For the love of freedom

I used to have a strong conviction about the essence of human nature: it was that the strongest motivating factor in us is the yearning for personal freedom. The freedom to choose our path in life, to choose how we want to live and think, to determine our own destiny. The opposite, in fact, of being enslaved by totalitarian governments and totalitarian belief systems. I’m sure this conviction sprang from my beginnings as a child refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which demonstrated that human beings will fight any battle, whatever the odds and however great the risks, in order to win those freedoms.

Tragically, the Hungarian people lost that fight against the Soviet tanks — many thousands were killed, imprisoned, executed. The Revolution’s mild-mannered leader, Prime Minister Imre Nagy, was hanged on Khrushchev’s orders “as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries”.

My father Peter Halasz was a Hungarian writer who witnessed his country’s momentous events of 1956. He later wrote that, despite the crushing of the uprising, “the truths proclaimed by Nagy survived — hid in office corners, in the winding corridors of public buildings, in the cracks of walls. No ideological spring cleaning could root them out. Truth, like a faithful dog, cannot be banished; once it has found a home and affection, truth clings to its owner, despite occasional kicks.”

This truth, the fact of Man’s powerful desire to be free of the shackles imposed by others, was further reinforced by my schooling in America. I was taught that our greatest national heroes were the leaders of the American Revolution, and the Founding Fathers of the most freedom-loving nation in the world. Men like Patrick Henry, who famously declared: “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Powerful words like that are engraved in your psyche forever.

Communism was therefore bound to fall in Europe, sooner or later.

But over the past decade or two I’ve had to reconsider my ideas on this theme. Because you cannot have seen the goings-on in the world without noticing another, equally powerful human instinct: tribalism. The primitive urge to belong to a particular grouping and adhere to its strictures, no matter how egregiously they limit personal freedom, and to accept unquestioningly the abhorrent notion that the grouping is most clearly defined by its perceived enemies.

This is nothing new. Take Iran, for example. The overthrow of the oppressive regime of the Shah in 1979 could have heralded the dawn of a more egalitarian, democratic society in which people could breathe freely. Instead the population embraced, seemingly en masse, an even more tyrannical theocracy. I found it hard to understand the mindset of those vast crowds of young men and women — mostly of student age — frenziedly ushering in an era of Islamist repression. Wasn’t youth supposed to favour the liberalising of social and cultural norms? And have they still not had enough, after four decades of brainwashing by the ayatollahs, to do something about it?

More recent events have reinforced my view that, to the detriment of civilisation, the rush to tribalism often trumps a desire for freedom. Take those teenage girls and young women living in our free western societies — often very bright and with good prospects — who chose to abscond to the Middle East, don the burka and throw in their lot with murderous jihadists. You’d have thought they might at least be squeamish about all that beheading, but not a bit of it. There are still tens of thousands of unrepentant ISIS brides/widows in camps in Syria.

But all is not lost. The one shining beacon in the world today is provided by the democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Young people risking everything to hold on to their cherished freedoms, taking on the might of the Chinese Communist Party as it moves to extinguish one country, two systems. I have followed them with admiration. A video of a recent anti-government rally shows a protester shouting at the massed ranks of riot police: “You call us cockroaches — that’s what Hitler called the Jews before he massacred them!” He went on to quote Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” before ending on that well-remembered line from my school days: “Give me liberty or give me death!” which put a knot in my throat.

These courageous Hong Kongese are going some way to restoring my faith in our better human nature. I only worry that, as with Hungary in 1956, taking on your communist overlords in this fearless manner will end in a bloodbath. China is more than capable of another Tiananmen Square.

I’d like to think that students here are following the events in Hong Kong and learning vital lessons from them. So often our student societies — in alliance with craven university administrations — are more intent on curtailing free speech than protecting it, with their no-platforming of anyone whose views they dislike, and their diktats on which words and expressions are permissible. That’s all just another form of that alarmingly retrograde thing: tribalism. There should be no place for it in today’s Britain.