Opinion: Why I’m not giving up on American democracy
The free and decent country that saved my family from Soviet Hungary is now under threat.In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.
The events of 1989, when several members of the Eastern Bloc were throwing off the Soviet yoke, were thrilling. Hungary was taking small steps toward democracy, something that I experienced very personally. At my wedding in 1995 in Budapest, my husband, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, announced in his toast, “In marrying Kati, I also welcome Hungary to the family of democracies.” Hungary’s president, Arpad Goncz, four years into his work to democratize the country, was also present.
How is it that Mr. Trump’s open admiration for Mr. Orban was not enough to warn away more American voters? Beyond showering praise him, Mr. Trump has already ripped pages from Mr. Orban’s playbook: threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of news channels he derides as “fake,” striving to bypass the Senate’s confirmation process and appointing lackeys to high positions. Expect much more along lines that Mr.
A chapter of my parents’ past opened in 2005, when, after their death, I got access to the files that the secret police had kept on my family during the years of Soviet domination . Imagine my pride when I found a document stating that under brutal interrogation my parents “did not compromise a single Hungarian citizen.
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