilliant campaign, won a series of spectacular victories against the Habsburg Army by April of 1849 they had again forced the imperial troops to evacuate nearly all of Hungary.

Elected Governor

On April 14, the Hungarian Parliament meeting in Debrecen, inspired by Kossuth, proclaimed the complete independence of Hungary from Austria and deposed the Habsburg dynasty. The Hungarian Declaration of Independence was inspired and influenced by the American document. At this same time the Parliament elected Kossuth "governor-president". Hungary was the last bastion of the democratic revolutions of 1848 to remain standing against the forces of absolutism, and Hungarian developments were carefully followed with considerable sympathy by the governments and people of Europe and the United States.

The inability of the imperial government to reestablish its authority over Hungary was of great concern to the autocratic government of Russia. Czar Nicholas I offered to aid Franz Josef in suppressing the Hungarian revolution. The offer was accepted. On June 17-18, a powerful Russian army of more than 200,000 invaded Hungary from the north, while at the same time an Austrian army began to move against Hungary from the west. The imperial government in Vienna continued to stir up discontent among the Croats, Serbs, and Romanians within Hungary. The exhausted Hungarian army of only 152,000 men was no match for this massive gathering of forces, but troops under General Görgei put up a vigorous resistance. The Russian army swept through eastern Hungary and Transylvania and defeated the Polish general Bem, at Segesvár, and the major Hungarian army at the Battle of Temesvár. The situation was hopeless. Kossuth transferred government authority to Görgei who surrendered to the Russian commander at Világos on August 13.

Despite promises of clemency by the Russian commander and subsequent demands by the governments of Great Britain and France the surrender led to savage reprisals, carried out with imperial authorization by the Austrian commander, General Haynau. Former Prime Minister Batthyány was executed, as were thirteen generals and hundreds of other Hungarian military officers. The execution of the generals on October 6 at Arad (now in Romania) later became a Hungarian day of commemoration. Hungary was put under military occupation and subjected to an absolutist rule from Vienna, carried out by a foreign bureaucracy under the Imperial Minister of the Interior.

Life in exile

At the time of the Hungarian surrender, Kossuth with many of his loyal followers and thousands of Hungarian troops and some Polish volunteers fled to the Lower Danube, which was then a part of the Turkish Empire, to escape Russian and Austrian forces. Kossuth spent two years in exile in Kutahiyah in Asia Minor.

The deposed Head of the Hungarian State, whose inclination to act never abated when it came to a cause concerning his country, elaborated a plan while in exile, which became famous under the name “The Kutahiyan Constitution”. It was a model of a civil state based on comprehensive individual rights, freedom of associaton and local self-governments. The specialty of this model from a constitutional point of view was that Kossuth, about half a century ahead of his time, drew up the idea of an independent body, the “Guard of Constitution” (a precusor of the European Constitutional Courts of today), which would set limits to central power, its legislative and executive branches.

Kossuth realized that the hostile behavior of the different ethnic groups living within the territory of Hungary contributed to the failure of the War of Independence. Therefore he proposed various national groups living on the historic territory of Hungary full collective rights, alongside with equality before the law, and unrestricted use of their mother tongue. In the relations of Hungary and its neighbors he drew up a plan of a Danubian Confederation. That is how, upon Kossuth’s ideas, the notion of a United States of the Danube evolved, to have been cited so often in the course of history.

The governments of Great Britain, the United States, and other West European nations successfully pressured the Turkish Sultan to refuse the Austrian and Russian demands for Kossuth's extradition. The President of the United States invited him for a visit and sent a ship to fetch him to the United States. On September 10, 1851, Kossuth steamed from the Turkish port of Smyrna (now Izmir) aboard the U.S. Navy’s frigate Mississippi.

Glorious visit to the US

After brief stops in France and Britain, he arrived in New York City on December 5, 1851, to great public acclaim. His triumphant six-month tour throughout the country was an unprecedented popular success.

Although Kossuth did not achieve his goal of winning official United States Government support and recognition for continuing his struggle for Hungarian independence, his visit did leave a permanent legacy in America. He gave several hundred speeches in all parts of the United States, including separate addresses to both Houses of Congress.

During his trip Kossuth expressed his view on many occasions that the young Republic as a model for freedom and democracy should end its isolationism, should play an active role in international politics and, in the name of self-determination, should help the oppressed peoples against the dictatorial, autocratic powers. More than half a century later Kossuth’s ideas were adopted by President Wilson and became part of the foundations of foreign policy in the 20th Century. Various representatives of the American people were right in claiming that Kossuth was “a most genuine European representative of freedom and democracy” and, alongside George Washington, a symbol of “universal human values”.

During Kossuth’s tour 250 poems, dozens of books, hundreds of pamphlets, and thousands of editorials were written about him and his democratic ideals. His achievements were praised by English and American political leaders and intellectuals, such as Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Griscom, William Lloyd Garrison, James Russell Lowell, John Edward Massey, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley.

Kossuth left the United States after six months, returning to Europe in July 1852 in an effort to rally support there for the Hungarian cause. He lived for a period of time in London, and eventually settled in Turin in exile, he continued his efforts for Hungarian independence, but he did not return to Hungary.

Following his death in Turin in 1894, his body was returned to Hungary, where he was buried amid nationwide mourning. After his death, Kossuth continued as the popular symbol of the aspirations of the Hungarian people for independence.

[thepennyking]

America's Global Role
Why the Fight for a Worldwide Open Society Begins at Home
George Soros

The American Prospect

May 27, 2003

May 27, 2003—At the invitation of then–Dean Paul Wolfowitz, I delivered a commencement address at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. I spoke about my vision for a global open society and Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense, seemed to be on the same wavelength. We had both participated in a small group called The Action Council for the Balkans, which was agitating for a more muscular policy against Slobodan Milosevic. We advocated military intervention in Bosnia much sooner than it happened. I remember a lively exchange with Colin Powell when I questioned the Powell doctrine of "we do deserts but we don't do mountains." I was very supportive of Madeleine Albright's activism on Kosovo, where I was in favor of a coalition of the willing: NATO intervention without United Nations authorization.

On March 7, 2003, on the eve of war with Iraq, I gave another speech at the same graduate school. This article is adapted from that speech. I was then and continue to be in favor of the removal from power of Saddam Hussein, who was, because of his chemical and biological weapons, an even more dangerous despot than Milosevic. I would like to see regime change in many other places. I am particularly concerned about Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's regime is going from bad to worse. I also see Muammar Quaddafi as a dangerous troublemaker in Africa. I support a project on Burma, or Myanmar as it is now called, which backs Aung San Suu Kyi as the democratically elected leader. I have foundations in central Asia, and I would like to see regime change in countries such as Turkmenistan. And, of course, I hoped for an easy victory in Iraq, if we went to war at all.

Yet I am profoundly opposed to the Bush administration's policies, not only in Iraq but altogether. My opposition is much more profound than it was in the case of the Clinton administration. I believe the Bush administration is leading the United States and the world in the wrong direction. In the past, my philanthropy focused on defeating communism and helping with the transition from closed societies to open societies in the former Soviet empire. Now I would go so far as to say that the fight for a global open society has to be fought in the United States. In short, America ought to play a very different role in the world than it is playing today.

Because open society is an abstract idea, I shall proceed from the abstract and general to the concrete and particular. The concept of "open society" was developed by philosopher Karl R. Popper, whose book Open Society and Its Enemies argued that totalitarian ideologies—such as communism and fascism—posed a threat to an open society because they claimed to have found the final solution. The ultimate truth is beyond human reach. Those who say they are in possession of it are making a false claim, and they can enforce it only by coercion and repression. So Popper derived the principles of freedom and democracy—the same principles that President Bush championed in his February speech on Iraq—from the recognition that we may be wrong.

That brings us to the crux of the matter. Bush makes absolutely no allowance for the possibility that we may be wrong, and he has no tolerance for dissenting opinion. If you are not with us you are against us, he proclaims. Donald Rumsfeld berates our European allies who disagree with him on Iraq in no uncertain terms, and he has a visceral aversion to international cooperation, be it with NATO or UN peacekeepers in Afghanistan. And [Attorney General] John Ashcroft accuses those who opposed the USA Patriot Act of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. These are the views of extremists, not adherents to an open society. Perhaps because of my background, these views push the wrong buttons in me. And I am amazed and disappointed that the general public does not have a similar allergic reaction. Of course, that has a lot to do with September 11.

But the trouble goes much deeper. It is not merely that the Bush administration's policies may be wrong, it is that they are wrong, and I would go even further: They are bound to be wrong because they are based on a false ideology. A dominant faction within the Bush administration believes than international relations are relations of power. Because we are unquestionably the most powerful, they claim, we have earned the right to impose our will on the rest of the world.

This position is enshrined in the Bush doctrine that was first enunciated in the president's speech at West Point in June 2002 and then incorporated in the National Security Strategy last September.

The Bush doctrine is built on two pillars: First, the United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy, and second, the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action. Taken together, these two pillars support two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush doctrine. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated so starkly; it is buried in Orwellian doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because there is a contradiction between the Bush administration's concepts of freedom and democracy and the principles of open society.

In an open society, people can decide for themselves what they mean by freedom and democracy. But the Bush administration claims that we have discovered the ultimate truth. The very first sentence of our latest National Security Strategy reads as follows:

"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."

This statement is false on two counts. First, there is no single, sustainable model for national success. And second, our model, which has been successful, is not available to others because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and that position is not attainable by others.

According to the ideologues of the far right, who currently dominate the Bush administration, the success of the American model has been brought about by a combination of market fundamentalism in economic matters and the pursuit of military supremacy in international relations. These two objectives fit neatly together into a coherent ideology—an ideology that is internally consistent but does not jibe with reality or with the principles of open society. It is a kind of crude social Darwinism in which the survival of the fittest depends on competition, not cooperation. In the economy, the competition is among firms; in international relations, among states. Cooperation does not seem necessary because there is supposed to be an invisible hand at work that will ensure that as long as everybody looks out for his or her own interests, the common interest will look after itself.

This doctrine is false, even with regard to the economy. Financial markets left to their own devices do not tend toward an equilibrium that guarantees the optimum allocation of resources. The theories of efficient markets and rational expectations don't stand up to critical examination. But at least these theories exist, and they are widely accepted.

No similar theory can reasonably be proposed with regard to international relations. There is the well-known doctrine of geopolitical realism according to which states have interests but no principles. But nobody can deny that there are common human interests that transcend national interests.

We live in an increasingly interdependent world and, due to the progress of technology, our power over nature has increased by leaps and bounds. Unless we use that power wisely, we are in danger of damaging or destroying both our environment and our civilization. These are not empty words. Terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction give us a taste of what lies ahead. The need for a better world order predates September 11, but the terrorist threat has rendered international cooperation all the more necessary.

That is not how the Bush administration sees the world. Its perspective is not totally false but it emphasizes one aspect of reality to the exclusion of others. The aspect it stresses is power, and in particular military power. But military power is not the only kind of power; no empire could ever be held together by military power alone. Joseph S. Nye Jr., in his recent book The Paradox of American Power, introduced the concept of "soft power" to bring the point home.

I would go even further. Applying the concept of power to human affairs is altogether questionable. In physics, power or force governs the behavior of objects. That is a misleading analogy for human affairs. People have a will of their own. They may be cowed by military power or other forms of repression, but that is not a sound principle of social organization. Might is not right.

Yet that is the belief that guides the Bush administration. Israel's Ariel Sharon shares the same belief, and look where that has led. The idea that might is right cannot be reconciled with the idea of an open society.

The objective of disarming Saddam Hussein was a valid one, but the way the U.S. government has gone about it is not. That is why there was so much opposition to the war throughout the world and at home. That is why I shall remain opposed to the Bush administration's conduct of foreign policy.

There is an alternative vision of the role that the United States ought to play in the world, and it is based on the concept of open society. The current world order is a distorted form of a global open society. It is distorted because we have global markets but we do not have global political institutions. As a consequence, we are much better at producing private goods than taking care of public goods such as preserving peace, protecting the environment and ensuring economic stability, progress and social justice. This is not by accident.

Globalization—and by that I mean the globalization of financial markets—was a market fundamentalist project, and the United States was its chief architect. We are also the chief beneficiary. We are unquestionably the dominant power in the world today. Our dominance is not only economic and financial but also military and technological. No other country can even come close to us.

This puts us in a position of unique responsibility. Other countries have to respond to U.S. policy, but the United States is in a position to choose the policy to which others have to respond. We have a greater degree of discretion than anybody else in deciding what shape the world should take. Therefore it is not enough for the United States to preserve its supremacy over other states; it must also concern itself with the well-being of the world.

There were great tensions in the global capitalist system prior to September 11, but they have gotten much worse since then. We must work to reduce the tensions and make the system stable and equitable so that we can maintain our dominant position within it.

That is the responsibility that we fail to live up to. Worse, the Bush administration does not even acknowledge that we bear such a responsibility. It attributes our dominant position to the success of the American model in fair competition with other countries. But that is a self-deception.

Contrary to the tenets of market fundamentalism, the global capitalist system does not constitute a level playing field. In economic and financial matters, there is a disparity between the center and the periphery. And in military matters, there is a disparity between the United States and the rest of the world because the European Union, as distinct from its member states, does not seek to be a military power. There are large and growing inequalities in the world, and we lack the mechanism for reducing them. Therefore we need to strengthen our international political institutions to match the globalization of our markets. Only the United States can lead the way because without U.S. participation, nothing much can be done in the way of international cooperation.

A world order based on the sovereignty of states, moreover, cannot take care of our common human interests. The main source of poverty and misery in the world today is bad government—repressive, corrupt regimes and failed states. And yet it is difficult to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries because the principle of sovereignty stands in the way.

One way to overcome the problem is to offer countries positive inducements for becoming open societies. That is the missing ingredient in the current world order. There are penalties for bad behavior, from trade sanctions to military intervention, but not enough incentives and reinforcements for good behavior. A global open society would achieve certain standards by providing assistance to those who are unable to meet them. States that violate the standards could be punished through exclusion. There would be a better balance between rewards and reinforcements on the one hand and penalties on the other. In a global open society, every country would benefit from belonging to it. Developing countries would get better access to markets under the World Trade Organization. Countries at the periphery, such as Brazil, would be guaranteed an adequate supply of credit through the International Monetary Fund as long as they followed sound policies, and there would be a genuine attempt to meet the UN's millennium goals of reducing poverty and improving lives throughout the world.

Providing incentives, of course, would not be sufficient. Not all countries have governments that want or tolerate an open society. A rogue regime such as Saddam Hussein's was a threat to the rest of the world, and a global open society must be able to defend itself. But the use of military force must remain a last resort.

The United States cannot create a global society on its own. No single country can act as the police officer or the benefactor of the entire world. But a global open society cannot be achieved without American leadership. This means that the United States must engage in international cooperation. It must be willing to abide by the rules it seeks to impose on others, to accept its share of the costs and, most importantly, to accept that other participants are bound to have other opinions, and other states other national interests. The United States will always have veto rights due to its weight and importance.

Here is an alternative vision of America's role in the world. It is the vision of America leading the world toward a global open society. Such a vision is badly needed. After September 11, President Bush has managed to convince the country that it is unpatriotic to disagree with him.

The two visions—American supremacy and America as the leader of a global open society—are not that far apart. In fact, they are so close to each other that I am afraid that when the pursuit of American supremacy fails—as it is bound to fail—the vision of a global open society will also be abandoned. That is why it is so important to distinguish between them.

Both visions recognize the dominant position of the United States. Both agree that the United States has to take an active leadership role in international affairs. Both favor preemptive action. But when it comes to the kind of preemptive action that America ought to take, the two visions differ. A global open society requires affirmative action on a global scale while the Bush approach is restricted to punitive action. In the open-society version, crisis prevention cannot start early enough; it is impossible to predict which grievance will develop into bloodshed, and by the time we know, it is too late. That is why the best way to prevent conflicts is to foster open societies.

The Bush administration claims to be fostering democracy by invading Iraq. But democracy cannot be imposed from the outside. I have been actively involved in building open societies in a number of countries through my network of foundations. Speaking from experience, I would never choose Iraq for nation building.

Military occupation is the easy part; what comes afterward is what should give us pause. The internal tensions and the external ones with neighboring countries such as Turkey and Iran will make it very difficult to establish a democratic Iraqi regime. To impose a military regime as Douglas MacArthur did in post–World War II Japan would be to court disaster.

It would have been easier to achieve success in Afghanistan because both the Taliban and al-Qaeda were alien oppressors. But having won a resounding military victory, we failed to follow through with nation building. Secretary Rumsfeld opposed the extension of UN peacekeeping beyond Kabul, and, as a result, law and order have still not been fully established outside the capital. Hamid Karzai needs to be protected by American bodyguards. His government is making slow progress, but the historic opportunity to build on the momentum of liberation was irretrievably lost.

The war with Iraq does not help the building of open societies in other countries, either. In our efforts to gain allies and buy votes in the United Nations, we have become less concerned with internal conditions in those countries than we ought to be. This is true of Russia and Pakistan and all the central Asian republics, not to mention Angola and Cameroon, which are among the most corrupt regimes in Africa. To claim that we are invading Iraq for the sake of establishing democracy is a sham, and the rest of the world sees it as such. The Atlantic Alliance has been severely disrupted, and both NATO and the European Union are in disarray.

Disarming Iraq is a valid objective, but with regard to weapons of mass destruction, Iraq ought not to be the top priority today. North Korea is much more dangerous, and it has to be said that President Bush precipitated the current crisis. North Korea's nuclear program had been more or less contained in 1994 by the Agreed Framework concluded by the Clinton administration. In the meantime, President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea had engaged in a sunshine policy, and it began to bear fruit. There was progress in removing land mines along the border, and a direct train connection was about to be opened. The North Korean leadership seemed to become increasingly aware that it needed economic reforms.

When Kim Dae Jung came to Washington as the first foreign head of state to visit President Bush, he wanted to enlist the president's support for the sunshine policy. But Bush rebuffed him rather brusquely and publicly. Bush disapproved of what he regarded as the appeasement of North Korea, and he was eager to establish a discontinuity with the Clinton administration. He also needed North Korea out in the cold in order to justify the first phase of the National Missile Defense program, the initial linchpin in the Bush strategy of asserting U.S. supremacy. Then came the "axis of evil" speech, and when North Korea surprised the Bush administration by admitting its uranium-enrichment program (strictly speaking not in violation of the Agreed Framework because that covered only plutonium), Bush cut off the supply of fuel oil. North Korea responded with various provocations.

As this magazine goes to press, North Korea could soon start producing a nuclear bomb a month. In mid-April, it backed off its demand for bilateral talks with the United States and agreed to three-way talks with the United States and China. But a serious rift between the United States and South Korea remains. South Koreans now regard the United States as being as much of an aggressor as North Korea, and this renders our position very difficult.

The Bush administration's policies have brought about many unintended, adverse consequences. Indeed, it is difficult to find a similar time span during which political and economic conditions have deteriorated as rapidly as they have in the last couple of years.

But the game is not yet over. The quick victory in Iraq could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. The price of oil could fall, the stock market could celebrate, consumers could overcome their anxieties and resume spending, and business could respond by stepping up capital expenditures. The United States could reduce its dependency on Saudi Arabia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations with North Korea could calm tensions with Pyongyang. That is what the Bush administration is counting on.

The jury is out. But whatever the outcome in Iraq, I predict that the Bush approach is bound to fail eventually because it is based on false premises. I base my prediction on my theory of reflexivity and my study of boom-bust processes, or bubbles, in the financial markets.

Bubbles do not grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. In this case, the dominant position of the United States is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception. For a while, reality can reinforce the misconception, but eventually it is bound to become unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception seems irresistible but, unless it is corrected earlier, a dramatic reversal becomes inevitable. The later it comes the more devastating the consequences. There seems to be an inexorable quality about the course of events, but, of course, a boom-bust process can be aborted at any stage. Most stock-market booms are aborted long before the extremes of the recent bull market are reached. The sooner it happens, the better. That is how I feel about the Bush doctrine.

I firmly believe that President Bush is leading the United States and the world in the wrong direction and I consider it nothing short of tragic that the terrorist threat has induced the country to line up behind him so uncritically. The Bush administration came into office with an unsound and eventually unsustainable ideology. Prior to September 11, it could not make much headway in implementing its ideology because it lacked a clear mandate and a clearly defined enemy. September 11 changed all that. The terrorist attack removed both constraints.

Terrorism is the ideal enemy because it is invisible and therefore never disappears. Having an enemy that poses a genuine and widely recognized threat can be very effective in holding the nation together. That is particularly useful when the prevailing ideology is based on the unabashed pursuit of self-interest. By declaring war on terrorism, President Bush gained the mandate he had previously lacked to pursue his goals. The Bush administration is deliberately fostering fear because it helps to keep the nation lined up behind the president. We have come a long way from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But the war on terrorism—which is supposed to include the war on Iraq—cannot be accepted as the guiding principle of our foreign policy. What will happen to the world if the most powerful country on earth—the one that sets the agenda—is solely preoccupied with self-preservation? America must play a more constructive role if humanity is to make any progress.

