Kati Marton likens Prime Minister Viktor Orban's war against George Soros to the persecution of Jews and the communist rampage, - Hungary's liberal press trumpeted out the opinion of a central figure in the deep state which also intervened in Hungarian political process. The 74-year-old American-Hungarian Kati Marton - actually Márton, but the accent has worn off since her emigrating from Hungary in 1957 - told the Budapest Forum 2022, co-organized by the Gergely Karacsony- led capital, that
as a result of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's reign, Hungarians have become a "stupid, ignorant society".
The Budapest-born writer/journalist, who has known Orban since 1989, also commented that the PM will have to give up his chumminess with Russia because it is detrimental in the Western world.
Many have collected much
Marton is also an international advisory board member of the US-based Action for Democracy (A4D)organization that became a central player in the so-called Hungarian Dollar Left. A4D, headed by David Koranyi, had interfered in Hungary's 2022 elections – deemed a national security risk by the Hungarian secret services – just as it supported the forces behind the centrist-liberal opposition in this year's parliamentary election in Poland. Most recently, the A4D staged an attack on Hungary's Sovereignty Protection Act. All of this foreshadows the nature of interventions that can be expected to sway the 2026 parliamentary elections, as well.
The intelligence report quotes the statement of the Hungarian opposition alliance's 2022 joint prime ministerial candidate Peter Marki-Zay, who said
Kati Marton and a lot of her friends have done a lot and raised considerable funds among both Hungarians and obviously non-Hungarians abroad, to make this campaign a success.
In the words of the politician himself, he is "infinitely grateful" for this, Magyar Hang wrote.
The question arises as to why someone would turn on the country of their birth to serve the forces of the deep state, when a political community of millions in Hungary has been supporting the current governing parties with a convincing majority for over ten years.
To gain some insight, we emailed Kati Marton, who lives in the US, in hopes of answers to our questions, but so far have not received a reply. Upon receiving a response, this article will be updated.
In the mean time, we turned to other sources for information and didn't have to dig too deep. Marton, who left Hungary with her family as an eight-year-old child, as we alluded to at the beginning, with the persecution of Jews and the dictator Rakosi's regime leaving deep psychological impressions on the young girl, leading to the development of what experts call fixations. The Marton family was persecuted in 1944, and Kati's parents - Endre and Ilona Marton (maiden name Nyilas) - were imprisoned for a time in the 1950s.
Kati Marton reflects on this in an English-language video while accusing Viktor Orban of homophobia in conjunction with a controversial monument to the victims of the German occupation in 1944, on Budapest's Szabadsag Square:
Hungary has not confronted its heinous past the way Germany has.
She continued by saying,
My grandparents, who were good Hungarian citizens, [the family] goes back several generations, were taken - with a great deal of help from their neighbors - to the trains [from Miskolc] bound for Auschwitz . I have never even seen a single photo of them.
In the interview Marton makes clear that
in Hungary, she fears the potential outbreak of murderous violence (!), unlike in Germany, where children are taken on field trips to Holocaust memorials from the age of six. (In one of her books she calls Miskolc an "unpleasant city").
Hungary [as opposed to Germany, for example] has not done this hard work,
she claims, also categorizing Hungary's criticism of George Soros for supporting the resettlement of migrants in Europe as politically motivated and anti-Semitic. However, Soros is also regularly attacked by well-known Jewish personalities, and Magyar Nemzet has also reported on the philanthropist's support of anti-Israel groups and even groups linked to Hamas, the terror organization that carried out the October 7 brutal massacre that killed more than a thousand Jews in Israel.
Entry into the US elite
To understand Kati Marton's personality and her way of thinking, two more bits of information seem indispensable. A Washington source who knew her personally, but request that her name not be disclosed, described the writer/journalist as a decorative, social creature with good intellectual abilities and interpersonal skills, despite her age, adding that
following the family's emigration, Marton easily entered into the American elite like a knife into butter.
Marton, who is fluent in several languages, became a well-known TV journalist and author, while her marriage to TV anchor Peter Jennings (who died in 2005) and later to Richard Holbrooke, one of the best-known US diplomats - associated with the ruling Democratic Party until his death in 2010 - only broadened her American network, which she could easily activate for her A4D fundraising activities to target Hungary.
Marton and Holbrooke were married in 1995 at the Budapest residence of the US ambassador to Hungary on Zugligeti Street, which is more than symbolic given the personal connections. At the time, Donald Blinken, the father of Antony Blinken, the current US Secretary of State, was the - Democratic Party political appointee - head of the mission in Budapest. On the other hand, in her memoir "Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America" Marton writes of this residence as a place of which "my parents had so many fond memories from the 1950s".
By Studebaker in Rakosi's Budapest
Fond memories from the 50s (at least until her parents were arrested)...
You had to be a Marton family member to experience that. While the political scientist Charles Gati, fifteen years older than Kati Marton, also a deep state figure and Action for Democracy advisory board member, as a twenty-year-old budding reporter by the name of Károly Gáti - more on him in an upcoming article in our series - was for example explaining in the Hungarian press of the 1950s, the merits of a Soviet propaganda film for children, writing:
in following the example of the greats in shaping the distinctive style of Soviet youth cinema.
In the mean time, Kati Marton was spared the language of Gati in the 50s. Together with her sister, they found themselves in a dream world unimaginable to the average person in Matyas Rakosi's Hungary.
Here are some revealing pieces of information from Marton's family history "Enemies of the People". As Budapest correspondents for the American news agencies AP and UPI, Kati's parents drove to the US Embassy as well as to the Feny Street market near their Csaba Street apartment in Buda in sports cars, and sensed no danger in playing bridge with American diplomats in their spare time. The Marton family apparently did not even consider that there might be a fourth way - a Hungarian national way - separate from 1944 and the Rakosi regime, fascism and communism, and rubbing shoulders with the United States, such as the one followed by Istvan Angyal , who became a martyr in 1956, after surviving anti-Semitic hardships.
At that time, when there were no more than two thousand cars in Hungary, my parents drove around in a Studebaker with a convertible top. My sister and I felt like princesses in our white, open Studebaker, while the grey crowd stood on the curb waiting for the rickety buses spewing black smoke,
translated back from Daniel Bart's translation.
And a slightly uncomfortable statement:
It was practically self-evident for me that a middle-class, intellectual family in Budapest, which placed great emphasis on the education of its children, could only be Jewish.
And finally:
Our clothes, our way of life, our friends and our work are all Western,
her mother had allegedly said. As for the last two statements, Kati Marton could not have put it more self-revealingly, herself.
Cover photo: Kati Marton at a speech in 2018 (Photo: Getty Images/Cindy Ord)
