Hungary: controversy over censorship and rewriting in textbooks

Members of the lesbian community and supporters participate in a march against discrimination and for LGBTQ rights in Budapest, October 1, 2022. AFP - ATTILA KISBENEDEK

Text by: Florence La Bruyère Follow

3 min

Under communism, censorship or rewriting of history in textbooks was commonplace. The phenomenon is now reappearing in Hungary. A recent case caused an uproar: in a textbook, a poem was changed; The publisher replaced the word "homosexual" with the adjective "Hungarian".

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From our correspondent in Budapest,

It is a textbook of literature published by a Catholic publisher, for students in the tenth grade – the equivalent of the second class in France. There is a poem written by a contemporary novelist and poet, Judit Agnes Kiss. It calls on Hungarians to stay in their country to "protect those who have nowhere else to go, whether they are poor, homeless, Jewish, gay or Roma.

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In the book, the word homosexual was replaced by the Hungarian word, without the consent of the poetess, who of course reacted: "I find it ridiculous that someone changes a word, just to please the poem!

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All this is due to an error of the publisher who copied the poem on the internet and published it as is without checking. But the website on which he found the worms is a far-right site. It is therefore on this site that the poem was censored. The Catholic publisher (the Catholic Pedagogical Institute) apologized to the poetess, he has already corrected the online version of the school book.

But this incident is no coincidence for the left-leaning daily Nepszava that Viktor Orban is leading a crusade against all sexual minorities. His government has even passed a law that equates homosexuals with pedophiles and prohibits talking about homosexuality in schools. What Judith Agnès Kiss denounces: "It's really sneaky to mix the two, under the pretext of protecting children. Whereas in Hungary there are terrible cases of domestic violence, and the state does nothing to protect children from this suffering.

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>> Read also: Hungary: LGBT+ and gender identity, new targets of Viktor Orban

Falsification of history

Another controversy: in a geography book published by the Hungarian state, the recent annexation of Crimea by Russia is presented only from the Russian point of view. Ukraine accuses Hungary of falsifying history.

In this geography textbook, we read that frequent conflicts take place in Crimea between ethnic groups, and that the opposition between these groups has given rise to armed conflict. Not a word about Russia's annexation of the peninsula, nor about the referendum that had not been recognized by the international community.

The manual also publishes a cartoon, showing that Ukraine is coveted by the United States and the European Union. Outraged, the Ukrainian government and many Ukrainian NGOs protested against this falsification of history. Last September, the Hungarian authorities undertook to amend the text and submit it to the Ukrainians. But nothing has been done yet.

>> Also listen: Viktor Orban's pro-Russia campaign

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