Acting as the leader of a global open society will not protect the United States from terrorist attacks. But by playing a constructive role, we can regain the respect and support of the world, and this will make the task of fighting terrorism easier.

The Bush vision of American supremacy is not only unsound and unsustainable, it is also in contradiction with American values. We are an open society. The principles of open society are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. And the institutions of our democracy are protected by our Constitution. The fact that we have a bunch of far-right ideologues in our executive branch does not turn us into a totalitarian dictatorship. There are checks and balances, and the president must obtain the support of the people. I put my faith in the people. But in the end, open society will not survive unless those who live in it believe in it.

George Soros is the founder and chairman of the Open Society Institute.

http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/articles/americanprospect_20030527

[lugan]

Initially posted by The PennyKing on BLYC board

Karl Polanyi: Some Observations

by Dr A. J. H. Latham, University College of Swansea

Introduction

This paper was originally given to the Global History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. To stimulate discussion on the Twentieth Century list, A. J. H. Latham has agreed to allow it to be the subject of debate on this list.

Karl Polanyi was born in 1886 and died at the age of 77 in 1964. At University he studied law and philosophy, and was called to the bar in Budapest in 1912. He was a cavalry office in the First World War. From 1924 to 1933 he was foreign affairs editor of Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt in Vienna. When the liberal traditions of this paper were threatened in the early 1930's he lost his job. He came to England in 1933 where he lectured for the Worker's Educational Association and the Extra Mural Departments of both Oxford and London Universities, giving classes in rural Kent and Sussex. From 1940 to 1943 he was resident scholar at Bennington College in the United States, and from 1947 to his retirement in 1953 he was Visiting Professor of Economics at Columbia University, New York. From 1953 to 1958 he and Conrad M. Arensberg were directors of a project at Columbia on the economic aspects of institutional growth (Polanyi et al 1957 v; Polanyi 1966 v-vi; Dalton 1971 ii; Polanyi 1977 xvi) The Columbia project had a profound impact on socio-economic thought in the United States, and in particular on economic history, economic anthropology and archaeology, but aroused little attention in Britain.

Yet it was in his time in England during the late 1930s that Polanyi became seriously interested in economic history and undertook the work on English economic history which was to be his major work, The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944) published in Britain by Gollancz as Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1945). His wife says of this period:-

'It is given to the best among men somewhere to let down the roots of a sacred hate in the course of their lives. This happened to Polanyi in England. At later stages, in the United States it merely grew in intensity. His hatred was directed against market society and its effects, which divested man of his human shape.' (Polanyi 1977 xvi)

Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation did not appear until he was already 58. The principal theme was that the world market economy had effectively collapsed in the 1930s. Yet this familiar system was of very recent origin and had emerged fully formed like a butterfly from its chrysalis only as recently as the nineteenth century, in conjunction with industrialisation. Prior to the coming of industrialisation the market played no part in economic life. Even where market places could be seen to be operating, they were peripheral to the main economic organisation and activity of society (Polanyi 1945 41- 50).

His argument is that in modern market economies the needs of the market determine social behaviour, whereas in pre-industrial and primitive economies the needs of society determine economic behaviour. Drawing heavily on Malinowski and Thurnwald, he introduces the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution.

Reciprocity implies that people produced such goods and services for which they were best suited, and shared them with those around them. This was reciprocated by the others. There was an unspoken agreement that all would produce that which they could do best and mutually share and share alike. The motivation to produce and share was not personal profit, but fear of social contempt, ostracism, and loss of social prestige and standing. Presumably examples of this kind of behaviour would be village communities where men made hunting parties, and women grew vegetables. A contemporary observer would comment that examples of this kind of behaviour still exist, as in the traditional home where mother makes the dinner, father mends the car, the children run errands, and the dog barks at strangers. No money changes hands but all contribute according to their abilities to the common welfare, and all share according to their needs. Another example is British pub behaviour, where each buys a round of drinks in turn for the peer group, and failure to buy leads to social contempt, ostracism, and loss of social prestige and standing.

Redistribution is involved where a chief or leader gathers together a harvest or the kill of a hunting expedition into a safe storage place. Having made it safe he then redistributes it to members of his group by holding communal feasts and festivals. This serves both to share the communal wealth fairly, and also to reinforce the social structure, allocation (and indeed seating arrangements !) indicating status and importance. These festivals may also be used to reinforce relationships with neighbouring tribes, and the store may be used to supply the community's warriors if circumstances require (Polanyi 1945 50-56).

Polanyi recognised that market places existed in ancient times, and were present in primitive economies, but he argues their existence away by saying they were not important, and existed within a context of reciprocity. Money too was often present, but it was unimportant, and also operated within the context of reciprocity. These money using daily markets were merely convenient localised exchange places operating within the broad system of reciprocity. There were also market places for long distance trade, such as ports. But these were only for items which could not be obtained within the area, and therefore could not be provided within the local system of reciprocity. These ports of trade were specifically isolated from the prevailing reciprocity area and served to separate it from external influences. So local craft and provision markets were not linked to long distance markets and the ports of trade were controlled by the authorities to ensure the isolation was maintained (Polanyi 1945 64-69: See also Polanyi 1963 30- 45).

If ancient and primitive economies had market places but were not market economies, how does Polanyi define a market economy ? How is it different from a system of reciprocity ? According to Polanyi, a market economy is an economic system controlled by prices, these prices determining how much is produced, and how what is produced is distributed. Social considerations have no part in this system. Money exists, which serves as purchasing power and enables its possessors to acquire goods and services, which are priced in money terms. People are motivated to acquire money with which they can then purchase whatever they want (Polanyi 1945 74). Polanyi believes this monetary based market economy sprang suddenly into existence in the nineteenth century thrusting aside the old systems based on reciprocity and redistribution.

To return to Polanyi's basic point, he argues:-

'The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interests in the possession of material goods; he acts as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end.' (Polanyi 1945 53)


In taking this position he specifically challenges Adam Smith who suggested that the division of labour depended upon the existence of the market, or as he put it, upon man's "propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another" (Polanyi 1945 50). Polanyi says this was amazingly prophetic of Smith, because the market economy had not appeared to much extent in Smith's time. Even where it had appeared it was a subordinate feature of economic life (Polanyi 1945 51).

In 1947 Polanyi was appointed Visiting Professor of Economics at Columbia, where he taught economic history in the Graduate School. In 1948 he was given a grant by Columbia for a research project on economic institutions. When he retired in 1953 at the age of 67 he obtained another grant from the Ford Foundation to continue this work for another two years to 1955 (Polanyi et al 1957 v). This work resulted in Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Polanyi et al, 1957).

The introductory note to Trade and Market is revealing. It argues that most of us are accustomed to think that the hallmark of the economy is the market. But:-

'What is to be done, though, when it appears that some economies have operated on altogether different principles, showing a widespread use of money, and far-flung trading activities, yet no evidence of markets or gain made on buying or selling? It is then that we must re-examine our notions of the economy.' (Polanyi et al 1957 xvii).

The introduction also suggests that there are only a few ways of organising man's livelihood, and that the book provided the tools for examining non-market economies. These tools were to be demonstrated in the book in a series of empirical researches `although the underlying theory transcends them.' (Polanyi et al 1957 xvii-xviii).
Link to the seminar index (full details) or use the quick links below to select a seminar:

The Bishops' Census of 1563: A Re-examination of its Reliability


John Dee and the English Calendar: Science, Religion and Empire


Karl Polanyi: Some Observations (this page)


The Role of the Individual in Educational Reform


Deconstructing History


Forced Labour, Workhouse- Prisons and the Early Modern State: A Case Study


The Pattern of Distribution of the Lords Lieutenant and Custodes Rotulorum


Public and Private Schooling in Australia - Historical and Contemporary Considerations


Jung and Antisemintism


Voluntary Societies and Urban Elites in XIXth Century Italy


Domestic State Violence - Repression from the Croquants to the Commune


The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment


The Place and Space of Illness: Climate and Garden as Metaphors in the Robben Island Medical Institutions


Institution and Ideology: The Scottish Estates and Resistance Theory


The Policing of Politics in Bologna, 1898-1914


Naturalisations in France, 1927-1939: The example of the Alpes de Haute Provence (formerly the Basses-Alpes)


Tory Tergiversation in the House of Lords, 1714-1760


Regional Distinctions in the Consumption of Films and Stars in mid-1930s Britain


Management or Semi- Independence? The government of Scotland from 1707-1832


Some Ambiguities of Late Medieval Religion in England


"In the Presence of Mine Enemies": Face-to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare


'I am no longer human. I am a Titan. A god!' The fascist quest to regenerate time


The Socratics' Sparta and Rousseau's


Feeding Medieval European Cities, 700-1500


Yet despite this apparent commitment to empirical research there was another agenda.

'In the receding rule of the market in the modern world, shapes reminiscent of the economic organisation of earlier times make their appearance. Of course we stand firmly committed to the progress and freedoms which are the promise of modern society. *But a purposeful use of the past may help us to meet our present over concern with economic matters and to achieve a level of human integration, that comprises the economy, without being absorbed in it.'* (Polanyi et al. 1957 xviii). (My emphasis).

So Trade and Market consists of a collection of papers on ancient or primitive economies, including Ancient Greece, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztecs and Mayas, the Berbers, India and Dahomey. These are used to show how these societies operated their economies in accordance with Polanyi's principles.

Polanyi himself writes a chapter on 'The Economy as Instituted Process', which is a restatement of the principles enunciated in Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation. In it he adds a section on the formal and substantive meanings of the term 'economic'. This distinguishes the methodology of economics from that of economic anthropology. He argues that economics as we know it depends on formal principles. Thus a set of self-evident assumptions are made, which become premisses used as the basis for a sequence of logical deductions to a set of irrefutable conclusions. Thus one can take Smith's statement about man's `propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another' and develop it to show how money and markets came into being, and how they led in turn to specialisation of function, and increased productivity. But the method of economic anthropology was substantive and depended upon empirical observation from which principles of economic behaviour were induced from perceived evidence. Societies are first observed and the principles of their economic activity recognised from their actual behaviour. Polanyi's claim is that the empirical observations of the substantivists reveal economic life in archaic and primitive economies to be entirely different from that assumed by the formalists. (Polanyi et al 243-44).

Trade and Market together with the Columbia seminars had an enormous impact on United States economic history and economic anthropology. Names associated with the project were David Landes, Margaret Mead, Marshall Sahlins, Moses Finlay, Walter Neale, Harry Pearson and many others, together with outright disciples like Paul Bohannan and George Dalton. One might say that beneath the surface of an American social scientist of that generation, you will find a Polanyist, just as beneath the surface of a British social scientist of that period you will find a Marxist. Perhaps this is because the McCarthy Era and the Marxist witch-hunt left an intellectual gap which Polanyi conveniently filled because of his broadly socialist perspective. In the same way, and for the same reasons, American children were banned from watching Chaplin, and instead were brought up on Laurel and Hardy. In Britain, where Karl Marx held sway, Karl Polanyi attracted little attention.

Polanyi's last book Dahomey and the Slave Trade (Polanyi 1966) was researched in the British Museum when he was in study leave in London during the winter term 1949-50, and was published after his death (Polanyi et al 1957 x). Based largely on secondary sources, the book amplifies his concept of the port of trade previously dealt with in Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1945 64-69), and his 1963 paper in The Journal of Economic History (Polanyi 1963). These ports of trade were for long distance trade through which things could be obtained which were not available within the local reciprocity system. They were exchange places strictly administered and controlled by the local authorities who ensured that they were isolated from the domestic reciprocity network. Deals were done by the authorities with the outsiders, and they were done at set rates, and not by price. Money did not change hands (Polanyi 1966 xxiv, 99).

Money was another issue. Although Polanyi had always maintained that there was no market activity in primitive and archaic economies of which this West African state was an example, he was confronted by an economy in which there were numerous market places, and widespread use of money. This use of money would seem to contradict his views on reciprocity. Money is not required if exchange is based on unspoken social obligation, but if it is required and widely used, surely reciprocal obligations do not apply ? To get over this hurdle, Polanyi argues that the money was not being used for exchange, but to reinforce the social structure by allocating and rationing status. To illustrate his point, he quotes the Arab explorer Ibn Battuta who he credits with discovering such status money in the fourteenth century Niger empires, where thin and thick copper wires were used as money.

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'Thin wires, in which wages were paid, bought only firewood and coarse millet, while the thick ones bought anything, not excluding elite goods. Limitations of consumption thus were set up for the poor, while the higher standard of life of the leisure classes was automatically safeguarded. Without unfairness one can here speak of "poor man's money" as an instrument of maintaining upper-class privileges.' (Polanyi 1966 174-75).

But Polanyi's interpretation seems to have been based on a misreading of the text. A scrutiny reveals that it does not mention wages at all, and states that firewood and *meat* were obtainable with thin rods, not firewood and coarse millet. Millet, wheat, butter, and elite goods such as slaves were all bought with the thick wires. Both thin and thick rods could be changed into gold, so they were actually interchangeable, and the tiers of exchange were therefore linked not isolated. They were in fact a general purpose currency (Battuta 1929 336).

Copper rod currencies seem to have held a fascination for Polanyi and his disciples. Rods still operated in the eastern areas of Nigeria until the end of the Second World War. Paul Bohannan, a student of Polanyi's, did research among the Tiv, and produced two papers about this rod monetary system. The first was in The American Anthropologist (Bohannan 1955) and the second in The Journal of Economic History (Bohannan 1959). Using information gathered among the Tiv from the 1930s onwards, Bohannan distinguished three levels of exchange in the Tiv economic system. At the lowest level, everyday consumer goods such as chickens, goats, sheep, baskets, calabashes, pots, chairs, beds, grindstones and tools were exchanges for each other. Completely separated from this level of exchange was the middle level in which status conferring items like guns, trade cloth, slaves, horses, cattle, magic, medicine, ritual offices and copper rods were exchanged. Above this, and again completely separate for it, was the highest level where rights over women were exchanged. A wife could only be obtained in exchange for a girl of one's one lineage. Only in the most exceptional circumstances was it possible to obtain goods of a higher level of exchange for goods of a lower level. Because copper rods were valuable and not divisible, they could not be used for petty transactions of the lowest level. Buying a yam with a rod would be like buying a cup of coffee with a =A350 note. The indivisibility of the rod kept the levels of exchange separate, and ensured status conferring items were kept out of the hands of the lower orders (Bohannan 1955 60-70; Bohannan 1959 492-99; Bohannan and Bohannan 1968 228-37).

But the Tiv were not the only people to use the copper rod as currency. Directly to the south is the Cross River basin, with its chief town of Calabar. There too the rod currency remained in use until just after the Second World War. Here the use of the rod is well documented from the seventeenth century. The economy was based on the interchange of basic commodities along approximately 150 miles of the Cross River. Yams from the north, palm oil for cooking from the west, and salt and fish from the estuary to the south were distributed through the local network of markets. Vegetables, and things like chickens, goats and slaves, were also distributed through these markets, and so were craft goods like twine, ropes, nets, baskets, and raffia cloth. Itinerant blacksmiths operated at market places and made weapons and tools. Pottery could only be made at specific places where there was suitable clay, but the finished products were sent to the markets. Canoes could only be made at the few places where the trees grew big enough, but they were freely available at the markets, and these major capital goods were essential to the carrying trade of the region. Several different tribes, the Efik, the Ibibio, the Ibo, the Ekoi, the Efut, speaking different languages, participated jointly in this market system. The common currency was the copper rod, which served all the functions of a modern currency. It was a medium of exchange accepted by all, it was a unit of account, it was a standard of deferred payment essential for credit, and it was a store of wealth. Prices fluctuated according to shortages caused by harvest failure or war, and the price of a good increased the further it was carried from its place of origin incorporating the cost of transport. During the nineteenth century the currency suffered from inflation due to an increase in the supply of rods, indicating it was subject to the quantity theory. There were no restrictions on the ownership of rods. Even slaves could aquire them and use them to buy other slaves, and they could buy offices in the secret society which controlled the community. In Calabar the rod was a general purpose currency and the economy was a market economy. This was not an economy based on reciprocity (Latham 1971, 1973, 1986).

Crucial to this view that the rod in Calabar was a general purpose currency is the question of divisibility. Bohannan argued that rods could not be divided into small change, and this prevented them being used for petty transactions. This ensured that the circulation of elite goods was separated from the circulation of everyday goods. Thus rods operated as a privilege rationing system, as possession of rods made it possible to acquire elite goods which conferred and confirmed status. But in Calabar this was not the case. The Rev. Hugh Goldie's dictionary, published in 1874 and based on over twenty years experience of Calabar, states that copper rods, known okuk, were commonly made by the blacksmiths into wires. They were known as obubit okuk, or black rods, obubit being the word for black, the colour the wires were after they had been split by the Ibo blacksmiths (Goldie 1874 255). These wires were freely obtainable by all, and were essentially small change used for everyday purchases. They could also be saved up and exchanged for the big rods. Thus the concept that the isolation of transaction levels was maintained by the indivisibility of the copper rod is not true. Perhaps things were different in Tiv, just a few miles to the north of the Cross River basin and part of the same currency area. But Malherbe's 1931 dictionary of the Tiv language suggests the situation in Tiv was the same as in Calabar. He gives the word akpo`A thin brass wire, a trading commodity' which was distinct from the rod which was called bashi (Malherbe 1931 10, 22). It seems that Bohannan was either mistaken in his analysis, or misled by his informants, who were speaking after the rod had gone out of circulation. Nevertheless the fact that rods were divisible completely wrecks the status rationing hypothesis. There is also ample photographic evidence to prove the existence of the wires.

So Calabar had a market economy, not one based on reciprocity or redistribution. In many ways it was more of a market economy than our own. In Calabar you could buy slaves to use for sacrifices, or as canoe boys, farm hands or servants. But we have banned slaves from our market system. Labour services of course are marketable, but not the actual people who provide the services. Indeed slavery is another major problem for Polanyi's concept of reciprocity. How can slaves fit into a system of reciprocity ? How can a slave enjoy a reciprocal gain from the person who sells or sacrifices him ?

The rod currency was the principle Polanyist example of a status exchange unit operating within a system of reciprocity, and key to their interpretation of primitive and archaic societies. But if it turns out to have been a true general purpose currency operating within a market economy as appears to be the case, then the whole Polanyist interpretation is thrown into question. How many other systems have they misleadingly labelled as reciprocity based ? It must be emphasised that if a currency contains both large units, and small units which can be used as small change for petty transactions, then it is almost certainly a true general purpose currency. If it is a true general purpose currency, then it is operating in a market economy and not a reciprocity system. True general purpose currencies and market economies are synonymous. Money based market economies pervaded primitive and archaic societies, not systems based on reciprocity and redistribution. Harold Schneider, founder of the Society For Economic Anthropology (U.S.) and a leading anti-Polanyist, showed in a famous study that even an East African cattle currency was a general purpose currency, with the small change being calves and goats (Schneider 1970: See also Schneider 1974).

The specialisation of function which the coming of the market and general purpose economies facilitated seems to have marked the onset of the sustained economic development upon which we all now depend. Yet at the same time, in its own way the market is the ultimate form of reciprocity. Thus a salaried academic may sit at his desk writing a scholarly paper in the unspoken knowledge that others elsewhere are producing the food, clothing, shelter and transport that he needs. What is true for the academic applies equally to the judge, the plumber and that apostle of the market, the commodities trader. Presumably the tax system is the ultimate form of redistribution and indeed retribution!

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Returning to Polanyi, it seems clear that his and his disciples views are dangerously misleading, and apparently motivated by a desire to create a world in which the market has no part. In their desire to model a future devoid of market forces, they subconsciously interpret the past as having no market forces. These misleading views have been been widely adopted in the social sciences, particularly in the United States, and have even had a pernicious infiltration into `the new' archaeology. Peter Sawyer, the authority on the Vikings, has said:-

'Polanyi's analysis is not now widely accepted by economic historians or anthropologists, but it has been enthusiastically adopted by some archaeologists who think it provides a basis for reconstructing social, economic and even political phenomena in periods for which only material evidence survives. There has even been an attempt to interpret the development of early medieval Europe in this way. The resulting review of the archaeological evidence is a useful progress report but the classification of the towns, markets and fairs of post-Roman Europe according to anthropological models contributes little or nothing to our understanding of a period for which we have the welcome control of written evidence.' (Sawyer 1986 61).

Patty Jo Watson agrees with Sawyer that the new or processual archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s has a strong anthropological basis. But she points out in the December 1995 edition of The American Anthropologist that this has been succeeded by postmodernism or postprocessualism:-

'Hodder and other postprocessualists are also very concerned about the sociopolitical setting of contemporary archaeology. They urge archaeologists to be aware and self-critical about their biases and preconceptions, lest they unwittingly create a past in the image of their own present, a past that then helps to legitimate contemporary social or political themes.' (Watson 1995 688)

In conclusion it is necessary to return to Polanyi's concept of reciprocity and redistribution. Despite his and his disciples work, it is difficult to accept that primitive or archaic economies operated according to these principles. Market forces and true general purpose monies appear to have been present in societies at primitive levels and from early times, and at the onset of their sustained development. True general purpose currencies and market economies are synonymous. One must agree with Polanyi that the substantive methodology of observation and induction is the way to study primitive and archaic economies. However, when these societies are studied in this manner, the operation of their economic systems tend to confirm the deductions of the formalists, rather than confound them.

