Hihetetlen, hogy száz év alatt gyakorlatilag semmit sem változott a kormányzati kommunikáció Magyarországon. R. W Seton-Waton írta az alábbiakat 1908-as, Racial Problems in Hungary című könyvének bevezetésében. Széll Kálmánnal!
A brief article of mine on the situation in Hungary which appeared in the ” Correspondence ” columns of the Spectator last June, involved me in a controversy with Count M. J. Eszterhazy, a member of the Hungarian Parliament ; and when the massacre of Csernova (see page 339) on October 27, led me to contribute a further appeal on behalf of the Slovaks, he returned to the charge and repeated the stale old accusation made against every foreign critic of Hungary — namely that of using a Viennese make of spectacles. That Count Eszterhazy should have lost his temper during the controversy which he himself evoked, is regrettable, but not unnatural under the circumstances ; for he belongs to a class and party whose future is threatened by the democratic and non-Magyar movements in Hungary, with which I had expressed sympathy.
But his last letter was so entirely misleading and inaccurate, that my astonishment knew no bounds, when I learnt that the ex-Premier, Mr. Coloman Szell, at a political dinner of
the Constitutional Party, had publicly thanked Count Eszterhazy for his answer in the Spectator, which he described as ” a calm, courageous, enlightening and instructive article.” My letter, on the other hand, was ” untrue, tendancieux, utterly blind, and saturated with fanatical rage ” (az ellenünk koholt tendencziosus, egeszen vak, fanatikus dühvel szaturalt tamadas).”
Now, a perusal of Count Eszterhazy’s letter suggests that its comparative ” calmness ” is due to an extensive application of the pruning knife : that its author is ” courageous,” I should never dream of denying ; but that his writings are ” enlightening and instructive ” is more than I can admit. In fact, his last letter is full of evasions and misstatements, supported by the use of old statistics to prove what new statistics disprove ; so that the Temesvarer Zeitung unintentionally hit the nail on the head when it printed a translation of his letter under the heading ” Falsche Informationen.” The lamentable feature of the incident is that few persons in Hungary are so conversant with the real facts as Mr. Szell, who must therefore have known the extreme weakness of the arguments upon which he lavished his praise. I am thus forced to conclude that that distinguished statesman — the only Hungarian Premier of recent times who tried to apply tact and humanity to the question of the nationalities — has abandoned his former moderate attitude and surrendered to the crude reaction now rampant among his colleagues of the Coalition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_William_Seton-Watson
http://archive.org/stream/racialproblemsin00setouoft/racialproblemsin00setouoft_djvu.txt
