Az állampárti propagandaoldal interjút készített Orbán Viktorral.
Idézem :
"Oxfordi évekről, az antikommunista előkészületekről és a magyar történelem lehetséges olvasatairól beszélgettünk a miniszterelnökkel."
. Orbán Viktor pár héttel később ment ki Angliába, mint én Amerikába 1989 őszén, amiből következik, hogy maximum négy hónapot tölthetett Oxfordban. Évekig... aha.
Ennél is érdekesebb az interjú azon része, ahol váratlanul megkeresi őt Norman Stone professzor.
" A másik, ha egyszer csak váratlanul felhívta az embert Norman Stone, és meghívta ebédelni. Fogalmam sem volt, hogy kicsoda, de hamar kiderült, hogy egy magasan jegyzett, különleges tekintélynek örvendő professzor."
Norman Stone-t 1997-ben rúgták ki az oxfordi egyetemről miután tökrészegen ment be az órákra, ha egyáltalán és masszívan zaklatta a diáklányokat. Stoneról írták minden idők talán legviccesebb nekrológját, amiből idéznék pár gondolatot.
Rögtönaz első mondattal kezdem, erős felütés...
"One of the specialities of the historian Norman Stone, who has died aged 78, was character assassination. As a judge of the Fraenkel prize in contemporary history some years ago, he told the astonished members of the jury that they should not award the prize to a historian of Germany whose politics he disliked because she was an East German agent – an allegation that was enough to rule her out of contention even though it was absolutely baseless and undoubtedly defamatory."
Rögtön utána,
"Shortly after the death in 1982 of his patron and mentor in Cambridge, EH Carr, the author of a multivolume History of Soviet Russia and influential works on historiography and international relations, Stone published a lengthy assault on his reputation, which included lurid details of his three marriages. When a colleague criticised this “outrageous” diatribe to his face, telling him that Carr “always said you were amoral”, Stone responded: “And he always said you were a bore” (probably an invention, though one cannot know for sure)."
(Carr-ról tudni kell, hogy Anglia egyik legjelentősebb történésze volt, aki azért kicsit támogatta Hitlert és Sztálint is)
"Stone was undoubtedly clever. He could write entertainingly and could summarise complex historical circumstances in a few pregnant sentences, gifts which brought him a flourishing career as a journalist and commentator. He was a talented linguist who read and spoke more than half a dozen languages, including Hungarian. Yet his career was also dogged by character flaws that prevented him from fulfilling his early promise as a historian."
"He did some speechwriting for Thatcher and advised her on foreign policy, though she did not listen to his assurances that the reunification of Germany in 1990 was not a danger to European peace. On one occasion he collapsed in front of her, drunk; but she was well known for her indulgence towards alcoholics so long as they supported her politically."
És a lényeg.
He devoted some of his remaining energies to the denial of the genocide of Armenians by Turkey in the first world war, but they were fading rapidly, and his last books – short histories of the two world wars (2007 and 2013) and The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (2010) – did no justice to his real abilities, mixing worn-out historical clichés with random statements of his own personal views.
His last post was at the Danube Institute, Budapest, and his last book, Hungary: A Short History (2018) praised the country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán among other things for his tough line on immigration.
Évekig...nem tudnak hibázni.