Finally, a word of caution. Marxism is today an unfashionable ethic. Are we therefore to see a flourishing of Marx surrogates ? Is this why there is a revival of interest in Polanyi ? Do those who now turn to Polanyi seek in him a new socialist figurehead ? For them there can only be this clear message:- Polanyi is baloney !


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bibliography

Anderson, B. L. and Latham, A. J. H. (1986) The Market in History, London: Croom Helm.

Battuta, I. (1929) Travels in Africa and Asia, 1325- 1354, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bohannan, P. (1955) Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv, American Anthropologist 57 60-70.

Bohannan, P. (1959) The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy, Journal of Economic History 19 491-503

Dalton G. (ed) (1971) Primitive Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, Boston: Beacon Press.

Goldie, H. (1874) Dictionary of the Efik Language, Edinburgh.

Humphreys, S. C. (1978) Anthropology and the Greeks, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Latham, A. J. H. (1971) Currency, Credit and Capitalism on the Cross River in the Pre-Colonial Era, Journal of African History 12 599-605

Latham, A. J. H. (1973) Old Calabar 1600-1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Latham A. J. H. (1986) Palm Produce from Calabar, 1812- 1887, with a Note on the Formation of Palm Oil Prices to 1914, in Liesegang, Pasch and Jones (1986) 265-91

Liesegang, G. Pasch, H. and Jones, A.(eds) (1986) Figuring African Trade, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.

McRobbie, K. (ed) (1994) Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Polanyi K. (1944) The Great Transformation, New York: Rinehart and Co.

Polanyi K. (1945) Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation, London: Gollancz.

Polanyi K. Arensberg C. H. and Pearson, H. W. (eds) (1957) Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.

Polanyi K. (1963) Ports of Trade in Early Societies The Journal of Economic History 23 30-45.

Polanyi K. (1966) Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Polanyi K. (1977) The Livelihood of Man, New York: Academic Press.

Sawyer, P. (1986) Early Fairs and Markets in England and Scandinavia, in Anderson and Latham (1986) 59-77.

Schneider, H. K. (1970) The Wahi Wanyaturu: Economics in an African Society, Chicago: Aldine Atherton.

Schneider, H. K. (1974) Economic Man/, New York: The Free Press)

Watson, P. J. (1995) Archaeology and the Culture Concept, American Anthropologist 97 683-94

(IHUB-BLYC, #59, 2/20/04)

[lugan]

Initially posted by The PennyKing

Karl Polanyi: Some Observations

by Dr A. J. H. Latham, University College of Swansea

Introduction

This paper was originally given to the Global History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. To stimulate discussion on the Twentieth Century list, A. J. H. Latham has agreed to allow it to be the subject of debate on this list.

Karl Polanyi was born in 1886 and died at the age of 77 in 1964. At University he studied law and philosophy, and was called to the bar in Budapest in 1912. He was a cavalry office in the First World War. From 1924 to 1933 he was foreign affairs editor of Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt in Vienna. When the liberal traditions of this paper were threatened in the early 1930's he lost his job. He came to England in 1933 where he lectured for the Worker's Educational Association and the Extra Mural Departments of both Oxford and London Universities, giving classes in rural Kent and Sussex. From 1940 to 1943 he was resident scholar at Bennington College in the United States, and from 1947 to his retirement in 1953 he was Visiting Professor of Economics at Columbia University, New York. From 1953 to 1958 he and Conrad M. Arensberg were directors of a project at Columbia on the economic aspects of institutional growth (Polanyi et al 1957 v; Polanyi 1966 v-vi; Dalton 1971 ii; Polanyi 1977 xvi) The Columbia project had a profound impact on socio-economic thought in the United States, and in particular on economic history, economic anthropology and archaeology, but aroused little attention in Britain.

Yet it was in his time in England during the late 1930s that Polanyi became seriously interested in economic history and undertook the work on English economic history which was to be his major work, The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944) published in Britain by Gollancz as Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1945). His wife says of this period:-

'It is given to the best among men somewhere to let down the roots of a sacred hate in the course of their lives. This happened to Polanyi in England. At later stages, in the United States it merely grew in intensity. His hatred was directed against market society and its effects, which divested man of his human shape.' (Polanyi 1977 xvi)

Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation did not appear until he was already 58. The principal theme was that the world market economy had effectively collapsed in the 1930s. Yet this familiar system was of very recent origin and had emerged fully formed like a butterfly from its chrysalis only as recently as the nineteenth century, in conjunction with industrialisation. Prior to the coming of industrialisation the market played no part in economic life. Even where market places could be seen to be operating, they were peripheral to the main economic organisation and activity of society (Polanyi 1945 41- 50).

His argument is that in modern market economies the needs of the market determine social behaviour, whereas in pre-industrial and primitive economies the needs of society determine economic behaviour. Drawing heavily on Malinowski and Thurnwald, he introduces the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution.

Reciprocity implies that people produced such goods and services for which they were best suited, and shared them with those around them. This was reciprocated by the others. There was an unspoken agreement that all would produce that which they could do best and mutually share and share alike. The motivation to produce and share was not personal profit, but fear of social contempt, ostracism, and loss of social prestige and standing. Presumably examples of this kind of behaviour would be village communities where men made hunting parties, and women grew vegetables. A contemporary observer would comment that examples of this kind of behaviour still exist, as in the traditional home where mother makes the dinner, father mends the car, the children run errands, and the dog barks at strangers. No money changes hands but all contribute according to their abilities to the common welfare, and all share according to their needs. Another example is British pub behaviour, where each buys a round of drinks in turn for the peer group, and failure to buy leads to social contempt, ostracism, and loss of social prestige and standing.

Redistribution is involved where a chief or leader gathers together a harvest or the kill of a hunting expedition into a safe storage place. Having made it safe he then redistributes it to members of his group by holding communal feasts and festivals. This serves both to share the communal wealth fairly, and also to reinforce the social structure, allocation (and indeed seating arrangements !) indicating status and importance. These festivals may also be used to reinforce relationships with neighbouring tribes, and the store may be used to supply the community's warriors if circumstances require (Polanyi 1945 50-56).

Polanyi recognised that market places existed in ancient times, and were present in primitive economies, but he argues their existence away by saying they were not important, and existed within a context of reciprocity. Money too was often present, but it was unimportant, and also operated within the context of reciprocity. These money using daily markets were merely convenient localised exchange places operating within the broad system of reciprocity. There were also market places for long distance trade, such as ports. But these were only for items which could not be obtained within the area, and therefore could not be provided within the local system of reciprocity. These ports of trade were specifically isolated from the prevailing reciprocity area and served to separate it from external influences. So local craft and provision markets were not linked to long distance markets and the ports of trade were controlled by the authorities to ensure the isolation was maintained (Polanyi 1945 64-69: See also Polanyi 1963 30- 45).

If ancient and primitive economies had market places but were not market economies, how does Polanyi define a market economy ? How is it different from a system of reciprocity ? According to Polanyi, a market economy is an economic system controlled by prices, these prices determining how much is produced, and how what is produced is distributed. Social considerations have no part in this system. Money exists, which serves as purchasing power and enables its possessors to acquire goods and services, which are priced in money terms. People are motivated to acquire money with which they can then purchase whatever they want (Polanyi 1945 74). Polanyi believes this monetary based market economy sprang suddenly into existence in the nineteenth century thrusting aside the old systems based on reciprocity and redistribution.

To return to Polanyi's basic point, he argues:-

'The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interests in the possession of material goods; he acts as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end.' (Polanyi 1945 53)


In taking this position he specifically challenges Adam Smith who suggested that the division of labour depended upon the existence of the market, or as he put it, upon man's "propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another" (Polanyi 1945 50). Polanyi says this was amazingly prophetic of Smith, because the market economy had not appeared to much extent in Smith's time. Even where it had appeared it was a subordinate feature of economic life (Polanyi 1945 51).

In 1947 Polanyi was appointed Visiting Professor of Economics at Columbia, where he taught economic history in the Graduate School. In 1948 he was given a grant by Columbia for a research project on economic institutions. When he retired in 1953 at the age of 67 he obtained another grant from the Ford Foundation to continue this work for another two years to 1955 (Polanyi et al 1957 v). This work resulted in Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Polanyi et al, 1957).

The introductory note to Trade and Market is revealing. It argues that most of us are accustomed to think that the hallmark of the economy is the market. But:-

'What is to be done, though, when it appears that some economies have operated on altogether different principles, showing a widespread use of money, and far-flung trading activities, yet no evidence of markets or gain made on buying or selling? It is then that we must re-examine our notions of the economy.' (Polanyi et al 1957 xvii).

The introduction also suggests that there are only a few ways of organising man's livelihood, and that the book provided the tools for examining non-market economies. These tools were to be demonstrated in the book in a series of empirical researches `although the underlying theory transcends them.' (Polanyi et al 1957 xvii-xviii).
Link to the seminar index (full details) or use the quick links below to select a seminar:

The Bishops' Census of 1563: A Re-examination of its Reliability


John Dee and the English Calendar: Science, Religion and Empire


Karl Polanyi: Some Observations (this page)


The Role of the Individual in Educational Reform


Deconstructing History


Forced Labour, Workhouse- Prisons and the Early Modern State: A Case Study


The Pattern of Distribution of the Lords Lieutenant and Custodes Rotulorum


Public and Private Schooling in Australia - Historical and Contemporary Considerations


Jung and Antisemintism


Voluntary Societies and Urban Elites in XIXth Century Italy


Domestic State Violence - Repression from the Croquants to the Commune


The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment


The Place and Space of Illness: Climate and Garden as Metaphors in the Robben Island Medical Institutions


Institution and Ideology: The Scottish Estates and Resistance Theory


The Policing of Politics in Bologna, 1898-1914


Naturalisations in France, 1927-1939: The example of the Alpes de Haute Provence (formerly the Basses-Alpes)


Tory Tergiversation in the House of Lords, 1714-1760


Regional Distinctions in the Consumption of Films and Stars in mid-1930s Britain


Management or Semi- Independence? The government of Scotland from 1707-1832


Some Ambiguities of Late Medieval Religion in England


"In the Presence of Mine Enemies": Face-to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare


'I am no longer human. I am a Titan. A god!' The fascist quest to regenerate time


The Socratics' Sparta and Rousseau's


Feeding Medieval European Cities, 700-1500


Yet despite this apparent commitment to empirical research there was another agenda.

'In the receding rule of the market in the modern world, shapes reminiscent of the economic organisation of earlier times make their appearance. Of course we stand firmly committed to the progress and freedoms which are the promise of modern society. *But a purposeful use of the past may help us to meet our present over concern with economic matters and to achieve a level of human integration, that comprises the economy, without being absorbed in it.'* (Polanyi et al. 1957 xviii). (My emphasis).

So Trade and Market consists of a collection of papers on ancient or primitive economies, including Ancient Greece, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztecs and Mayas, the Berbers, India and Dahomey. These are used to show how these societies operated their economies in accordance with Polanyi's principles.

Polanyi himself writes a chapter on 'The Economy as Instituted Process', which is a restatement of the principles enunciated in Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation. In it he adds a section on the formal and substantive meanings of the term 'economic'. This distinguishes the methodology of economics from that of economic anthropology. He argues that economics as we know it depends on formal principles. Thus a set of self-evident assumptions are made, which become premisses used as the basis for a sequence of logical deductions to a set of irrefutable conclusions. Thus one can take Smith's statement about man's `propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another' and develop it to show how money and markets came into being, and how they led in turn to specialisation of function, and increased productivity. But the method of economic anthropology was substantive and depended upon empirical observation from which principles of economic behaviour were induced from perceived evidence. Societies are first observed and the principles of their economic activity recognised from their actual behaviour. Polanyi's claim is that the empirical observations of the substantivists reveal economic life in archaic and primitive economies to be entirely different from that assumed by the formalists. (Polanyi et al 243-44).

Trade and Market together with the Columbia seminars had an enormous impact on United States economic history and economic anthropology. Names associated with the project were David Landes, Margaret Mead, Marshall Sahlins, Moses Finlay, Walter Neale, Harry Pearson and many others, together with outright disciples like Paul Bohannan and George Dalton. One might say that beneath the surface of an American social scientist of that generation, you will find a Polanyist, just as beneath the surface of a British social scientist of that period you will find a Marxist. Perhaps this is because the McCarthy Era and the Marxist witch-hunt left an intellectual gap which Polanyi conveniently filled because of his broadly socialist perspective. In the same way, and for the same reasons, American children were banned from watching Chaplin, and instead were brought up on Laurel and Hardy. In Britain, where Karl Marx held sway, Karl Polanyi attracted little attention.

Polanyi's last book Dahomey and the Slave Trade (Polanyi 1966) was researched in the British Museum when he was in study leave in London during the winter term 1949-50, and was published after his death (Polanyi et al 1957 x). Based largely on secondary sources, the book amplifies his concept of the port of trade previously dealt with in Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1945 64-69), and his 1963 paper in The Journal of Economic History (Polanyi 1963). These ports of trade were for long distance trade through which things could be obtained which were not available within the local reciprocity system. They were exchange places strictly administered and controlled by the local authorities who ensured that they were isolated from the domestic reciprocity network. Deals were done by the authorities with the outsiders, and they were done at set rates, and not by price. Money did not change hands (Polanyi 1966 xxiv, 99).

Money was another issue. Although Polanyi had always maintained that there was no market activity in primitive and archaic economies of which this West African state was an example, he was confronted by an economy in which there were numerous market places, and widespread use of money. This use of money would seem to contradict his views on reciprocity. Money is not required if exchange is based on unspoken social obligation, but if it is required and widely used, surely reciprocal obligations do not apply ? To get over this hurdle, Polanyi argues that the money was not being used for exchange, but to reinforce the social structure by allocating and rationing status. To illustrate his point, he quotes the Arab explorer Ibn Battuta who he credits with discovering such status money in the fourteenth century Niger empires, where thin and thick copper wires were used as money.

back to the top

'Thin wires, in which wages were paid, bought only firewood and coarse millet, while the thick ones bought anything, not excluding elite goods. Limitations of consumption thus were set up for the poor, while the higher standard of life of the leisure classes was automatically safeguarded. Without unfairness one can here speak of "poor man's money" as an instrument of maintaining upper-class privileges.' (Polanyi 1966 174-75).

But Polanyi's interpretation seems to have been based on a misreading of the text. A scrutiny reveals that it does not mention wages at all, and states that firewood and *meat* were obtainable with thin rods, not firewood and coarse millet. Millet, wheat, butter, and elite goods such as slaves were all bought with the thick wires. Both thin and thick rods could be changed into gold, so they were actually interchangeable, and the tiers of exchange were therefore linked not isolated. They were in fact a general purpose currency (Battuta 1929 336).

Copper rod currencies seem to have held a fascination for Polanyi and his disciples. Rods still operated in the eastern areas of Nigeria until the end of the Second World War. Paul Bohannan, a student of Polanyi's, did research among the Tiv, and produced two papers about this rod monetary system. The first was in The American Anthropologist (Bohannan 1955) and the second in The Journal of Economic History (Bohannan 1959). Using information gathered among the Tiv from the 1930s onwards, Bohannan distinguished three levels of exchange in the Tiv economic system. At the lowest level, everyday consumer goods such as chickens, goats, sheep, baskets, calabashes, pots, chairs, beds, grindstones and tools were exchanges for each other. Completely separated from this level of exchange was the middle level in which status conferring items like guns, trade cloth, slaves, horses, cattle, magic, medicine, ritual offices and copper rods were exchanged. Above this, and again completely separate for it, was the highest level where rights over women were exchanged. A wife could only be obtained in exchange for a girl of one's one lineage. Only in the most exceptional circumstances was it possible to obtain goods of a higher level of exchange for goods of a lower level. Because copper rods were valuable and not divisible, they could not be used for petty transactions of the lowest level. Buying a yam with a rod would be like buying a cup of coffee with a =A350 note. The indivisibility of the rod kept the levels of exchange separate, and ensured status conferring items were kept out of the hands of the lower orders (Bohannan 1955 60-70; Bohannan 1959 492-99; Bohannan and Bohannan 1968 228-37).

But the Tiv were not the only people to use the copper rod as currency. Directly to the south is the Cross River basin, with its chief town of Calabar. There too the rod currency remained in use until just after the Second World War. Here the use of the rod is well documented from the seventeenth century. The economy was based on the interchange of basic commodities along approximately 150 miles of the Cross River. Yams from the north, palm oil for cooking from the west, and salt and fish from the estuary to the south were distributed through the local network of markets. Vegetables, and things like chickens, goats and slaves, were also distributed through these markets, and so were craft goods like twine, ropes, nets, baskets, and raffia cloth. Itinerant blacksmiths operated at market places and made weapons and tools. Pottery could only be made at specific places where there was suitable clay, but the finished products were sent to the markets. Canoes could only be made at the few places where the trees grew big enough, but they were freely available at the markets, and these major capital goods were essential to the carrying trade of the region. Several different tribes, the Efik, the Ibibio, the Ibo, the Ekoi, the Efut, speaking different languages, participated jointly in this market system. The common currency was the copper rod, which served all the functions of a modern currency. It was a medium of exchange accepted by all, it was a unit of account, it was a standard of deferred payment essential for credit, and it was a store of wealth. Prices fluctuated according to shortages caused by harvest failure or war, and the price of a good increased the further it was carried from its place of origin incorporating the cost of transport. During the nineteenth century the currency suffered from inflation due to an increase in the supply of rods, indicating it was subject to the quantity theory. There were no restrictions on the ownership of rods. Even slaves could aquire them and use them to buy other slaves, and they could buy offices in the secret society which controlled the community. In Calabar the rod was a general purpose currency and the economy was a market economy. This was not an economy based on reciprocity (Latham 1971, 1973, 1986).

Crucial to this view that the rod in Calabar was a general purpose currency is the question of divisibility. Bohannan argued that rods could not be divided into small change, and this prevented them being used for petty transactions. This ensured that the circulation of elite goods was separated from the circulation of everyday goods. Thus rods operated as a privilege rationing system, as possession of rods made it possible to acquire elite goods which conferred and confirmed status. But in Calabar this was not the case. The Rev. Hugh Goldie's dictionary, published in 1874 and based on over twenty years experience of Calabar, states that copper rods, known okuk, were commonly made by the blacksmiths into wires. They were known as obubit okuk, or black rods, obubit being the word for black, the colour the wires were after they had been split by the Ibo blacksmiths (Goldie 1874 255). These wires were freely obtainable by all, and were essentially small change used for everyday purchases. They could also be saved up and exchanged for the big rods. Thus the concept that the isolation of transaction levels was maintained by the indivisibility of the copper rod is not true. Perhaps things were different in Tiv, just a few miles to the north of the Cross River basin and part of the same currency area. But Malherbe's 1931 dictionary of the Tiv language suggests the situation in Tiv was the same as in Calabar. He gives the word akpo`A thin brass wire, a trading commodity' which was distinct from the rod which was called bashi (Malherbe 1931 10, 22). It seems that Bohannan was either mistaken in his analysis, or misled by his informants, who were speaking after the rod had gone out of circulation. Nevertheless the fact that rods were divisible completely wrecks the status rationing hypothesis. There is also ample photographic evidence to prove the existence of the wires.

So Calabar had a market economy, not one based on reciprocity or redistribution. In many ways it was more of a market economy than our own. In Calabar you could buy slaves to use for sacrifices, or as canoe boys, farm hands or servants. But we have banned slaves from our market system. Labour services of course are marketable, but not the actual people who provide the services. Indeed slavery is another major problem for Polanyi's concept of reciprocity. How can slaves fit into a system of reciprocity ? How can a slave enjoy a reciprocal gain from the person who sells or sacrifices him ?

The rod currency was the principle Polanyist example of a status exchange unit operating within a system of reciprocity, and key to their interpretation of primitive and archaic societies. But if it turns out to have been a true general purpose currency operating within a market economy as appears to be the case, then the whole Polanyist interpretation is thrown into question. How many other systems have they misleadingly labelled as reciprocity based ? It must be emphasised that if a currency contains both large units, and small units which can be used as small change for petty transactions, then it is almost certainly a true general purpose currency. If it is a true general purpose currency, then it is operating in a market economy and not a reciprocity system. True general purpose currencies and market economies are synonymous. Money based market economies pervaded primitive and archaic societies, not systems based on reciprocity and redistribution. Harold Schneider, founder of the Society For Economic Anthropology (U.S.) and a leading anti-Polanyist, showed in a famous study that even an East African cattle currency was a general purpose currency, with the small change being calves and goats (Schneider 1970: See also Schneider 1974).

