ABSTRACT
Many liberal and socialist contemporaries, such as Oszkar Jászi, the noted political scientist and Minister of Nationalities in the first democratic government in the fall of 1918, thought that the people’s verdicts and the pogroms represented a regression in history. As Jaszi argued in a book written in exile in 1920, with the White Terror Hungary’s “wild Asian soul raised its head again.” As a patterned event, the people’s verdict in Hungary in 1919 bore a close resemblance to lynching in reconstruction America. Both took place after a lost war and were the products of the “culture of defeat”; both were meant to restore balance in the fields of political, social, racial and even gender relations. To break the stalemate with local administration, the officers’ detachments and their local allies in more than half a dozen places invaded prisons to kidnap and murder the inmates.
