I HAVE JUST SEEN some remarks 6y a Church of
England clergyman; the Reverend Bryn Thomas, over Budapest Radio, which really make the Dean of Canterbury's statement which I criticised the other day seem almost decent by comparison. For one thing they are swathed more thickly 'in cant about honesty, the interests of mankind, God and the sacred writings'—quite apart from the fact that his money estimates are merely signs of the extreme weakness of the forint vis-a-vis the pound, his criteria of what constitutes liberty and the good life are odd by any standards, let alone Christian ones : 'For fifty fillers you can travel all the way on the underground, and if you pay seventy fillers you can even change from one line to the other. In other words, for a halfpenny you can travel both ways, back and forth, any distance you like. The thing isr so -fantastic, so beyond imagination in England: And yet we feel that these people in Hungary are being oppressed.' I feel, too, that he might have avoided calling Kadar's Hungary 'a true paradise for artists' just at the moment when savage sentences were being handed out to the country's leading writers.
Previous page