The specialisation of function which the coming of the market and general purpose economies facilitated seems to have marked the onset of the sustained economic development upon which we all now depend. Yet at the same time, in its own way the market is the ultimate form of reciprocity. Thus a salaried academic may sit at his desk writing a scholarly paper in the unspoken knowledge that others elsewhere are producing the food, clothing, shelter and transport that he needs. What is true for the academic applies equally to the judge, the plumber and that apostle of the market, the commodities trader. Presumably the tax system is the ultimate form of redistribution and indeed retribution!

back to the top

Returning to Polanyi, it seems clear that his and his disciples views are dangerously misleading, and apparently motivated by a desire to create a world in which the market has no part. In their desire to model a future devoid of market forces, they subconsciously interpret the past as having no market forces. These misleading views have been been widely adopted in the social sciences, particularly in the United States, and have even had a pernicious infiltration into `the new' archaeology. Peter Sawyer, the authority on the Vikings, has said:-

'Polanyi's analysis is not now widely accepted by economic historians or anthropologists, but it has been enthusiastically adopted by some archaeologists who think it provides a basis for reconstructing social, economic and even political phenomena in periods for which only material evidence survives. There has even been an attempt to interpret the development of early medieval Europe in this way. The resulting review of the archaeological evidence is a useful progress report but the classification of the towns, markets and fairs of post-Roman Europe according to anthropological models contributes little or nothing to our understanding of a period for which we have the welcome control of written evidence.' (Sawyer 1986 61).

Patty Jo Watson agrees with Sawyer that the new or processual archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s has a strong anthropological basis. But she points out in the December 1995 edition of The American Anthropologist that this has been succeeded by postmodernism or postprocessualism:-

'Hodder and other postprocessualists are also very concerned about the sociopolitical setting of contemporary archaeology. They urge archaeologists to be aware and self-critical about their biases and preconceptions, lest they unwittingly create a past in the image of their own present, a past that then helps to legitimate contemporary social or political themes.' (Watson 1995 688)

In conclusion it is necessary to return to Polanyi's concept of reciprocity and redistribution. Despite his and his disciples work, it is difficult to accept that primitive or archaic economies operated according to these principles. Market forces and true general purpose monies appear to have been present in societies at primitive levels and from early times, and at the onset of their sustained development. True general purpose currencies and market economies are synonymous. One must agree with Polanyi that the substantive methodology of observation and induction is the way to study primitive and archaic economies. However, when these societies are studied in this manner, the operation of their economic systems tend to confirm the deductions of the formalists, rather than confound them.

Finally, a word of caution. Marxism is today an unfashionable ethic. Are we therefore to see a flourishing of Marx surrogates ? Is this why there is a revival of interest in Polanyi ? Do those who now turn to Polanyi seek in him a new socialist figurehead ? For them there can only be this clear message:- Polanyi is baloney !


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bibliography

Anderson, B. L. and Latham, A. J. H. (1986) The Market in History, London: Croom Helm.

Battuta, I. (1929) Travels in Africa and Asia, 1325- 1354, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bohannan, P. (1955) Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv, American Anthropologist 57 60-70.

Bohannan, P. (1959) The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy, Journal of Economic History 19 491-503

Dalton G. (ed) (1971) Primitive Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, Boston: Beacon Press.

Goldie, H. (1874) Dictionary of the Efik Language, Edinburgh.

Humphreys, S. C. (1978) Anthropology and the Greeks, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Latham, A. J. H. (1971) Currency, Credit and Capitalism on the Cross River in the Pre-Colonial Era, Journal of African History 12 599-605

Latham, A. J. H. (1973) Old Calabar 1600-1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Latham A. J. H. (1986) Palm Produce from Calabar, 1812- 1887, with a Note on the Formation of Palm Oil Prices to 1914, in Liesegang, Pasch and Jones (1986) 265-91

Liesegang, G. Pasch, H. and Jones, A.(eds) (1986) Figuring African Trade, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.

McRobbie, K. (ed) (1994) Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Polanyi K. (1944) The Great Transformation, New York: Rinehart and Co.

Polanyi K. (1945) Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation, London: Gollancz.

Polanyi K. Arensberg C. H. and Pearson, H. W. (eds) (1957) Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.

Polanyi K. (1963) Ports of Trade in Early Societies The Journal of Economic History 23 30-45.

Polanyi K. (1966) Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Polanyi K. (1977) The Livelihood of Man, New York: Academic Press.

Sawyer, P. (1986) Early Fairs and Markets in England and Scandinavia, in Anderson and Latham (1986) 59-77.

Schneider, H. K. (1970) The Wahi Wanyaturu: Economics in an African Society, Chicago: Aldine Atherton.

Schneider, H. K. (1974) Economic Man/, New York: The Free Press)

Watson, P. J. (1995) Archaeology and the Culture Concept, American Anthropologist 97 683-94

[lugan]

On Leap Year

question: Why is it that: the year 1900 was not a leap year; the year 2000 will be a leap year; and the year 2100 will not be a leap year?

answer: A year that is evenly divisible by 100 is not a leap year unless it also is evenly divisible by 400.

explanation: The time required for Earth to make one lap around the sun -- to go from vernal equinox to vernal equinox -- is approximately 365.2422 days. Because the period of 365 days that our calendar assigns to the basic year falls approximately 0.2422 of a day short of the time it actually takes to orbit the sun, the calendar adds one day to every fourth year. This quadrennial "leap year" causes the average duration of a year to be approximately 365.2500 days. Because this quadrennial adjustment overshoots its goal by approximately 0.0078 of one day, the calendar "skips" the quadrennial adjustment at the turn of each century. This centennial "re-adjustment" causes the average duration of a year -- over the long run -- to be approximately 365.2400 days. Because this centennial readjustment overshoots its goal by approximately 0.0022 of one day, the calendar "un-skips" the centennial re-adjustment once every four centuries. This quadricentennial "re-re-adjustment" causes the average duration of a year -- over the very long run -- to be approximately 365.2425 days. All of this has the effect of reducing the difference between our calendar and our actual orbit around the sun to approximately 0.0003 of a day -- about 26 seconds.

(IHUB (WAVX-32153), 2/29/04)

[Investorman]

Old Joe smuggled a lot in during prohibition.

Washington operated a number of profitable businesses but the distillery was probably the best - nothing pays like sin.

One of his others was a grist mill where he ground grain from his own estate as well as for his neighbors which provided a nice cash flow.

[Investorman]

Nice site for history buffs and trivia addicts.

[lugan]

I believe the Kennedy family had a little hand in liquor also.

1797 John Anderson, a Scottish farm manager, convinced George Washington that distilling whiskey would make money. In a six-week season each spring, Washington’s men netted about a million shad and herring from the Potomac River. The catch was then salted, packed in barrels, and exported. His diversified farming was less successful, largely because of his long absences from Mount Vernon.
(AM, 9/01, p.80)(HNQ, 8/30/02)
1799 Dec 14, The first president of the United States, George Washington, died at his Mount Vernon, Va., home at age 67. Richard Brookhiser authored "Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington." The Washingtons at this time had 317 slaves. His 5 stills in Virginia turned out some 12,000 gallons of corn whiskey a year. In 1993 Richard Norton Smith authored "George Washington and the New American Nation."
(A&IP, ESM, p.16)(AP, 12/14/97)(WSJ, 11/6/98, p.W15)(SFEC, 5/2/99, Z1 p.8)(SFC, 12/11/99, p.B6)(WSJ, 2/22/00, p.A40)

[thepennyking]

History can always be rewritten:

[lugan]

Bela I ARPAD (MAGYAR) (King) of HUNGARY

from the link he dates at 1016-1063

The geneology is interesting, but I do not think it is historically significant.

[thepennyking]

Websites about King Arthur of the Round Table

Fabulous Genealogies

The genealogies involving Arthur get pretty wild. Taliesin was an historic bard, probably serving in the court of Rheged's King Urien, but nothing is known of his genealogy. Nevertheless, a pedigree can be found for him which makes him grandfather of Arthur, and a descendant of Frankish Kings! (As if that weren't enough, in the same fabulous genealogy, his ``wife,'' the Lady of the Lake, is shown as descended from Jesus Christ!)

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jamesdow/camelot.htm

[thepennyking]

Bela I ARPAD (MAGYAR) (King) of HUNGARY

Interesting Genetic Lines

HRH William's 23-Great Grandfather.
PM Churchill's 25-Great Grandfather.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jamesdow/s010/f035097.htm

[ergo sum]

I think there is a problem here with Bela and Steven. Do you know anything about it?

[thepennyking]

timeline

The following pages are based on the timeline on the Caslon Analytics site and from individual profiles on this site.

They highlight major technological innovations and corporate developments.

1712-1860

1861-1900

1901-1925

1926-1950

1951-1975

1976-1990

1991-2000

2001-

indicators

The following figures are estimates only, from a range of academic and industry sources

1900 1.4 million telephones, 8,000 registered automobiles and 24 million electric light bulbs in US
1901 22,310 telephone subscribers in Australia
1909 pianos reach maximum market penetration in UK homes at one per ten people
1910 9,500 cinemas in US
1910 122,000 telephones in UK
1912 cinema attendance reaches 5 million per day in US
1913 37% of UK homes own a phonograph
1938 radio surpasses magazines as a source of ad revenue in US
1939 radio in 75% of German homes
1939 15,115 cinemas in US (v 14,952 banks)
1950 4 million tv sets in US
1951 US television advertising revenue exceeds radio ad revenue
1952 22 million tv sets in US homes
1956 71% of US homes have tv
1960 6,000 computers in operation in US
1960 60 million tv sets in US homes
1960 10% of French homes have tv
1967 200m telephones in world - half in US
1968 200 million tv sets in the world - 78m in US
1969 97% of US homes have tv
1976 15% of US homes have cable tv
1976 60% of US homes have microwave oven
1985 average US TV viewing peaks at 7 hours 10 minutes per day
1987 50% of US homes have cable tv
1990 99% of US homes have at least one radio
1991 75% of US homes have VCRs, 60% have cable TV
1992 10 million mobile phone subscribers in US
1992 US spends US$12bn to buy/rent videotapes v US$4.9bn on box office
1992 900 million tv sets in the world; 201 million in US
2002 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity
2002 2.4 billion people rely on primitive biomass (eg dried cow dung) for cooking and heating

benchmarks

At a global level points of reference are provided by the following figures from 1999 on take-up of information & communication technology and annual electricity consumption.

per 1,000 people PCs Internet Hosts Mobiles Main Lines kW pa
Australia 492 50.3 397 610 9.907
New Zealand 416 47.8 190 469 8.810
United States 538 136.7 314 709 13.451
Singapore 390 22.2 381 484 7.137
Hong Kong 360 66.4 551 559 5.178
Japan 325 16.7 382 551 8.130
Malaysia 94 2.8 145 219 2.640
Taiwan 260 20.0 493 569 5.530
S Korea 181 6.0 499 449 5.448
China 9 0.1 32 84 0.912
Thailand 40 0.5 39 84 1.404
Philippines 19 0.2 37 37 0.473
Indonesia 13 0.2 9.8 29 0.358
France 318 11 350 684 7.141
Germany 317 17.6 283 593 6.480
United Kingdom 379 28.4 409 570 5.901

http://www.ketupa.net/timeline.htm

[lugan]

I will post this famous person link at the top of the Hungary file.

Lugan

[lugan]

OK pennyking,

Your contributions will soon qualify you as chief of the Hungary file! I will post credit for your efforts in the next newsletter.

Lugan

[thepennyking]

Free books for the asking

We have a few books to give away free of charge, to university professors, students, newspapermen, researchers, politicians, governments. The only requirement is, that the shipping address MUST be the LIBRARY of the school, institution etc. We also need your name, occupation and address.

At the moment these works are available:


CD1 HUNGARY, 1100 YEARS OF SUCCESS:
CD-ROM with most of the contents of this homepage.

B06: Chaszar, Edward: Decision in Vienna.
B11: Dunay, André: Origins of the Rumanians
B25: Lote, Louis: Transylvania and the Theory of the Daco-Roman-Rumanian Continuity.
B47: Wagner, Francis: Toward a New Central Europe.
B49: Wojatsek, Charles: From Trianon to the First Vienna Arbitral Award.
B62: Baross, Gabor: Hungary and Hitler.
B84: Borsody, Stephen: The New Central Europe.
C08: Kostya, Alexander: Northern Hungary.
C09: Cseres Tibor: Titoist Atrocities in Vojvodina, 1944.
C14: Vekony, Gabor: Dacians-Romans-Romanians
C21: DuNay-DuNay.Kosztin: Transylvania and the Rumanians.
C30: Kapronczay, Károly: Refugees in Hungary
C32: Balogh, Sandor: Autonomy and the New World Order
E01: Siladi, Karolj: Dobri susedi, losi susedi

http://www.net.hu/corvinus/free.htm

[lugan]

Excellent stuff pennyking. Your 1st format was best. The 2nd I'll have to sift and shorten for entry to the TL.

Thanks,
Lugan

[thepennyking]

So, a history wrought with tragedy. It's no wonder Hungary today is a leader in the world in suicide and has one of the lowest life-expectancy rates. But there's always hope. In 1996, Hungary celebrated its 1100th anniversary. A new awareness of what it means to be Hungarian and a willingness to assert her interests seems to be building. Half of all Western investment in Central/Eastern Europe is in Hungary - and half of that is US investment. Inflation has come under control and Hungary joined NATO. Hungary again leads Central and Eastern Europe toward democratization, but faces severe economic trials while her people on the other side of the border face persecution and according to the Helsinki Watch, "cultural genocide."

"The Roumanians are really the most reliable people in the world when it comes to depending upon their breaking any promises they make." - General Harry Hill Bandholtz, US Army, 22 NOV 1919, taken from his diaries which can be seen along with many more historical documents all available for download in Zip format at the outstanding Corvinus Virtual Library or mirror. General Bandholtz was the one who saved the Crown Jewels from the Rumanians. His statue sits in front of the American Embassy in Budapest. If you are a library or school representative, they can send you free a CD ROM with numerous resources.
The Study Web is a fantastically rich site with a huge directory of resources on numerous topics including Hungarian History and Attila the Hun. Sites listed are reviewed and rated for visual content by staff before being posted. The Hungary Page received 4 apples! A great study or information resource that can be incorporated into your classroom!
Visit this link for a great piece of work by Gyula Lászlo on the Origins of the Hungarians. The full book will soon be released. The author argues on a two-wave Hungarian conquest and cites ancient texts from Arabic, Byzantine, Swiss and other sources. Fascinating reading. It is part of the subscription journal, "The Hungarian Quarterly." Other articles are listed as well.
HUNGARY: A Short History, by C. A. Macartney, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Director of the Hungarian Section of the Foreign Office Research Department; and Professor of International Relations, University of Edinburgh. Though the name is "short" it is a quite extensive and excellent resource on Hungarian History and Trianon.
This is an excellent site with detailed essays on the History of Hungary by Stephen Pálffy, who resides in the UK. The authors writes about specific periods in Hungarian history from ancient times to the present. It is very neatly organized into historic periods.
Another excellent resource by István Lázár HUNGARY - A Brief History which takes us from the regions's pre-history through the author's lifetime.
See also the Trianon Adattár in Hungarian with trianon details, ethnographical maps and more.
The book, Origin of the Rumanians (Vlach Origin, Migration and Infiltration to Transylvania), by Endre Haraszti, is is now on-line courtesy of András Szeitz and offers an in-depth look at the foundation of the Daco-Roman Theory.
The Annotated Memoirs of Admiral Miklos Horthy, Regent of Hungary is a fascinating read about this controversial and often misunderstood figure.
For an in-depth look at the intrigue of the disasterous Treaty of Trianon see SUITORS AND SUPPLIANTS: The Little Nations at Versailles
The Hungarian Revolt, October 23-November 4, 1956 offers an excellent look at those brave and tragic days as does my site, 1956.
The Historical Text Archives at Mississippi State University is a comprehensive site for historical resources on Trianon and Hungary and includes some of the links above
Transylvanian Resources:

The renowned author and eloquent voice on Transylvanian autonomy, Count Albert Wass de Czege, supervised an excellent work, entitled Documented Facts and Figures on Transylvania. This work gives excellent detail on the TRUE origins of Transylvania and how Rumanians gained their foothold. See also his letter to Congress regarding the Cultural Genocide of Hungarians.
TransylvaniaNet - "not the legend, but the real story..." - is an interesting educational site on Transylvania with an objective source of information, detailed maps, history, current news and issues, discussion group, and links to other resources. This includes a link to ProTransylvania -a multiethnic political group seeking Autonomy for Transylvania.
Transylvania and the Theory of Daco-Roman-Rumanian Continuity is an excellent look at at this controversial theory.
Transylvania: The Roots of Ethnic Conflict
Witness to Cultural Genocide: First-Hand Reports on Rumania's Minority Policies Today
Genocide in Transylvania: Nation on the Death Row
István Lázár presents, Transylvania, A Short History
Transylvania on SlavWeb - provides many good resources, and includes the Rumanian version of history.
SEE MY "The Treaty of Trianon and the Dismemberment of Hungary" Page

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/history.htm

[lugan]

Good show pennyking. Is there onbe standard reference that you used for all the items. I need to attach a ref source to everything. If its all from one book, a page # would be great.

Lugan

[thepennyking]

When were the Martians teenagers?

http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/MARSL1.jpg

*
The Jews were expelled from Western Europe 500 years ago, but were welcome in Eastern Europe for bringing trade and industry, especially by the king of Poland. In the l9th century Poland was divided among Germany, Austria, and Russia. Escaping from the pogroms encouraged by Russian orthodox priests, the Jews moved southwards, towards Hungary, adding to her former Jewish population. According to ancient law, Jews were forbidden to own land, so they turned toward trade and industry. Their wealth was increased by the industrial revolution. At the proposal of the Minister of Culture, the enlightened Baron József Eötvös (the father of the physicist Roland Eötvös) the Hungarian Parliament emancipated the Jews (1867). Some of them were made noblemen for their services in the economy (e.g. the father of George Hevesy in 1895, the father of Theodore Kármán in 1907, the father of John Neumann in 1913). One hundred years ago (1895) Baron Roland Eötvös, a physicist served as Minister of Culture just for a few months. Because he was an aristocrat, he was able to convince the conservative Parliament to widen civil rights, including complete religious freedom and civilian marriage. Around 1900, in the tolerant social climate of Hungary over 50% of all the lawyers and medical doctors had Jewish roots. In the eyes of conservative nationalists, however, the Jews remained menacingly aliens. When the opportunity arose during the right-wing restoration (1920), the first anti-Jewish law, the numerus clausus was enacted in Hungary; according to it, the percentage of Jewish university students was restricted to the percentage of the Jewish population in the country as a whole (1920). Thus history was even more compressed in time for the Jews. The place of origin for the wandering Jew, the fictional Leopold Bloom (alias Virág Lipót) was placed in Hungary by James Joyce, describing the contemplative day of 16 June 1904 on the streets of Dublin in the novel appropriately entitled Ulysses.

Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of the movement for an independent Jewish state was born and attended school in Budapest. After graduation he left Hungary to study law in Vienna (1878), and he died in Austria. (Now a grand boulvard in Tel-Aviv is named Herzl Street, a hill in Jerusalem is Mount Herzl.) - The word "Holocaust" (burning completely to dust) was first used by peace-Nobel-laureate Elie Wiesel.

On this spot of the globe, within distances less than 1000 km, we find Albanians, Austrians, Bosnians, Croatians, Czechs, Gypsies, Hungarians, Jews, Slovakians, Slovenians, each possessing their own language, their own culture, most of them their own country with a population of a few million or even less. (This may remind us of the city-states of Greece in Antiquity or the city-states of Italy in the Renaissance, but here the linguistic-cultural heritages differ even more.) The tolerated coexistence and sparking conflict of cultures were present not only in foreign affairs or in the sectors of the Parliament but within the heads of young individuals. For example, it could happen in the family that the father spoke Hungarian, the mother spoke German, grandma's family originated somewhere in Poland, grandpa kept the Jewish feasts, the school teacher taught Christianity. Around 1900 for Jews especially, no career was open in politics, or in the army, they had to choose business. If a successful businessman wished to provide higher education for his son, he had to send him to study science or engineering. When later the political climate turned stormy for them, with the wind blowing from the east these young scientists sailed westwards. They landed on the coast of the New World at a time of great challenges and opportunities. Their rich political experiences, their open minds, and their critical thinking were their strengths. Nicholas Kurti told the author [Budapest 1990]:

- I don't think we were much more talented than the other students in the West, but we knew that we could not go back. Our talents would have to be used. There was no chance for us to waste our talents. - John von Neumann confirmed: - In this part of Central Europe there was an external pressure on society, a feeling of extreme insecurity for individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction.4 - Not everyone appreciated this originality. Telegdi recalled Enrico Fermi saying: - All the Hungarians I met were intelligent or terribly intelligent. Mostly too intelligent. Well, there are times when it pays to be conventional. Arthur Koestler expressed the opinion [Ubiquitous Presence]:

- In contrast to Austria and other small countries, Hungary did not have linguistic contact with her neighbors; Hungarians form an isolated ethnic enclave in Europe. Hungarian writers could find a wider readership only by emigrating, by writing in a foreign tongue. But giving up the mother tongue usually means the end of the career for a poet, or turns him into an insignificant journalist. Since World War I the main export of Hungary has consisted of best-selling journalists, producers, movie stars - the demi-monde of international culture. They were scattered worldwide by a centrifugal force, which arises when a small country has plenty of talents without the chance for their unfolding at home. But later I recognized that this opinion is only one side of the truth. This demi-monde of the cafes and "gulash-bars" of Vienna, New York, and Tokyo does not represent the most valuable part of the Hungarian contribution to culture. The really valuable elements of the Hungarian "export" were absorbed by the physics, mathematics, and biology departments of universities, furthermore by hospitals, research laboratories, state committees, and orchestra. I don't think that a comparable exodus of scientists and artists ever existed since the fall of Byzantium.

