“Cold War
Politics and the Hungarian-Canadian Press, 1956-1989”
Canadian Ethnic Studies Association
(CESA), Winnipeg, September 28, 2007.
The émigré press, and newspapers more generally, serve as
a vehicle through which society negotiates both its past and present.
Editorials and the selection of articles express the way in which the
given paper wishes to be perceived by its readership, while letters to
the editor are often representative of the ideas, views and beliefs
present in a specific community. In the case of Hungarians in Canada,
the sheer number of publications printed after the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution and the arrival to Canada of 38,000 refugees, as well as the
diversity of their political and ideological inclinations, means that
these Hungarian ethnic papers provide the best glimpse into both the
changes in public opinion over the years, and the way in which
Hungarian community leaders attempted to infuse the immigration with
specific ideological messages and political debates based on the
realities of the Cold War.
Ethnic newspapers serve as one of the most important institutions of
any minority community. While Hungarian immigrants in the United States
established political lobby groups aimed at keeping the international
outrage over the Soviet suppression of the 1956 revolution on the
political agenda and maintaining a sense of solidarity among
Hungarians, in Canada the Hungarian press assumed much the same role.
Despite the politically varied nature of Canada’s Hungarian press,
including a range of conservative, liberal and far-right papers, the
ramifications of the 1956 uprising and the unprecedented influx of
38,000 Hungarians made the issue of the repressed revolution, Communism
in Hungary and anti-Communism in Hungarian-Canadian communities the
single most important and contentious political debate on the pages of
the Hungarian weeklies for over three decades. Conservative, liberal
and far-right papers all seemed to think that the revolution belonged
exclusively to their political camp and that they were on the “right”
side of the Cold War. Consequently, this issue of ownership over an
event, which had at first served as a rallying cry and uniting force
for most Hungarian-Canadians, led to a politically and ideologically
divided community, based on the animosities of the Cold War.
Christopher Adam
Department of History - University of Ottawa