This article examines the social context of paramilitary violence
and scrutinizes the motives of the perpetrators in Hungary between 1919 and 1921 in a social context. The atrocities committed against middle-class Jews, the article argues, was primarily motivated by greed rather than ethnic and religious hatred; they were favored by the “retreat of the state”, its loss of monopoly on the means of violence and a collusion between the political and social elites and middle-class organizations, on the one hand, and the paramilitary groups, on the other. The article attributes the defeat of the militia movement in Hungary to its leaders’ lack of political talent and the
slow restoration of law and order under the conservative government of István Bethlen in the early 1920s. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The article explains the rise of popular extremism in post-World
War I Hungary through the story of Iván Héjjas and the Ragged Guard/Rongyos Gárda. This interwar militia is responsible for
anti-Jewish and anti-Communist atrocities in 1919-1923, and it was also deeply involved in the spreading of the anti-Semitic sentiment in the Hungarian countryside. Its case is particularly interesting because of its rejuvenation in 1938, when the Hungarian
government relied on the militiamen in a secret mission in the Sub Carpathian borderlands against the integrity of Czechoslovakia. The paper also investigates the background of some common
anti-Jewish accusations the Rongyos Gárda members propagated, and it tries to understand these arguments in a power framework.