To Koestler's words let us add one remark. It may be that the language of pictures was easier for immigrant Hungarians in America that speaking and writing in the foreign tongue. (Vilma Banky was an admired actor until sound film swept her off the screen for her Hungarian accent. Tony Curtis was born in the U.S. but he had to take long phonetics lessons to get rid of his inherited Hungarian accent.) The French film review Positif recently wrote:

- Hollywood gained much from the immigrant Hungarian artists' creative capacities, dedication to imagery, their tendency of daydreaming.11


Crossing borders

Tourist brochures advertise Hungary as the country of Tokaji wine, red-hot paprika, gypsy music, csardas dancing. It is less ackowledged that the coach (1400) and the match (1836), ball-point pen (1943) and Rubik's cube (1978), alternating current technology (1885) and streamlined airplanes (1928), tungsten filaments (1905) and krypton-filled light bulbs (1930), radioactive tracing (1913) and the nuclear reactor (1942), electronically programmable computers (1946) and time-sharing computer networks (1960), the BASIC language (1964) and the WORD word processor (1988), among others, emerged from brains born and schooled in Hungary, and changed the way we live in the 20th century. Wigner's student, Alvin Weinberg designed the safe water-moderated nuclear reactors; Wigner's other student, John Bardeen invented the transistor, opening new gates for human progress.

The precondition for the coexistence of different cultures in such a tiny domain of space-time is tolerance, a merit of Hungarian society, especially in the early 20th century. Being different enhances critical spirits and creative associations. There is no better expert on this than Arthur Koestler who compared his youth to riding a roller-coaster; in his late years he devoted most of his attention to understanding the interplay between conflict and creativity.l2 According to him the genius in science or the arts notices that two concepts - considered beforehand to belong to completely different dimensions - are deeply interrelated, even identical. (There are several examples of such insights in the history of science initiating scientific revolutions: Light / electricity. Heat / disorder. Mass / energy. DNA / heredity. Struggle / evolution. ) If the student is instructed to memorize only traditional skills, rules, laws, and boundaries postulated by axioms, then he may not recognize further interrelations presented by reality. But if someone is exposed to contradictions, he will not be afraid of wild associations. As Koestler has put it,

- The manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived reminds one more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic brain's.


*
- Chemistry and physics could only become united after physics had renounced the dogma of the indivisibility and impermeability of the atom, and chemistry had renounced its doctrine of ultimate immutable elements. A new evolutionary departure is only possible after a certain amount of de-differentiation, a cracking and thawing of the frozen structures resulting from isolated, over-specialized development. Perhaps our age of specialists is again in need of creative trespassers.l3

Well, Martians don't respect political and disciplinary boundaries; this might be how these refugees from the Wild East of Europe came to deserve the adjective: Mad Hungarians. It is impossible to classify them according to well-established disciplines; they show an inherent interdisciplinary spirit. It is hard to tell whether George von Békésy, Andrew Grove, George de Hevesy, John von Neumann, George Olah, Michael Polanyi, Edward Teller, Valentine Telegdi, Eugene P. Wigner, Richard A. Zsigmondy were chemical engineers (as their university diplomas indicate) or biologists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers.

Geophysics was introduced by Roland Eötvös who, after having studied the accurate proportionality of inertia and gravity, applied his gravimeter to peep below the Earth's surface, to find oil. George de Hevesy applied radioactivity to geochronology as first. Egon Orowan used his pioneering results on plastic dislocations in solids to explain the motion of glaciers, drifts of continents, and the formation of mid-oceanic rifts.

Biophysics is a favorite hunting place for Martians: Robert Bárány, Erwin Bauer, Albert Szent-Györgyi started from medicine, George von Békésy, Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner from engineering, to cross the physics/biology borderline. Wigner estimated the mathematical probability for the spontaneous emergence of life in the framework of quantum mechanics. Szilard experimented with evolution and speculated about the biochemistry of aging. John von Neumann, the mathematician, distinguished the role of software and hardware in the living cell before biologists clarified the distinct roles of DNA and enzymes; he constructed cellular automatons on the computer screen to explain self-reproducing molecules, and wrote a book about the computer and the brain. Martian mathematicians, physicists, and chemists cannot resist biological temptations.

Information theory is an emerging new development on the border of traditional disciplines. It originated with Leo Szilard's paper on the conflict between information-creating intelligence and disorder-creating thermodynamics (1929). John von Neumann recognized first the revolutionary importance of electronically programmable computers; after artillery trajectories he applied them to meteorology, economics, and strategy. He was followed by John Harsanyi, Nobel laureated for developing game theory in economics for players with imperfect informations. Dennis Gabor received the Nobel Prize for extracting the complete information carried by a light ray with the technique of holography. John G. Kemeny recognized that computers were for every (educated) person, therefore he invented the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC). Charles Simonyi is now the chief architect of Microsoft, the most successful software company. Andy Grove is the president and chief executive officer at Intel, the most successful hardware company. Hungary prepared the on-board computers for the Russian long-distance space missions, which reached Mars and Comet Halley. The RECOGNITA - software made in Hungary - is able to read hand-written texts.

Telling the future

- We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward everywhere. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living - it will bring new competition from new ways of doing things, from corners that you don't expect. It doesn't matter where you live. Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated peop1e from workers on the other side of the globe. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both coworker and competitor to every one of us. We can't stop changes. We can't hide from them. Instead, we must focus on getting ready for them. - This was written by Andrew Grove in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.l4

In a stable world sensing the state of the environment, the so-called "social adjustment" has survival value. In a variable climate, however, noticing the trends of change (the time derivative), sensing coming storms helps one survive. This explains another Martian characteristic: the capability to predict the future.

- Leo Szilard proved to be the best prognosticator: he was able to foresee events better than anybody else I know - Ben Liebowitz said. When World War I erupted, Leo Szilard, then 16, told his classmates: - I am not afraid to be called to the army; Austria, Germany, and Russia will collapse. - This prediction sounded strange because Russia was on the side opposite to that of Austria-Hungary and Germany, but Szilard turned out to be right! After World War I, in the 1920s he tried to organize a Bund in Berlin, which "might stand ready to exercise the functions of government if and when the parliamentary system in Germany collapses, one or two generations hence. "15 Hitler took power in 1933. Szilard left Berlin one day before Hitler ordered that Jews must not leave Germany. He did not stay in Austria either because in 1936 he anticipated, - Nazi Germany will invade Austria in two years. - So it happened in 1938. In London he told Michael Polanyi: - I shall go to America one year before war breaks out in Europe. - He sailed in 1938, World War II started in 1939. After the war (1945), there was a disagreement concerning the Russian capability to construct an atomic bomb. Vannevar Bush, director at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development guessed a decade; Szilard predicted five years. The first Soviet atomic bomb actually exploded in September 1949. Szilard wrote in his letter to Stalin (1947): - It will only be a question of time, a few short years perhaps, until peace will be at the mercy of some Yugoslav general in the Balkans or some American admiral in the Mediterranean who may willfully or through bungling create an incident that will inevitably result in a new war.16 -- In Yugoslavia we witness today the Catholic [Croatian]-Eastern Orthodox [Serbian]-Islam [Bosnian] conflict, and the superpower play behind it, having turned again to war. As Leo Szilard has summarized: - You don't have to be cleverer, you just have to be one day earlier.

- My father taught me that one gains very little knowledge of how to behave as a nation from looking at year-to-year changes. To find the true worth of historical experience, one must examine generations - Von Kármán recalled. It is Central Europe where history happens. World War I erupted in Sarajevo (Bosnia). World War II started in Danzig (Gdansk, Poland). The focus of the present greatest European conflict was again Sarajevo. Condensed historical experiences enable the scientists living here to notice the trends more acutely than those living in quieter regions. Dennis Gabor had already written in 1938: What a Price of Peace!

- President Wilson's 1919 doctrine about national self-determination was so self-evidently right that people did not see what nonsense it was. - The problem is that people in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kurdistan, and elsewhere still believe in it.

John von Neumann also wrote in June 1938: - I think , that there will be war, although it may be at a distance of a half year or perhaps even one or two years. - (The exact time of grace left was 15 months.) About the Western surrender in the case of Czechoslovakia in Munich (30 September 1938) he said: - I can only say that Mr. Chamberlain obviously wanted to do me a great personal favor. I needed a postponement of the next world war very badly - because Neumann traveled to Budapest to marry in November. In 1940 the German army cut through France as Neumann predicted, but he also expressed the unbelievable views that Britain would deter a German invasion, and whichever president was going to be elected in 1940, would probably bring America into the war in 1941. (So it happened.) He thought that free mankind's two enemies (Hitler and Stalin, that time allies) might by then be doing the nice thing of fighting each other. - Stanislav Ulam, a fellow mathematician at the Manhattan Project, said: - I can testify that in his forecasts of political events leading to World War II and of military events during the war, most of von Neumann's gueesses were amazingly correct.l7

Egon Orowan - a physicist turned mechanical engineer - picked up writings of Ibn-Khaldun, the l4th century Tunisian Arab historian, about the rise, maturation, and senescence of Arabic tribes from dynamic beginnings to rich and decadent ends, when they are replaced by a new wave of dynamic invaders. Orowan has found many parallels to these in modern Western societies where economics becomes to be of central importance. Beginning at Adam Smith and Malthus, Orowan concluded that the present problems of industralized Western societies result from ever increasing productivity which replaces the old crafts of many skilled craftsmen with automated industries. The outcome is chronic unemployment followed by government's "charity" in the form of armanent industry, in government contracts for public work and research centers not necessarily needed by society. Orowan liked to call his approach to socionomy, coined from sociology+economy.

- Till now man has been up against Nature, from now on he will be up against his own nature - said Dennis Gabor.l8 - Our civilization faces three great dangers. The first is destruction by nuclear war, the second is overpopulation, and the third is the Age of Leisure. For the first time in history we are now faced with the possibility of a world in which only a minority needs work to keep the great majority in idle luxury. Soon the minority which has to work for the rest may be so small that it could be entirely recruited from the most gifted part of the population. Almost every important invention unbalances the front of progress, and a new invention is needed to redress the balance. Disinfectants have reduced child mortality, and we need the "pill" to keep the population in bounds. The steam engine, the internal combustion engine are threatening our stock of fossile fuel with exhaustion; we must have nuclear power and later on thermonuclear power. We cannot stop inventing, because we are riding a tiger.


*
- It's like sailing a boat when the wind shifts on you but for some reason, maybe because you are down below, you don't even sense that the wind has changed until the boat suddenly keels over. What worked before doesn't work anymore; you need to steer the boat in a different direction quickly before you are in trouble, yet you have to get a feel of the new direction and the strength of the wind before you can hope to right the boat and set a new course. And the tough part is that it is exactly at times like this that hard and definite actions are required. So the ability to recognize that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat is crucial to the future of an enterprise. - This is what Andrew Grove, a skilled navigator says about his experiences, failures, and successes.14

Perhaps the storms experienced by Martian sailors beforehand in Europe enabled Szilard to sense the approach of the Atomic Era and Neumann to feel the coming of the Computer Era. What do common terrestrials do when the storm arrives?

- When the environment changes in such a way as to render the old skills and strengths less relevant, we almost instinctively cling to our past. We refuse to acknowledge changes around us, almost like a child who doesn't like what he's seeing so he closes his eyes and counts to 100 and figures that what bothered him will go away. The phrase you're likely to hear from grownups at such times is "Just give us a bit more time."14


*
Correct forecasting of the future may make money. - Countervailing forces usually prevail, but occasionally they fail. That is when we have a change of regime or revolution. I am particularly interested in this occasion. I can do better in the financial markets than dealing with history in general, because financial markets provide a more clearly defined space and the data are quantified and publicly available - George Soros said.l9 - My basic idea is that our understanding of the world in which we live is inherently imperfect. There is always a discrepancy between the participant's views and expectations and the actual state of affairs. Sometimes the discrepancy is so small that it can be disregarded but, at other times, the gap is so large that it becomes an important factor in determining the course of events. History is made by the participants' errors, biases, and misconceptions. - Citizens of quiet regions may afford to believe in a fixed set of values, but Hungarians cannot afford it. This is how Soros explains his successful intuitions:

- Rationality has its uses, but it also has its limitations. If we insist on staying within the limits of reason, we cannot cope with the world in which we live. By contrast, a belief in our fallibility can take us much farther. It can guide us through life.

Andrew Grove gives the following diagnosis on the state of the world: - When most companies of a previously regulated economy are suddenly thrust into a compatitive environment, the changes multiply. Management now has to excel in the midst of a global cacophony of competing products, and every person on the labor force suddenly must compete for his or her job with employees of similar companies on the other side of the globe. When such fundamental changes hit a whole economy simultaneously, their impact is cataclysmic. They affect an entire country's political system, its social norms and its way of life. This is what we see in the former Soviet Union and, in a more controlled fashion, in China. l4

George Soros warnsl9 that the West is now missing a special opportunity to lead the former communist world from the closed societies of the past into the open community of nations: - We do not have much time to come to our senses. The collapse of the Soviet Empire meant the end of a stable world order that prevailed during the Cold War, only we did not realize it. We carry on with business as usual while all our institutions of collective security are disappearing. The collapse of communism was a revolutionary event, and a revolution creates opportunities! - Later he added [Time, 10 July 1995]: - We have missed the opportunity, and now it will be forty years in the wilderness.

Saving the world

A trait related to this peculiar property of the Martians was that they even tried to save the world. Some of them were considered to be hawks, others were doves, but each of them felt convinced that he was right.20 - We were - and still are - trying to shape the future at a time when this idea doesn't have broad currency. We were - and are - to be early movers - as Andrew Grove wrote.l4 It may be due to the rich historical heritage of the Martians that they all liked to offer advice, even to Presidents. Leo Szilard urged President Roosevelt to develop nuclear power. President Kennedy answered his letters about the importance of a superpower dialoge, resulting in the Washington-Moscow hot line. Szilard also contacted Khrushchev, Nehru, and the Pope. Theodore von Kármán advised President Kennedy on supersonic flight and ballistic missiles; he met Stalin and Gandhi as well. Eugene P. Wigner pressed President Johnson on civil defense. John von Neumann advised President Eisenhower on nuclear and rocket armaments. His daughter, Marina von Neumann advised President Nixon on economic affairs. Albert Szent-Györgyi travelled to Moscow to inform Stalin about the misbehavior of the Red Army in Hungary; invited President Kennedy to his home; criticized President Johnson bitterly for his war in Vietnam; even wrote a Presidential Speech - never told. John G. Kemeny advised President Carter on the safety of nuclear plants at the time of the Three Mile Island accident. Edward Teller advised President Reagan on Star Wars; he is in contact with the prime ministers of Israel and Hungary concerning national modernization programs. Elie Wiesel received the Medal of the Congress and President Reagan made him chairman of The President's Commission of the Holocaust. George Soros asked President Clinton to devote more attention to Central-Eastern Europe. As journalists claim, Soros used to have breakfast with one head of state, and dinner with another one on the very same day. - I am not ashamed of my messianic fantasies; the world would be a grim place without such fantasies.l9

In the middle of the night Arthur Koestler called and woke up Gaitskell, the leader of the British Labour Party, before Gaitskell's visit to Moscow, asking for his intervention at Krushchev in order to save the life of the Hungarian writer Tibor Déry after 1956 - and he succeeded. In the 1930s, during his visits to the Soviet Union, Michael Polanyi contacted Bukharin, chief of scientific and technological planning. In conclusion, let us quote Dennis Gabor, one of the most ardent prophets, who took a long view ahead in his evangelium entitled Inventing the Future.

- Technological development is much too fast to be matched by biological adaptation of man. Moses showed the Promised Land to his people, but then he led them around for forty years in the wilderness until a new generation worthy of it had grown up. Now forty years is not an unreasonable estimate for educating a new generation which can live in leisure, but we must find a better equivalent of the wilderness. At the present stage of technology the time ought to be shorter - merely the time to train teachers and for the teachers to train the first generation of modern workers. It is not so much the education of the people which is slow but the education of the leaders.

The prophecies of Hungarians were not always appreciated by their fellow scientists. Still, eventually, some of their forecasts and advice were acknowledged in America - because they worked. This has made the liberation of nuclear power also a Martian success story. The first six recipients of the Atoms for Peace Award were Niels Bohr (1957) for the theory of the atom and its nucleus, George de Hevesy (1958) for radioactive tracing and its application in medicine, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner (1959), as well as Alvin Martin Weinberg and Walter Henry Zinn (1960), "to honor the four men, who, of all men living, have done most to originate and perfect the nuclear fission chain reactor. It alone, of all devices thus far conceived, provides practical means for utilizing the energy of the atomic nucleus and producing radio-isotopes in abundance. These gifts of the atom, if used wisely, will be of inestimable benefit to mankind. " - (A Dane, a Canadian, an American and three Hungarians make up this list.)

REFERENCES

George Marx: "Beszélgetés Marslakókkal" (interviews in Hungarian). OOK-Press, Veszprém, Hungary (1992) 145 pages. George Marx: "The Voice of the Martians;" first edition Eötvös Physical Society, Budapest (1993) 230 pages; second edition Hungarian Academy Press, Budapest (1997), 420 pages. This paper is essentially a chapter from the last quoted book.
First page in Francis Crick's book: "The Life Itself." Macdonald, London 1982.
Norman Macrea: "John von Neumann." Pantheon Books, New York (1992)
Richard Rhodes: "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Simon&Schuster, N.Y.(1986)
Leon Lederman: "The God Particle." Boston (1993)
"Hungarians in Film." Magyar Filmunió, Budapest (1996), p.6.
Proceedings of the Royal Society, A336 (1974) p. 141.
Arthur Koestler: "The Boredom of Phantasy" (1955)
A. Blumberg - G. Owens: "Energy and Conflict." G. P. Putnam, New York (1976)
Newsweek, 17 February 1997
"Hungarians in Film," loc.cit. p.53.
Arthur Koestler: "The Act of Creation." Hutchinson, London (1964)
Arthur Koestler: "The Sleepwalkers." Hutchinson, London-Macmillan, N.Y. (1959)
Andrew S. Grove: "Only the Paranoid Survive." Doubleday, New York (1996)
Leo Szilard: "His Version of Facts," selected recollections; editors S. R. Weart - G. Szilard. MIT Press, Cambridge MA (1978)
Sending this letter was not permitted. Printed in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
"John von Neumann Memorial Volume" (1958)
Dennis Gabor: "Inventing the Future." Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1964)
George Soros - B. Wien - K. Koenen: "Soros on Soros." John Wiley, New York (1995)
This aspect has been emphasized by Gábor Palló.

[thepennyking]

Coming from outer space

There is only one single factual piece of evidence about the descent from planet Mars: there is a mount named Von Kármán Crater on the Red Planet. Hungarians left more traces on the Moon: a huge ring in the southern part of the far side of the Moon has also been named Von Kármán Crater, honoring the pioneer of supersonic flight. East of it is the tiny crater honoring Imre Izsák, the Hungarian-American expert of celestial mechanics of the Space Age (1929-1965). In the North-West, near the lunar Terminator Line, halfway between H.G. Wells and F. Joliot is the great Szilard Crater of 122 km in diameter. East of it astronauts may find the Von Neumann Crater. Further l9th century Hungarians, who did not cross the Ocean, also deserved place on the Lunar Map: in the southern part of the far side are János Bolyai (pioneer of non-Euclidean geometry, 1802-1880); a bit east of it is Roland Eötvös. A tiny crater represents Gyula Fényi, the Jesuit solar astronomer (1845-1927), another one the Austro-Hungarian Nobel laureate, Richard Zsigmondy. But there is a Martian who proved that the craters on the Moon are not products of lunar volcanism but had been created by impacts of meteors from outside: Egon Orowan, while working on plasticity and fractures in solids, studied high resolution photographs brought back by the Apollo missions.7 (There is indeed an asteroid named Teller orbiting around the Sun, discovered by E.F. Helin in 1989.)

