MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON rr the age of reason, and are no longer swayed by those extremes of affection or dislike which disturbed our young and middle years. Our hatred of the National Socialists in Germany is not an irrational hatred ; it is a rational hatred, since they have denied and murdered every virtue which man has painfully evolved for himself in the last three thousand years. Our dislike of the Italian Fascists is also rational, since it is unforgivable that a small cohort of adventurers should have brought such misery upon their own country and the world. I do not for these reasons regard my loathing of all forms of Fascism as an unbalanced loathing, or as something which I should seek to mitigate or reduce. Yet • when I learnt that the Russian armies were within cannon-range of Buda-Pesth, I was conscious of a degree of delight which I felt to be neither virtuous nor sane. My season tells me that the Hungarians found themselves. in a difficult position, and that it would have been hard indeed for them to maintain a stubborn neutrality. They were forced into the war by geovaphical necessity, and by a burning national resentment against the Treaty of Trianon, a resentment which between the two wars was innocently fostered and condoned by many pro- Hungarians in this country. Nor is this all. Hungary has not been engaged in direct hostilities against my own countrymen, and my feelings of hostility should thus be comparatively mild. More- over, almost alone among Hitler's satellites, they for long refrained from cruelty against the Jews in their midst, and for several years their conduct in this respect was independent and humane. For these reasons one should welcome the defeat of Hungary and the bombardment of Buda-Pesth with impersonal, and perhaps even tepid, satisfaction. Thus, when I detect in myself stirrings of positive delight, I suspect that in this connexion my reason has surrendered itself to feelings which are none the less compulsive feelings in that
they are obscure.
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