Speaking an alien tongue

An obvious explanation of the myth of the Martians may be their strange language: its grammar and vocabulary are quite distinct from those of the Indo-European languages. Kármán and Bárány proudly accented the á in their names at all times, in spite of the opposition of computerized word processors. (The Báránys did so through generations.) When polyglott Valentine Telegdi decided to learn Japanese, he rushed to Budapest to buy a Japanese language book written in Hungarian, because Hungarian grammar is similar to Japanese, while for an English author it is difficult to explain how Japanese think and speak. (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans put family name first, given name as last; in Europe only the Hungarian language follows this rule.)

According to myth, at a top secret meeting of the Manhattan Project General Groves left for the gents' room. Szilard then said: - Perhaps we may now continue in Hungarian! - Hungarian emigrees enjoyed speaking their mother tongue whenever a chance offered itself. This has made them look suspicious. Los Alamos was a place of top security. General Groves was annoyed that Neumann and Wigner had frequent telephone conversations in Hungarian. [Teller, talk in Budapest 1991.] The "thick Hungarian accent" was often heard even in the corridors of the Pentagon. (The Lugosi accent made the alien power of Dracula, the count from the faraway Transylvania even more realistic. )

This explanation of the myth, however, is certainly not sufficient. Let us quote now George Békésy:

- If a person traveling outside Hungary is recognized as a Hungarian due to his accent, something which - beyond a certain age - is impossible to drop, the question is asked almost in every case: "How is it possible that a country as small as Hungary has given the world so many internationally renown scientists?" There are Hungarians who have tried to give an answer. For my part: I cannot find an answer, but I would mention one thing. When I lived in Switzerland, everything was peaceful, quiet and secure; we had no problems earning a living. In Hungary, life was different, and we all were involved in an ongoing struggle for almost everything which we wanted, although this struggle never caused anybody's perdition. Sometimes we won; sometimes we lost; but we always survived. It did not bring an end to things, not in my case anyway. People need such challenges, and these have existed throughout the history of Hungary.


Crossroads in space-time

It is a fact of history that the great figures of human culture are not distributed evenly in space and time. They concentrated, for example, in democratic Athens (Aristotle and Sophocles), while the city was fighting against Persian invasions; in renaissance Florence (Michelangelo and Galileo), in a city struggling with the supremacy of the Pope; at the dawn of the English industrial revolution (Shakespeare and Newton), while fighting the Spanish Armada. Quiet periods require only social adjustment. Under a changing climate, however, old schemes no longer work, such conditions encourage creative individuals. If a very different final truth is offered each month, young people learn critical thinking, and become more interested in facts than in axioms. During the recent political turmoil a joke circulated: - What is the most unpredictable thing today in Hungary? The past! - Psychology teaches us that an impact-rich environment cultivates talent. To support this view, let's quote one of the strangest Martians, Arthur Koestler8:

- When Tom Corbett, Space Cadett, behaves on the Third Planet of Orion exactly in the same way as he does in a drugstore in Minnesota, one is tempted to ask him: "Was your journey really necessary?"

There may be historical reasons for this alien coherence of the Hungarians: - Hungary was usually in turmoil; a situation attributable mainly to an accident of geography.9 - As Kati Marton (Mrs Holbrook), who left Hungary as a child in 1957, said,l0 - My parents had too much history. - My thesis is that Hungary (together with her Central-European neighbors) has been at the crossroads of history, where the routes from Rome (Catholicism), Germany (Reformation), Russia (Eastern Orthodox Christianity), Osman Empire (Islam) met each other, presenting alternatives and igniting conflicts. Armies from East and West were marching on the roads through centuries. We have learned agriculture from the Slavs, the Renaissance arrived from Italy, and industry came from Germany. Through one and a half centuries the armies of the Osman Empire took everything what they could from the Hungarian peasants - but pigs; this is why pork is the favorite meat of the Hungarians till today. Grapes were introduced by the veterans of the Roman legions, in oder to make wine. Beer-brewing came from Germany. The Russians have shown how to distill vodka. And the Turks introduced the strong black coffee, a present national drink of the Hungarians. So much about the first Hungarian millenium.

A hundred years ago (when the Martian heroes of this book were born), a German-speaking Emperor-King ruled Hungary, supported by feudal landlords. But the industrial revolution was already in full swing, having brought the parliamentary system, compulsory education (1868) - and unsolved social contradictions. In 1896 politicians in Parliament spoke of the glory of the past thousand years of Hungarian history, but the world exposition, organized in Budapest to honor the millenium, presented new physical inventions and the first underground metro system on the continent was already operational in Budapest (second only to London).

As the 20th century arrived, the Austro-Hungarian Empire started playing the superpower: Turkey was expelled from most of the Balkan Peninsula. Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia (1908), pushing Serbia toward an alliance with Russia. After a Serbian nationalist murdered the Habsburg crown-prince in Sarajevo (1914), war was declared against Serbia. Russia rushed to help the Serbs, Germany responded by attacking Russia, France and England declared war against Germany. Thus World War I was started, and was lost. After the military collapse Michael Károlyi, the liberal Count rose against the Austrian emperor and created a pro-Western democratic Hungarian Republic (31 October 1918). But with the encouragement of the Western Powers the neighboring countries attacked Hungary. Károlyi resigned, and a communist government organized resistance - looking for help from Moscow (21 March 1919). Their defense efforts could not last for long: Budapest was invaded by foreign troops (July 1919). Finally a group of Hungarian army officers assembled and took power (November 1919), made the country formally a kingdom again (but the military rulers expelled the Habsburg king trying to return). The rightist military rule took revenge. A wave of emigration began.

Almost all the Martians attended university and began their careers in Germany, where and when quantum mechanics had been born. This does not contradict but confirms our thesis that conflicts cultivate creativity. The 1920s were the decade of the Weimar Republic, which was full of psychological conflicts: the democracy was overshadowed by the lost World War ("Dolchstoss von hinten" ), the dream of a new German Empire (das Dritte Reich), the trilemma of liberalism-communism-nazism. This fruitful period of the coexistence of contradicting ideologies lasted there over ten years, before terminating in the tragedies of the economic crisis, dictatorship, and war.

A similar critical but creative period of accelerating history was experienced in Petrograd in the early 1920s, after the fall of the Czar and before the rise of Stalin, resulting in an explosion of creativity. In Hungary, however, all these revolutions and counter-revolutions happened in a mere twelve months!

http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html

[thepennyking]

THE MARTIANS' VISION OF THE FUTURE

George Marx
Department of Atomic Physics, Eötvös University, Budapest


It is well known that it was the U.S., and soon thereafter the Soviet Union, England, France, and China, where nuclear power was accomplished. In addition, a number of highly talented physicists of other nations contributed to the success, e.g. Germans (Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Otto Hahn, Rudolf Peierls), Austrians (Otto Robert Frisch, Hans Halban, Lise Meitner, Victor Weisskopf), Italians (Eduardo Amaldi, Enrico Fermi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Emilio Segré). Teller used to emphasize: - It was the work of many people. - Why are just Hungarian scientists considered to be, in some sense, "aliens"?1


The birth of a legend

- Enrico Fermi was a man with outstanding talents, he had many interests outside his own particular field. He was credited with asking famous questions. There are long preambles to Fermi's questions like this:

- The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, many of them not unlike our Sun. Many of these stars are likely to have planets circling around them. A fair fraction of these planets will have liquid water on their surface and a gaseous atmosphere. The energy pouring down from a star will cause the synthesis of organic compounds, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. These chemicals will join each other to produce a self-reproducing system. The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. Civilization, science, and technology will follow. Then, yearning for fresh worlds, they will travel to neighboring planets, and later to planets of nearby stars. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. - "And so, " - Fermi came to his overwhelming question, - "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they ? " - It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to Fermi's rethoric: - "They are among us," - he said, - "but they call themselves Hungarians. "

This is Francis Crick's version of the myth.2 - A saying circulated among us that two intelligent species live on Earth: Humans and Hungarians - as Isaac Asimov recalled. Hans Bethe wondered quite "seriously" whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man.3 - Richard Rhodes4 has reported: - At Princeton a saying gained currency that Neumann, the youngest member of the new Institute for Advanced Studies, twenty-nine in 1933, was indeed a demigod but that he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly. - The myth of the Martian origin of the Hungarian scientists who entered world history on American soil during World War II probably originated in Los Alamos. Leon Lederman, director of the Fermilab, reported possible hidden intentions5: - The production of scientists and mathematicians in the early 20th century was so prolific that many otherwise calm observers believe Budapest was settled by Martians in a plan to infiltrate and take over the planet Earth. - (See Kovács' map in this volume, p.45.) As a matter of fact, these suspicious Hungarians - Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard - enjoyed the myth. Edward Teller became especially happy of his E.T. initials, but he complained about indiscretion, - Von Kármán must have been talking. Yankee magazine [March 1980] reported this landing in detail:

- Gabor, von Kármán, Kemeny, von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner were born in the same quarter of Budapest. No wonder the scientists in Los Alamos accepted the idea that well over one thousand years ago a Martian spaceship crashlanded somewhere in the center of Europe. There are three firm proofs of the extraterrestrial origins of the Hungarians: they like to wander about (like gypsies radiating out from the same region). They speak an exceptionally simple and logical language which has not the slightest connection with the language of their neighbors. And they are so much smarter than the terrestrials. (In a slight Martian accent John G. Kemeny added an explanation, namely, that it is so much easier to learn reading and writing in Hungarian than in English or French, that Hungarian kids have much more time left to study mathematics.)

Valentine Telegdi recalled his youth [talk in Budapest 1989]: - For a young Hungarian abroad it may be good to hide his Hungarian descent, because if it is made known, too much will be expected of him. People will know that he is one of the Martians of exceptionally high intelligence who use that incomprehensible language. There was another profession besides science which was crowded by Hungarian talents, the cinema, - an art born from the marriage of traditional drama and modern technology.

Landing in Hollywood

- Legend has it that Hollywood was founded by Hungarians. (At least in part.)6 - Sándor Korda was born in Hungary, in the fateful year 1919 he emigrated to Germany, from there to Hollywood, but reached the peak of his career in England (The Private Life of Henry VIII and Lady Hamilton), and became Sir Alexander Korda. The names of Hungarians in Hollywood make a long list, from Adolph Zukor - born in Ricse (Paramount Pictures) to William Fox - born in Tolcsva, near Tokaj (20th Century Fox) as founders; from Michael Curtiz - born in Budapest (Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood) to Andy Vajna - born in Budapest (Rambo and Evita) as directors; from Menyhard Lengyel ( Typhoon and Ninotshka) to Joe Esterhas - born in Csákánydoroszló (Flashdance and Basic Instinct, working now on a script about the 1956 revolt of Hungary) as screenwriters; from Laszlo Kovacs - born in Budapest (Easy Riders and Free Willy) to Willy Zigmond (Close Encounter of the Third Kind and The Dear Hunter) as cinematographers; from Bela Lugosi - born in Lugos (Frankenstein and Dracula) to Zsa Zsa Gabor - born in Budapest (Moulin Rouge and A Nightmare on Elm Street) as actors, and so on. A special attraction to atoms has been shown by Ciccolina - born as Ilona Staller in Budapest (in her Orgia Atomica). There is also a list of second generation Hungarian actors like Tony Curtis - fluent in Hungarian (stylishly the Lobster Man from Mars and The Boston Strangler who Likes it Hot) through Paul Newman ( The Sting, then Exodus, followed by a Long Hot Summer) up to Leslie Howard - born László Steiner (A Free Soul, later The Scarlet Pimpernel, to be Captured! and then Gone with the Wind). (Howard was wounded in World War I; while flying an airplane near Gibraltar on a secret mission in World War II he was shot down in action, according to myth at the direct order of Hitler. ) Hungarians have been laureated by Oscar Awards: George Cukor (director), József Rufusz (cartoon director), Vilmos Zsigmond (cinematographer), Adolph Zukor (for life's work). On the wall of Zukor's office there was an inscription:


TO BE A HUNGARIAN IS NOT ENOUGH.

http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html

[thepennyking]

Born in Budapest, Miss Kiss completed her studies at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, and the Juilliard School in New York, where she was awarded the coveted Gina Bachauer prize. She received first prize at Barcelona's Maria Canals International Piano Competition, first prize at Cincinnati's International American Music Competition and two dozen additional prizes at international competitions on three continents including the Athens, Dino Ciani, Van Cliburn, Gina Bachauer and the Liszt - Bartok.

http://www.d-vista.com/Kiss/index.htm
http://www.d-vista.com/OTHER/franzliszt.html

[thepennyking]

When Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi was asked if he believed in extraterrestrials, he replied, "They are already here...they are called Hungarians!"

Did you know that the developers of the atomic bomb; the holograph; moon rover; Model T Ford; and the fathers of binary code, BASIC and computer programming; the atomic bomb, nuclear engineering; the California wine industry; the U.S. Cavalry; the Model T Ford; matches; color television; full-length motion pictures; the carburetor; the Zeppelin; the automatic gearbox; the moon rover; Intel Corporation; and of the U.S. aerospace industry are all Hungarian-Americans? And what about Joseph Pulitzer, of "Pulitzer Prize" fame? There's much more to his story. And can you believe there was a Hungarian Emperor of Madagascar?

This list is far from inclusive, but exemplifies, along with the other sections, the Hungarian Genius! Many of these will surprise you. They sure surprised me. The number of these incredible people is astounding given the size of the Hungarian population in the entire world is around 20 million. I have received submissions from all over the world (see "Special Thanks").

Click to [Submit] a Famous Hungarian. Please include a resource for verification purposes. I do get quite a bit of hate mail regarding this site and this list. History can so easily be corrupted by nationalism. To maintain the high standards and integrity of this site, submissions cannot be accepted without a verifiable resource.

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/famous.htm

Sections:

Sports
Science, Mathematics, & Technology I, II
Film, the Arts, & Media I, II
Business & Politics
Military
Hungarian Nobel Prize Winners
Hungarian Olympic Triumph

Master Name Index is below


Master Name Index (Alphabetical with Appropriate Section in Link)
Don Adams - Record setting Triple Emmy Award and Clio Award Winning Actor, Director, Screenwriter - Get Smart!
Florian Albert - Soccer Great - World Cup scoring title and European Soccer Player of the Year: the "Gold Ball" of 1967
Franz (Gabriel) Alexander - Physician and Psychoanalyst: Psychoanalytic Pioneer - Father of Psychosomatic Medicine
Count Ede Laszlo Almasy - Explorer, Double Agent! Immortalized in "The English Patient"
Geza Anda - Acclaimed Pianist: The "Troubador of the Piano"
Anonymous - Inventor of the Carriage or "Coach"
Lt. Colonel Albert Anzelm - Civil War Hero: General Fremont's Chief-of-Staff.
General Alexander Asboth - US Chief-of-Staff, US Minister to Argentina
Oscar Asboth - Engineer - Student of Theodore Kármán and Helicopter Pioneer
Donat Banki - Co-Invented the Carburetor
Robert Barany - Nobel Prize 1914 - "For his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus"
Bela Barenyi - Engineer, Auto Safety Pioneer - Father of the Volkswagen Beetle, Passive Safety, Occupant Safety Cell, Collapsible Steering System, AND the Seat Belt!
Victor Barna - Legendary Table Tennis Champion - "The Greatest Table Tennis Player that ever Lived"
Madeleine Forro Barnothy - Astrophysicist, Pioneer in the study of Cosmic Radiation, Bio-Magnetism and Magnetic Therapy, first Woman to earn a doctorate in physics in Hungary!
Drew Barrymore - Actress, Model, Producer, Philanthropist, "America's Sweetheart"
Bela Bartok - Composer, ethnomusicologist
Zoltan Bay - Physicist: First to use radar to take measurements of the moon
Antal Bejczy - Engineer - Developed Mars Rover "Sojourner," and Pathfinder's Remote Control System
George von Bekesy - Nobel Prize 1961 - "For his discoveries concerning the physical mechanisms of stimulation within the cochlea."
Laszlo "Laci" Bellak - Table Tennis Legend - Seven-time World Champion, Hall of Famer
Laszlo Benedek - Producer/Director
Pal Benko - Legendary Chess Champion Grand Master - only man to beat Bobby Fisher in ' 62 and US Chess Hall of Famer
Count Moric Benyovszky - Emperor of Madagascar!
Count Laszlo Bercsenyi - Huszár, Founder of the modern French Cavalry! Marshal of France
Gabor Bernath - Inventor, Computer Prodigy: at 15 Invented the commercially viable 3d Scanner, "ScanGuru," and won the 50th Intel ISEF
Peter Besenyei - World Champion Aerobat
Jozsef Laszlo Biro - Inventor - Developed the ballpoint pen in 1938 AND the automatic gearbox for automobiles.
Otto Blathy - One in the "Great Triad"of Electrical Engineers at Ganz: Father of the electric transformer, the tension regulator, the watt meter, the alternating current motor, the turbogenerator and high efficiency turbogenerator.
Hugo Bockh - Geologist who discovered Iran's oil fields
Ladislau (Laszlo) Boloni - Soccer Player and Rumanian National Team Head Coach
Farkas Bolyai - Mathematician
Janos Bolyai - Mathematician - Discovered non-Euclidian hyperbolic geometry
Julius Boros - Golf Legend
Adrien Brody - Actor - Oscar Nominated for "The Pianist"
Imre Brody - Physicist: Father of the Krypton Electric Bulb
Joe Bugner - (WBF) World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Australian Heavyweight Champion - Fought Muhammad Ali for the world title twice!
Robert Capa - Acclaimed Photojournalist: "One of the greatest photojournalists of the 20th century" and "The Greatest War Photographer in the World"
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Renowned Psychologist - Father of "Flow Theory," former Chair of University of Chicago's Department of Psychology, and Bestselling Author
Marton Csokas - Acclaimed Actor - Recently "Celeborn, King of Lothlorien," In Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"
Sandor Korosi Csoma - Explorer! Explorer! "Father of Tibetan Studies and Buddhist Culture"! Presented the world with the first Tibetan dictionary and grammar
Janos Csonka - Co-Invented the carburetor
Larry Csonka - Miami Dolphins' Perfect Season Super Bowl Runningback, Super Bowl VIII MVP and Hall of Famer.
Tivadar Csontvary (Kosztka) - Famed Painter: Picasso once chided Chagall that he could not produce a painting half as good as one of Csontvary's!
Gabor Csupo - Leader of the new generation of animation. 5 EMMYS and 2 CABLE ACE Awards - produced Rugrats and the Simpsons
Charles Csuri - "Father of Digital Art!"
George Cukor - Double Oscar-Winning Director
Jamie Lee Curtis - Actress...Best Legs in Hollywood?
Tony Curtis - Oscar-Nominated Actor, Artist, and Hollywood Legend!
Michael Curtiz - Oscar Winning Director of "Casablanca"
Huba Wass de Czege - Brigadier General, US Army Founding Director of the US Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies and Architect of AirLand Battle Doctrine
Georges Cziffra - World-renowned, Legendary Concert Pianist: The "virtuoso showman at the keyboard!"
Joseph Dallos - Physician - The First Modern, Molded Contact Lenses!
Frank Darabont - Director/Writer - Two Oscar Nominations for The Green Mile, "One of the best writer/directors of his generation"
Nicholas Deak - Banker, Finanacier. Received the surrender of the Japanese in Burma in WWII. Founder of Deak-Perera, the nation's "oldest and largest foreign exchange and precious metals investment firm
Robert Deak - Banker, Financier and Father of the Secured Credit Card
Mihaly Denes - Mechanical Engineer - Father of Sound Film and Television Broadcasting: Produced the first television program in history!
Miksa Deri - One in the "Great Triad"of Electrical Engineers at Ganz: Developed A/C electric generator
Dr. Hans von Dohnanyi - WWII hero of German resistance!
Kristof (Christoph) von Dohnanyi - Conductor (Cleveland) of the "Country's Greatest Orchestra"
Erno (Ernst) von Dohnanyi - Pianist, composer, conductor, and pedagogue
Antal Dorati - Acclaimed Conductor and Composer
Istvan Dorogi - Chemical Engineer / Inventor: Father of Mass Produced Inflatable Toys, Forms and Figures!
Krisztina Egerszegi - 5-time Olympic Gold Medalist: "Greatest Backstroke Swimmer of All Time," youngest Olympic Champion of all time, and only woman to win five gold medals in individual swimming events!
St. Elizabeth of Hungary - Giver of Charity, Patroness of Hospitals
Baron Lorand Eotvos - Mathematician: Developed one of the first steps towards relativity theory. Inventions made it possible to explore for natural resources like oil, coal, and different ores
Arthur Erdelyi - Mathematician - His works are cited as "the most widely cited mathematical works of all time and a basic reference source for generations of applied mathematicians and physicists throughout the world."
Paul Erdos - Legendary Mathematician: Revered by colleagues and considered to be the "most brilliant mind in his field," he collaborated with so many mathematicians that the phenomenon of the "Erdos Number" evolved
Joe (Joszef) Eszterhas - Prolific Screenwriter (Basic Instinct, Sliver, Flashdance) "Highest-paid writer in Hollywood"
Jeno Fejes - Engineer, Inventor - first in the world who submitted patents for manufacturing automobile parts by cold-forming, pressing, torch- or spot-welding.
Gyula Fenyi - Physicist: First to prove that the frequency of solar protuberances varies according to the number of sun spots
Philip Figyelmessy - US Inspector General during Civil War
Charles Fleischmann - Founder of the famous Standard Brands Yeast Company of Fleischmann's Yeast fame
Eugene Fodor - Founder of "Fodor's Travel Guides"
Albert Fono - Mechanical Engineer - Received the first patent on airplane jet propulsion and enabled aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound. Also developed Aerial Torpedoes, Jet Artillery, Air Compressors
William Fox - Producer and Hollywood Mogul - Founder of Fox Studios!
Milton Friedman - Nobel Prize 1976 - "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy" - the best known living economist
The Gabor Sisters - Actresses with a temper!
Dennis Gabor - Nobel Prize 1971 - "for his investigation and development of holography"
Joseph Galamb - Ford Chief Engineer: Designed the Model T and Model A Ford, the Fordson Tractor, invented the Ignition Plug and the Planetary Gearbox, and prepared the production of Liberty aircraft engines
Eva Gardos - Acclaimed Screenwriter, Director, and Editor
Charles Gati - Political Scientist, Author, Foreign Policy Advisor, Professor
Mitzi Gaynor - Legendary Actress / Singer / Dancer: Star of "South Pacific"
Uri Geller - Psychic/Entertainer
Peter Gergely - Architect and Structural Engineer: Founder of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering
Peter & Charlie Gogolak - All-Pro Football Players - Longest Field Goal and all-time leading scorer in New York Giants history!
Karl Goldmark - Composer
Peter Carl Goldmark - Engineer, CBS Chief Scientist - Invented the Color Television, 33 1/3 LP Record, and the Electronic Video Recorder! National Medal of Science
Peter Goldmark, Jr. - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the International Herald Tribune
Pal Greguss - Chemical Engineer and Physicist: invented the Pál-Optic used in NASA's Deep Space Program
Andy Grove - Former President/CEO, and Chairman of Intel. Time's Man of the Year for 1998! That's the second Hungarian to be awarded this honor!
Lou "The Toe" Groza - NFL Football Player: Record-setting Tackle and Placekicker for the Cleveland Browns - 9 Pro-Bowls, Hall of Famer
Alfred Haar - Mathematician: Introduced a measure on groups, now called the Haar measure, used by von Neumann, and other notables
Eugene Hainer - US Congressman, 1893, 1895, from Lincoln, Nebraska
George "Papa Bear" Halas - Legendary Hall of Fame Football Coach: Father of the NFL
Robert Halmi, Sr. - Producer, "Tele-Visionary," Chairman of Hallmark Entertainment, the most prolific producer in TV history: multiple Emmy Award winner and 1999 Peabody Award winner
Col. Agoston Haraszthy - "Father of California Wine Culture!" - Ronald Reagan
Mariska Hargitay - Actress (Law and Order. ER, Leaving Las Vegas)
Mickey (Miklos) Hargitay - Mr. Universe!
John Harsanyi - Nobel Prize 1994 - "For his pioneering analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games." Shared prize with A Beautful Mind's John Nash
Stefan Hatos - Television producer of "Let's Make a Deal" fame
Goldie Hawn - Very Cute Actress and Academy Award Nominee for Private Benjamin. Tentative honoree
Miksa Herz - Architect - known in Egypt as Pasha Herz
Theodor Herzl - Founder of the Zionist Movement
George de Hevesy - Nobel Prize 1943 - "For his pioneering work with isotopes as tracers." Winner of Atom for Peace Award 1959
Martina Hingis - Tennis Superstar! At 17, she became the youngest #1 ranked player ever and is the youngest to ever win and defend a Grand Slam Title.
Harry Houdini - The "Greatest Magician on Earth," Actor, Pioneer Pilot
Alan Mackenzie Howard - Actor
Leslie Howard - Actor - 'Gone With the Wind"
Al Hrabosky - "The Mad Hungarian" Great relief pitcher
Jeno Hubay - Violin Virtuoso, Romantic Composer - The "Prince of the Violin" and Founder of the legendary modern Hungarian Violin School
Janos Hunyadi - Military leader and statesman. First to stop the Ottoman Turks!
Emeric (Imre) Ienei - Soccer Player and Rumanian National Team Head Coach
Janos Irinyi - Chemist - Invented safety matches!
Ernest Istook - US Congressman, Republican from Oklahoma, Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee, Co-Chair of the Hungarian Caucus in the US House of Representatives
Anyos Jedlik - Priest, Engineer, Physicist, Inventor - Father of the Dynamo
Stephen (Steven, Istvan) Kaali - Medical Pioneer, Inventor - Patented Bio Electrical Blood Cleansing Device for AIDS and other blood diseases
Janos Kabay - First to isolate morphine directly from the plant
Frida Kahlo - Acclaimed Artist and Mexican Icon: One of the most influential artists of the middle twentieth century
Rudolf Emil Kalman - Developed the Kálmán Filter which is the " greatest discovery in statistics in our century." Kalman filtering is also the method used in GPS (Global Positioning Systems) for navigation
Kalman Kando - Inventor, Engineer - Discovered triple phase high tension current for electric locomotion and industrial applications. Father of Modern Electric Trains!
Moricz Kohn Kaposi - Physician and Dermatologist: Discovered Kaposi's Sarcoma
Theodore von Karman - Aeronautical Engineer & Mathematician. The Father of the Supersonic Flight and a founder of the aeronautical and astronautical sciences. Designed the first rocket to reach interstellar space!
Bela and Marta (Martha) Karoly - U.S. Gymnastics Coaches to Nadia and Mary Lou
Sgt. Leopold Karpeles - Civil War Hero - Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
John Kemeny - Mathematician, President of Dartmouth: "Father of Microcomputing," developed BASIC computer language
Farkas Kempelen de Pazmand - Inventor - First Speaking Machine - first experimental phonetician
Gyorgy Kepes - Painter, designer, author and educator who founded and directed the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT
Andre Kertesz - Acclaimed photographer
Imre Kertesz - Nobel Prize 2002 - "For writing that upholds the tragic experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history"
Kincsem - "The greatest racehorse of all time"
Karch Kiraly - 3-time Olympic Gold Medalist and Professional Volleyball Player: "The King" and Player of the Century
Christina Kiss - Renowned Pianist: one of the foremost Liszt interpreters of our time
Calvin Klein - American Fashion King!
Brigadier General Frederick Knefler - Civil War Hero: "Hungarian Patriot and American General" - highest rank attained in the Union army by a member of the Jewish faith.
Mark and David Knopfler - Legendary, Grammy Award-winning Rock Musicians of Dire Straits: "The Sultans of Rock" and "the finest British band of all time."
Sgt. Matej Kocak - WWI Hero - DOUBLE Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
Sandor Kocsis - Soccer Legend: The "The Man With The Golden Head"
Zoltan Kocsis - Piano Virtuoso and Composer
Zoltan Kodaly - Composer, educator, ethnomusicologist, linguist, author and philosopher
Arthur Koestler - Author/Playwright
Lajos Koltai, HSC - Cinematographer - Oscar Nomination
Sir Alexander Korda - Legendary, Oscar Nominated Producer / Director: A "Hollywood Renegade" & Founding Member of The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers. Founder and guiding force behind the British film industry and "Savior of the British film industry."
Vincent Korda -Oscar Winning Film Art Director
Zoltan Korda - Acclaimed Director
Janos Kornai - Economist, Harvard Professor: Developed the "economics of shortage" theory
Bernie Kosar - Superbowl winning Quarterback. Played for the Browns, Cowboys and the Dolphins!
Mihaly Kotai - Boxer - WBF Super Welterweight Champion and world-title contender - "The Ace of Tokai"
Ernie Kovacs - Actor, Broadcast Pioneer, and Legendary Comedian and T.V. Personality Three Emmy Awards in the 1956-57 TV season.
Laszlo Kovacs ASC - Legendary Cinematographer
Col. Michael de Kovats - US Military Hero!- Founding Father of the US Cavalry!
Brigadier General Eugene A. Kozlay - Civil War Hero: Organized the 54th New York Infantry Regiment
Hon. Tom Lantos - 11-term U.S. Congressman from California
Erno Laszlo - Dermatologist and Cosmetics Tycoon: Father of Modern Skincare Products
Estee Lauder - Cosmetic Queen! Founder of the current world cosmetics leader!
Leonard A. Lauder - White House Advisor and Chairman, The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc.
Ronald S. Lauder - US Ambassador to Vienna, Deputy Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, philanthropist and businessman.
Benjamin Lax - Electrical Engineer / Physicist: Founder and Director of Francis Bitter National Magnetic Laboratories (MIT); Professor of Physics, Emeritus (MIT); Semiconductor and magneto-optics pioneer; Radar Pioneer: developed the radar height and range finder and discovered radar meteorology.
Peter Lax - Renowned and Prolific Applied Mathematician and "one of the greatest figures in pure and applied mathematics of our times."
Franz Lehar - Foremost composer of 20th century operettas
Fulop von Lenard - Nobel Prize 1905 - "For his studies in x-rays and the cathode ray tube"
Menyhert Lengyel - Oscar Nominated Writer, Producer, and Broadway and Film Director
Gyorgy Ligeti - Composer and 20th Century Musical Pioneer: One of the world’s best known living composers - featured on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Franz Liszt - Classical Composer, "Greatest Pianist of All Time"
Lajos Loczy - First to make geological survey of the Trans-Himalaya mountain chain
Stefan Lorant - Photographer / Editor / Filmmaker / Pioneering Journalist - Widely regarded as the first major editor of modern photojournalism and "the Godfather of Photojournalism"
Peter Lorre - Actor - Chaplin called him "the greatest actor alive"
Bela Lugosi - Actor - The Original Dracula!
J. Anthony Lukas - Acclaimed Author and Journalist . "One of America's most brilliant writers" and Winner of TWO Pulitzer Prizes!
Paul Lukas - Actor, Academy Award Winner for "Watch on the Rhine," in 1943
Janos Luppis - Naval Captain and Engineer: Co-Inventor of the Torpedo
Dezso Magyar - Chair, American Film Institute Conservatory, Master Filmmaker-in-Residence
The Magyar Tribes - Innovators: Invented The Stirrup and wooden-framed saddle; Leather Processing; the famous reflex bow; Beef Jerky; Mint Methods
Eva Marton - Heavenly Soprano
Kati Marton - Acclaimed journalist & best-selling author
Ilona Massey - Actress
Maria Mednyanszky - Legendary Table Tennis Champion - First official female World Champion
Joe Medwick - Baseball Superstar: World-Series Slugger, Hall of Famer, "The Muscular Magyar"
Col. Geza Mihaloczy - Civil War Hero: Organized the famed "Lincoln Riflemen"
Jozsef Mihalyi - Engineer / Inventor: Co-Developed Automatic Camera, Chief Designer at Kodak
Ferenc Molnar - Playwright: part of the "Hungarian Invasion" of New York Theatre
S/Sgt Frankie "Zoly" Molnar - Vietnam War Hero - Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
Miklos Molnar - Soccer Star: Danish "Golden Boot," Kansas City Wizards, International - His nickname is "Danish Dynamite" for his explosive scoring ability
Alanis Morrisette - Multi-Platinum-selling Singer, Songwriter - 7 Grammy Awards! One of the VH1: 100 Greatest Women of Rock & Roll
Charles Nagy - World Series Pitcher (Cleveland Indians), 3-time All Star, & Olympics Gold Medal Winner!
Laszlo Moholy - Nagy, Avant-Garde Painter, designer, and experimental photographer: A Founder of Constructivism, Professor and Director at the Bauhaus School of Design, Chicago, and Founder and head of the Chicago Institute of Design
Joe Namath (Németh) Sports Hero, Super Bowl Quarterback and MVP (New York Jets), and Hall of Famer
John von Neumann - Legendary Mathematician, Physicist, Logician, and Computing Pioneer: Co-developed the Atomic Bomb. Father of Binary Code and the Stored Program Computer, Father of Game Theory. Key in development of U.S. ballistic missile program
Paul Newman - Oscar Winning Actor - Eight Oscar Nominations!
George Olah - Nobel Prize 1994 - "For his contribution to carbocation chemistry: the study of hydrocarbons, the ingredients of oil and natural gas, and his discovery of new ways to use them"
Edward James Olmos - Oscar and Tony Nominated and Emmy Award Winning Actor, Producer, Director, and Activist. The "Olivier of the Latino World" and People's 2000 Sexiest Man Alive
Eugene Ormandy - Renowned Conductor (Philadelphia)
Tom Orosz - NFL Football Player - Superbowl Punter for the Miami Dolphins #3
Egon Orowan (Orován) - Applied Physicist
George Pal - Cartoonist/Animator of "War of the Worlds" - Winner of SIX Oscars, and pioneer of stop-action animation!
Ziggy Pallfy - Hockey Phenom - Top Scorer for the NY Islanders and LA Kings - sixth in the NHL in scoring!
Laszlo Papp - Legendary Boxer: Only man in history to win 3 consecutive Olympic Gold Medals
Joseph Pasternak - Film Producer/Director
Beatrix Aruna Pasztor - Costume Designer: designed costumes for 20 major feature films
George Pataki - Governor, New York
Ferenc Pavlics - Engineer: Developed NASA's Moon Rover and Directed Development of the Mars Rover
Eszter Pecsi - Structural Engineer - designer of the first reinforced-concrete skyscraper! First woman to receive a degree in engineering in Hungary (1920)
Jozsef Petzval - Inventor: A Founder of Photography: His Work allowed for construction of modern cameras and made practical portrait-photography possible. Invented Photographic Objective Lens, Darkroom, Opera Glass, and perfected the telescope
Sandor (Alexander) Pfitzner - Engineer: Designed the first American Monoplane for Curtiss
Sylvia Plachy - Acclaimed Photographer, Mother of Actor Adrien Brody
John Polanyi - Nobel Prize 1986 - "For contributions to the development of a new field of research in chemistry - reaction dynamics." Founder of Reaction Dynamics
Zsuzsa (Susan), Judit (Judith), and Zsofia (Sofia) Polgar - Chess Grand Masters and Olympic Gold Medalists! - Judith has been called the Greatest Female Player of all Time!
George Polya - Mathematician: "The Great Teacher"
Colonel George Pomutz - Civil War Hero: Appointed US Consul General to St. Petersburg, Russia.
Geza Pozsar - U.S. Gymnastics National Team Coach and Choreographer
Janos Prohaska - Actor/Stuntman
Ferenc Puskas - Soccer Legend: The "Greatest Soccer Player in History!"
Freddie Prinze, Jr. - Actor and Heart-Throb! "Young Hollywood's Leading Man"
Freddie Prinze Sr. - Actor, Comedian
Joseph Pulitzer - Publishing Tycoon: Responsible for building of the Statue of Liberty
Tivadar Puskas - Inventor, Thomas Edison's Colleague - Devised the idea of using telephone exchanges between subscribers, invented the switchboard and built Europe's first telephone exchange. Coined the term "Hello"
S/Sgt. Laszlo Rabel - US Military Hero! Congressional Medal of Honor
Elemer Ragalyi - Acclaimed, Emmy Award Winning Cinematographer
Tommy Ramone - Drummer and Producer of the Legendary, Pioneering Punk Rockers, The Ramones!
Deszo Ranki - Renowned Concert Pianist - with Kocsis, the "Golden Boys of the Magyar Keyboard"
Fritz Reiner - Legendary Conductor: A "Foremost Conductor of his Time" and "Genius Orchestra Builder"
Imre Reiner - Painter, Sculptor, Illustrator, and Renowned Type Designer of "Reiner Script" fame!
Maria Judith Reményi - Miss USA 1966
Alfred Renyi - Mathematician. Discovered "one of the strongest methods of analytical number theory"
Frigyes Riesz - Mathematician. Riesz was a founder of functional analysis and his work has many important applications in physics
Odon Riszdorfer - Engineer / Inventor: Co-Developed Automatic Camera and Automatic Shutter for Movie Cameras. Father of the hand held, battery operated light meter.
Donald Lawrence Ritter - US Congressman, Republican from Pennsylvania
Ferenc Rofusz - Animator: Oscar in 1981 for his animated film, "The Fly" (A Légy) - the first Hungarian Oscar for a cartoon.
Anna M. Rosenberg - Under-Secretary of Defense in Truman Cabinet. Medal of Freedom in 1945 and Medal of Merit in 1947
George Rosencrantz - Chemist, Businessman, Founder of Syntex, the number seventeen world-ranked drug firm, the developer of Aleve
Miklos Rozsa - Triple Oscar Winning Film Music Composer
Erno Rubik - Mathematician, Inventor of Rubik's Cube!
Leopold Ruzicka - Nobel Prize 1939 - "For his work on polymethylenes & higher terpenes"
S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall - Famed Character Actor, from Casablanca fame
Sylvia Sass - Another Heavenly Soprano, "the New Callas"
Bela Schick - Pediatric Doctor / Researcher: Pioneer in immunology - Devised the "Schick test" for determining susceptibility to diphtheria.
Andras Schiff - Acclaimed Classical Pianist
Claude-Michel Schonberg - Acclaimed Grammy and Tony Award-winning Writer, Composer, and Producer of Les Miserables and Miss Saigon
Friedrich Schorr - Renowned "mahogany-colored" Bass- Baritone
Gerard Schurmann - World-renowned Double Oscar Winning Composer: Orchestrated Lawrence of Arabia and Exodus
David Schwartz - Inventor - Father of the Dirigible Air Ship or Zeppelin
Thomas A. Sebeok (Sebők) - Father of Modern Semiotics (the study of signs and non-verbal communication)
Janos Andras Segner - Father of the Water Turbine: First scientist to use reactive force and made substantial contributions to the theory of Dynamics
Jerry Seinfeld - Actor / Comedian: American Icon! The most successful and influential comedian of his generation!
Paul Selenyi - Physicist and Father of Electrostatics / Photoconductivity Pioneer - first to record images with an electrostatic marking process: the foundation of Xerography!
Monica Seles - Tennis Superstar - She has won 9 Grand Slam singles titles and bronze in Sydney 2000!
Hans Selye - Physician, Endocrinologist, Researcher - Founder of the concept of Stress: The "Einstein of Medicine!"
Ignac Semmelweis - Physician, "The Mothers' Savior"
Don Shula - Legendary Hall of Fame Football Coach (the 17-0 Miami Dolphins!) Winningest Coach in NFL History
Gene Simmons - Legendary Tongue and Rock-n-Roller of KISS!
Paul Simon - Musician, Singer, Songwriter - American Legend of Simon & Garfunkel" fame! 12 Grammys and Rock-n-Roll Hall of Famer
Charles Simonyi - Computer Scientist and Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation: Father of WYSIWYG and Hungarian Notation
Denis Sinor - Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Indiana University Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Uralic and Altaic Studies
Anna Sipos - Table Tennis Legend - first female player to use the "pen holder grip"
Sir Georg Solti -Acclaimed Conductor: Record number of Grammys
Mihaly Somogyi - Chemist: Produced first Child Insulin Treatment in US - Developed the "Somogyi test" for the diagnosis of diabetes
George Soros - "The world's greatest money manager" and Great Progressive Philanthropist.
Brent Spiner - Actor and Trekkies' favorite android, Lieutenant Commander Data!
Major-General Julius H. Stahel Számwald - US Military Hero! Congressional Medal of Honor
Sir Aurel Stein - "The most prodigious combination of scholar, explorer, archaeologist and geographer of his generation" - The "Sven Hedin of England" - pioneered the use of aerial photography in archaeology.
George Stigler - Nobel Prize 1982 - "For his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation"
Elvis Stojko - "King of the Ice" - 3-time World Champion, 7-time Canadian National Champion, and 2-time Olympic Silver Medalist!
Miklos Szabados - Table Tennis Legend - second only to Barna
Ekaterina (Katalin) Szabo - Champion Gymnast: Four Olympic Gold Medals and One Silver in Los Angeles
Gabor Szabo - JJazz Great: One of the "most original and outstanding improvisational guitarists of the 20th century"
Istvan Szabo - Director, Writer, Producer - Academy Award in 1981
Professor Szalay - Father of British Weightlifting
Chef Louis Szathmary - Legendary Chef and founder of Chicago's "The Bakery" - father of the "Stouffer's frozen dinner"
Gabor Szego - Mathematician: Head of University of Stanford Mathematics
Pierre Szekely - Renowned Sculptor and Architect - the "Incessant Adventurer"
George Szell - Conductor
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi von Nagyrapolt - Nobel Prize 1937 - "For his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion process with special reference to vitamin C & the catalysis of fumaric acid." First to isolate Vitamin C
Leo Szilard - Physicist: Co-developed the Atomic Bomb. Physicist - Co-developed the Atomic Bomb: Conceived the nuclear chain reaction and campaigned for nuclear disarmament, though the first to consider the application of the atom to making bombs. Achieved first sustained nuclear fission reaction with Enrico Fermi. Identified the unit or "bit" of information
Kornel Szilvay - Officer in the Hungarian Fire Brigade: Father of the Dry Fire Extinguisher!
Henrietta Szold - Founder of Hadassah
Pvt. William L. S. Tabor - Civil War Hero - Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
Jeffrey Tambor - Actor
Count Samuel Teleki - Explorer! Led the famous East-Africa Expedition
Maria Telkes - Chemist, Engineer: Pioneer of Solar Energy: "Mother of the Solar Home," "The "Sun Queen," and "world's most famous woman inventor in solar energy."
Edward (Ede) Teller - Physicist: Co-developed the Atomic Bomb. Discovered BET equation. Father of the the H-Bomb
Joe Theismann - Legendary Two-time Superbowl Quarterback for the Washington Redksins
Lou Thesz - Legend of Professional Wrestling, "Wrestling's True Icon"
Kalman Tihanyi - Physicist: Father of the Picture Tube and Television Pioneer (NOT Zworykin) - Invented the Picture Tube (Iconoscope), Infrared-sensitive (night vision) television, and Flat TV Tube
Ivan Tors - Producer/Director, Underwater Film Pioneer
Andre de Toth - Director - Oscar Nomination, "The Gunfighter"
Paul Turan - Mathematician: Erdos's closest friend and collaborator and Great Hungarian number theorist
Steven Ferencz Udvar-Hazy - Business Tycoon, Aircraft Leasing Pioneer, and GREAT Philanthropist - Father of the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center
Colonel George Utassy - US Civil War Hero: Organized the famed Garibaldi Guard
Albert Vadas (Wadas) - Spanish American War Hero - Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
Janos Vas - Hockey Player - Dallas Stars
Major Gyula Vari - Hungarian Air Force, Acclaimed Fighter Pilot - First pilot to win consecutive titles at Fairford's Royal International Air Tattoo
Andrew Vajna - Producer, Hollywood Legend: President of Cinergi Productions, co-Founder of Carolco Pictures
Robert Varkonyi - Poker World Series Champion of 2002! First Ever to Win 2 Million!
Viktor Vasarely - Famed painter known for his geometrical forms, he is the father of Op-Art
Bishop Faustus Verancsics - Invented the air turbine
Peter Vermes - Soccer Star: Kansas City Wizards, US National Team (captain), International
Adrienne Vittadini - Renowned Fashion Designer and Businesswoman
Andre Watts - Acclaimed Classical Pianist - one of the "Great Pianists of the 20th Century"
Rachel Weisz - Actress and Model (The Mummy, Enemy at the Gates, Stealing Beauty, Sunshine, Beautiful Creatures)
Jules White - Four-time Oscar-Nominated Producer / Director of "The Three Stooges" and More!
Elie Wiesel - Nobel Prize 1986 - "For his dedication to peace, atonement, and human dignity"
Eugene Wigner - Nobel Prize 1963 - "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles" Co-developed the atomic bomb, developed first breeder reactor, and is known as the Founder of Nuclear Engineering
Debra Winger - Actress - 2 Oscar Nominations!
Major Charles Zagonyi - "The Union Forever!" Led the famous Civil War "Zágonyi Death Ride"
Karoly Zipernowsky - A/C Electronics Pioneer! One in the "Great Triad"of Electrical Engineers at Ganz: Founder of heavy-current electrical engineering
Vilmos Zsigmond (ASC) - Legendary Cinematographer - Oscar Winner and Multiple Oscar Nominations!
Richard Zsigmondy - Nobel Prize 1925 - "For his work on methods in the study of colloid chemistry"
Adolph Zukor - "Mr. Motion Pictures" and Oscar Winner
Special Thanks To:
Judit Györgyey Ries of the University of Texas, Department of Astronomy for her correction and information on John von Neumann.
M.E. Pflieger for his contribution of Peter Lorre and András Schiff.
Feri Zsuppán, Ph.D., of Duke University, for his quotation from Albert Szent-Györgyi seen under the title.
Paul Szilágyi, Ph.D., in Florida for his information on Von Neumann and Szilárd and contributions of Zukor, Benedek, Rosencrantz, Tors, Udvarhelyi, Kertész, Benko, and Deák.
Al Boyd, of the University of Maryland, for his contribution of Alfred Schorr.
The Lónyay's for their contributions of de Kovats, Haraszthy, Puskás, Bolyai, Irinyi, Pólya, and Pázmánd! Great contributions! Thanks Amigos! You are now very "in" famous. Other information which the Lonyay's provided me was from the following books - Our Hungarian Heritage by Albert Wass (c)1975 Danubian Press and The Spirit of Hungary by Stephen Sisa. These are great books, check 'em out.
Gene Dannen, and his Leo Szilard Home Page!
Andrew J. Rózsa, Ph.D. in Birmingham, Alabama for Miklós Rozsa, General de Czege, Zinfandel info. on Haraszthy and Alexander Korda.
Mike & Naomi Tronzo for their contribution of Ilona Massey.
Johanne Tournier in Canada for her information and research on Béla Lugósi and contribution of Houdini! Great homepage!
Professor Edward Chászár in Virginia for lending me a copy of (which I returned late!) Rezsoe and Margaret Gracza's informative book, "The Hungarians in America, (c)1969 Lerner Publications. LOC #68-31503.
Miklós Békefi for his corrections on accent marks! Also his contribution of the Associated Press Article on Hungarians in the Arts.
Kása Zoltán from the University of Kolozsvár and Urszenyi Gábor from California for their contribution of Erdôs Pál.
George Furmann in Canada for Nicholas Hungaricus! Szathmary
"El Abogado" Juan Luis Boldizsár in Chicago for Chef Louis.
Andrew M. Gombos, Jr., in Houston, Texas for Hraboski, "The Mad Hungarian"
Zsolt Szalavari in Austria for Charles Csuri!
Szisz (Kiss Szilárd) from the University of Kolozsvár, Transylvania for his contribution of Rubik.
László Aranyos for his contribution of Goldmark and Vasarely.
Géza Hartai from Plano, Texas for Ferenc Rofusz.
Steve Colman (Kálmán Pista) for his contribution and editorial on Kémény and Mikes
Valentin Poncos in Canada for his contributions of Haar, Kalman, and Riesz.
The History of Mathematics Archive at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland for their superb collection.
Richard diSilvio, owner of the Franz Liszt Page for Christina Kiss.
Barry Hanger, for Frank Capa
Stephen Elekes in Hungary for S.Z. Sakall
Chris Golya at the Centre for New Media Research, School of Art, Design and Media, University of Portsmouth, UK for Moholy-Nagy, Kertesz, and additional biographical data on Biro
Miklos Racz in Virginia for Petzval, Herzl, Lehar, Hunyadi, Moholy-Nagy
Al Cunniff and Vladimir Korovkin for Gabor Szabo
Prof. Tom Barthel from the City College of New York for Joe Medwick
Andre Mommen in the Netherlands for Varga and Kornai
Gordon Woodworth for Peter Gogolak trivia!
Attila Zseni alias Zsenya in Hungary for contact lens developer, Dallos Joszef, Imre Kálmán, and Tivadar Csontvary.
Dezso Nyitray for Gene Simmons of KISS and Gábor Csupó!
Kati S. Maharry at Indiana University School of Medicine (Ooey Pooey) for Calvin Klein!
Laramie Banks for history and bibliography on Peter Karl Goldmark
Joseph Laszlo Kupan, in California, for biographical data on Charles Simonyi, Steven Udvar-Hazy, Jeffrey Tambor, Jerry Seinfeld, and Paul Simon
Prof. Tom Barthel for Joe Medwick
Mihaly Lorincz for Kincsem
USA Gymnastics for the information on Geza Pozar
Andrew Sarkany for submitting Kristina Egerszegi
Barry Hanger for biographical information on Robert Capa
Marc for Rachel Weisz
Paul Hazuda and Ricardo Creisstoff for the Freddy Prinzes
Enike Smith for Edward James Olmos and Mariska Hargitay
Gabor Piros for submission of Hans Selye
Janos Bimbo for Lou Thesz
Lászlo Gergely in Hungary for information related to pilot phenom Gyula Vári
Stephen Beszedits for his biographical data on many of many of the miltary heroes
Alice Egyed, Ph.D. and Martha Bihari for Andras Schiff
Amanda Sowards for Director/Writer Frank Darabont
Julianna Anda for her Father's cousin, renowned pianist, Geza Anda
Al Miller for Mitzi Gaynor
Dr. Daniel A. Lowy and Martha Bihari for Gyorgy Ligeti
György Takács in Sweden for the Knopflers of Dire Straits and Alanis Morissette
Joe Schmidt for Paul Simon (and Timothy Johnson), Joe Bugner, Claude-Michel Schonberg, Florian Albert, Jules White, Eugene Fodor, and Viktor Barna
Fred Mintz for Tommy Ramone
Martha Bihari for Gerard Schurmann
Marc Witorsch for Adrien Brody
Istvan Szoke for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Lola for Adrienne Vittadini, and Pierre Szekely
Lisa Doyle for Marton Csokas
Zsuzsanna Cseke for Ranki and Perenyi
Andy Vella for Don Adams!
Judith Meszaros for Ziggy Palffy.
Gail Bernas for Peter Lax
Jozsef "Joe" Urmos for Janos Prohaska
Pál Breuer for Egon Orovan, Elemer Ragalyi, Charles Gati
Veronica Saldanha Marinho in Brazil for her uncle, Artist and Typographer Imre Reiner
Ellen Rozsa for Kati Maton
Andy "New York Jets" Kovalev for Mihaly Kotai and Joe Theismann.

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/famous.htm

[thepennyking]

"Make the strangers welcome in this land, let them keep their languages and customs, for weak and fragile is the realm which is based on a single language or on a single set of customs."
"(Unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecille et fragile est)"
St. Stephen in a letter to his son St. Emeric, 1036 A.D..


St. Stephen
of Hungary

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/istvan1.gif

St. Emeric
of Hungary

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/imre1.gif

Above, you see the Coat of Arms of the Republic of Hungary with crown of Vajk (pronounced similar to Vike) who made Hungary a Christian power and is now known as St. Stephen (Szt. István), Hungary's first Christian King, receiving his crown from the Pope in 1000 A.D. The stripes on the heraldic right side represent the 7 Hungarian (Magyar) tribes who established Hungary in the Carpathian basin in the 9th century. The Apostolic white cross on its left, part of the coronation jewels presented to St. Stephen, sits on the mountains that protected the borders of historic Hungary - the Tatra, Matra, and Fatra. St. Stephen's crown sits atop the arms with its crooked cross, which according to legend, broke after the death of the great renaissance King, Matthias Corvinus - Mátyás Király. It is said, "truth and justice died with him." This was soon to be prophecy, as Hungary's tragic history began to unfold. The crown jewels were taken to the US after the Romanian occupation force attempted to remove them. The jewels were returned to Hungary by President Jimmy Carter. St. Stephen was a member of the original Árpád Dynasty which established Hungary in the Carpathian Basin in the year 896. His son, also canonized, is St. Emeric, the namesake of Amerigo Vespucci, discoverer of North America.

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/intro.htm

[thepennyking]

Hungarian History

"There is no more illustrious history than the history of the Magyar Nation... The whole civilized world is indebted to Magyarland for its historic deeds." Theodore Roosevelt, to the Hungarian Parliament,
April 2, 1910

Hungary has long been a citadel of Western thought in Central Europe. Relatives of the Hungarians, the Huns, Avars, and Szekleys settled the Carpathian basin as early as the 4th century. Magyar tribes established the Hungarian State in the Carpathian Basin in 896. Long after the fiered Attila, "The Scourge of God," ravaged Europe, the Magyar Chieftan Vajk converted to Christianity, established Hungary as a Christian power, and received his crown from the Pope, thus becoming István Király (King Stephen), Hungary's first Christian King in the year 1000. He was later canonized as St. Stephen of Hungary. Hungary has also been known for its tolerance which had its foundations as far back as St. Stephen as shown in the remarkable quote below.

"Make the strangers welcome in this land,
let them keep their languages and customs,
for weak and fragile is the realm which is based
on a single language or on a single set of customs."
"(Unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecille et fragile est)"
St. Stephen in a letter to his son St. Emeric (Imre), 1036 A.D..

In keeping with the tolerance and enlightened spirit of St. Stephen, the official language of Hungary remained Latin until 1844. Hungary also throughout the centuries gave asylum to many nationalities: in the north, Ruthenians; in the east and Transylvania, Wallachians (Rumanians) and Saxons; in the south, Serbs. Eventually, Hungary would contain 14 distinct national minorities, each developing rich cultures and literary languages, ascending to nobility, and all contributing to the beauty and diversity of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Popes throughout the centuries have called Hungary the " Savior of Europe," and the "Savior of Christianity," and ordered church bells around the world to ring at noon to remind us of the Hungarian victory over the Turks at Nándorfehérvár (now Belgrade) in 1456 by János Hunyadi at the beginning of what was to become a 150 year conflict. But do we remember? Ask your priest or Church official if they remember. Chances are they know nothing about where their own custom comes from. Schools in the west have long ignored Hungarian contributions to society. Did you know that Hungarians declared religious freedom in Torda, Transylvania, in 1557? Two centuries earlier, Hungary declared that there was no such thing as a witch. Too bad the feeling didn't reach the poor "witches" of Salem.

The Golden Bull (Arany Bulla), similar to the Magna Carta, established a constitutional monarchy in the early 13th century in which the King recognized the high nobles as a class power to be consulted on decisions. Soon after, Kings, such as the famed Matyas Hunyadi (1458 - 1490 and son of the famed János) were elected by the hign nobles. Kings were elected until the Habsburg takeover after the 150 year Turkish war and occupation of central Hungary that destroyed much of Hungary's wealth and population. Transylvania, the cradle of Hungarian culture, was the only part of Hungary that remained largely untouched and unconquered. Western Europe did little to help while Hungary struggled with the invading Ottomans; it was a sign of things to come...

The struggle with the Ottomans also forever changed demographics (and future borders) in Hungary as Austria's Habsburg Queen, Maria Theresa, sent Germans (Saxons) to Transylvania to bolster defenses while Rumanians further established themselves after seeking refuge in Transylvania from the Ottoman onslaught during the long conflict. Hungarians tried to break the Austrian yoke in the 18th (the Rákóczy fight) and again in the 19th century (Kossuth), only to be stopped short of their goal of total independence as Austria was supported by a Russian imperial government who also feared democracy. Kossuth, the leader of the 1848 democratic revolution, came to the US for help, and though extremely popular and supported, left empty handed. The compromise with Austria led to a dual monarchy with the Austrian Emperor acting as King of Hungary.

Though relatively autonomous internally, foreign policy was dictated by Vienna who, despite the Hungarian minister's vote against war and vociferous objections, decided to declare war on Serbia in retaliation for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In 1920, upon signing under duress the Treaty of Trianon, the reluctant participant in WWI was torn apart by the victors, losing territory even to Austria who was on the same side and forced Hungary into the war. Hungary could do little with French troops waiting for action in northern Hungary in violation of the peace as well as Rumanian and other troops also ready to capitalize on Hungarian political upheaval.

Rumania, created just 60 years earlier out of Wallachia and parts of Moldavia, laid claim to lands up to the river Tisza, and, with strong French support, got much of what she asked for. Though there was much talk of "national self-determination," nowhere but Sopron (which voted to remain in Hungary) was there a plebiscite held. Though US boundary recommendations were slightly more favorable to the Hungarians, the US washed its hands of the affair, and disgusted with the Franch and other European delegates at the treaty negotiations, refused to sign the Versailles Treaty. Now millions of Hungarians were on the wrong side of the border as 2/3 of Hungarian lands, 1/3 of her Hungarian-speaking population, 90% of her natural resources, and much infrastructure were in other's hands. The Versailles treaties were a disaster for the future of Europe, as a desperate Germany, suffering under war reparations to France, yielded to Nazism. The Hungarian tragedy at the signing of the Treaty of Trianon led Hungary into the sphere of the only nations willing to address her just aim of regaining her lost territory - Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Though she gained parts of her territory back with this alliance, Hungary was again on the losing side and lost them after the war, despite unsuccessfully trying to join the allies as did the successful Rumanians. In fact, the Soviets (now Ukraine) took a piece that was previously given to Czechoslovakia.

In 1956, thousands died and thousands more executed and jailed after the failed anti-communist revolution. Again, the West did nothing but encourage the Hungarians to fight on as the Voice of America cruelly claimed that help was on the way. 200,000 people fled Hungary after thousands of Russian tanks rolled in. The US let in but a fraction, but the impact of these emigres is enormous (see "Hungarian Nobel Prize Winners & Famous Hungarians").

http://hipcat.hungary.org/users/hipcat/history.htm

[thepennyking]

Important dates of Hungarian history

5th century

The Hungarian tribes left the area of the Urals. They passed along the Volga and the Caspian Sea. After several hundred years of wandering, they reached the Carpathian Basin.

896
Under the leadership of Árpád, the Hungarian tribes settled in the Carpathian Basin. They drove out part of the residents and absorbed the other part.

997-1038
King Stephen of the Árpád dynasty ruled the country.

1000
Stephen was converted to Christianity. After his death, he was canonized.

1055
An abbey was set up at Tihany. The foundation charter was drawn up on the northern shore of Lake Balaton. This is the earliest written record extant in the Hungarian language.

1241
The Mongolian Tatars devastated the country. Their presence, which lasted a year, halted development for at least a century. After the warfare with the Hungarians, the Tatars did not continue towards the west.

1458-1490
The rule of King Matthias. Cultural life of a European standard flourished in his palaces at Buda and Visegrád. For a few decades, Hungary lived on a West European standard.

1526
At Mohács, the present southern frontier of the country, the Turks defeated the Hungarian army. 150 years of Turkish occupation started.

1541
The Turks occupied Buda. Hungary was split into three parts. The Habsburg governed the western part of the country, the central area was ruled by the Turks, and the south-east Transylvanian principality (today part of Roumania) for a long time was the citadel of Hungarian culture.

1686
Buda was recaptured from the Turks. (The Turks - similarly to the Tartars - could only advance in Europe to the territory of Hungary. Here they were faced by obstacles, after which no strength was left for the siege of Vienna.)

1703-1711
A freedom war under the leadership of Ferenc Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania, against the Habsburgs. The rebels defeated the Imperial army in several battles, but did not receive the promised French support and failed.

First half of the 19th century
A national reform movement was launched for the political and economic transformation of the country, for Hungarian language and culture. This was when the National Anthem was born, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was set up. The building of the Chain Bridge started. The initiator of these was Count István Széchenyi, an eminent figure of the Reform Age.

1848-1849
A revolution broke out in Pest, which extendedover the entire country. The Habsburg Emperor was dethroned after the Hungarian army won several significant battles. Lajos Kossuth was elected Governor. The longest European national revolution could only be oppressed in the summer of 1849 by the Habsburgs with the help of the Russian army.

1867
The Hungarians concluded a compromise with the Habsburgs. A double-centred monarchy was set up with seats in Vienna and Pest-Buda. A spectacular industrial upswing started.

1873
Pest, Buda and Obuda were unified: Budapest became a European metropolis. The buildings of that time - the Opera House, the National Gallery and Parliament - still determine the skyline of the city. The first subsurface underground railway on continental Europe was put into operation.

1918
Germany and its allies, including the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, lost the world war. The monarchy disintegrated.

1920
The Trianon Treaty reduced Hungary's area by two thirds and the population by one third. Since then, considerable Hungarian minorities lived in the neighbouring countries.

1938-1940
Germany concluded treaties in Munich and Vienna, according to which Southern Slovakia and Northern Transylvania were returned to Hungary.

1944
The Nazis occupied Hungary, as they did not consider it a reliable ally. During the Second World War, the Hungarians suffered grave losses on the Soviet front. At the end of the war, Fascists took over the governing of the country.

1945
The Soviet Army liberated, then occupied Hungary. At the hastly held elections, the Communists gained only 17 percent of the votes.

1947
The last, relatively free election was followed by the years of Communist control: show trials, executions, forced settlement of hundreds of thousands, imprisonment, harassment, forced industrial development, a drop in living standards, and Stalinist dictatorship.

1956
A revolution against Stalinism. The uprising was defeated by Soviet troops. János Kádár, who acquired power with their assistance, promised democratic socialism; in the meantime, retaliation and executions started.

1965
The new system became consolidated, and cautious economic reforms were launched. Living standards were rising and the iron curtain became penetrable.

1988
The Hungarian transition period began.

1990
The Communist party voluntarily gave up its autocracy. A multi-party parliamentary democracy came into being in the country. The Soviet army left Hungary.

1999
Hungary became full member of NATO.

http://www.fsz.bme.hu/hungary/history.html

[lugan]

In general for the purposes of the timelines, I let AP, Reuters , the SF Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal make the major decisions for me and then I skim from the top based on whether the event will likely impact or be of interest in the future.

[garhart]

An interesting question. The more thought one gives it, the more complex it becomes.

[lugan]

What constitutes a critical historic event? If you were to select 5-10 daily items from news events around the world, what criteria would you use?