Letter to the Hungarian fan: fuck your mothers! Ultra, not a bitch!

Our editorial staff have close ties to Hungarian football ultras who once led a fast-paced supporter life. The piece below is one of theirs, and we are publishing it unchanged. We add no commentary now, except this: Slava Ukraini!

Letter to the Hungarian fan: fuck your mothers! Ultra, not a bitch!

There was once a T-shirt that summed up in a single sentence everything we thought about the Hungarian ultra mentality: Ultra! Not a bitch! We're tough, but we're not whores. We stand up for our club, for the national team and for our country, but we don't lie down for parties, for power, or for whichever political pimp of the moment tries to seduce the terraces with a free ticket, a bus ride or a few million in state money. This mentality was stamped out of Hungarian supporter culture by the Orbán–Kubatov duo, backed by the monkey business called football financed by the oligarchs of the NER [System of National Cooperation]. And at the end of the process we arrived at a point where the Hungarian ultra who fancies himself tough is nothing more than a last, stinking political whore who lets Putin fuck him in the ass and would screw his own mother for a pat on the head from the NER.

Whistling the Romanian national anthem is still part of the culture of the terraces. It's not nice, it's not right, but they do it too, and we do it too; that's the nature of the relationship between the two countries, that's the nature of the terraces, and it will probably stay that way for as long as Romania and Hungary exist on this earth. You can campaign against it, punish it, deliver moral sermons about it, but it won't achieve much. With the Ukrainians, however, the situation is entirely different.

A true ultra should not whistle the anthem of a country at war, a country under attack — he should stand up for it even if he doesn't otherwise like that country. If for no other reason, then because

one of the most basic, unwritten rules of ultra culture is: you don't kick a man who's already on the ground!

You can clash before, during and after the match, you can go looking for the opponent at the train station, around the stadium, or at some prearranged spot, but even a brawl has rules. Fair play matters even in a mass fight, because without it you're not fighters — you're a pack of cowardly rats, ten of you kicking one unconscious man.

And what did the Hungarian ultras do last night at the Puskás?

They whistled the Ukrainian national anthem.

They kicked the man on the ground, then proudly puffed out their chests as if they'd just won the Third World War. For fifteen minutes they got to enjoy Putin splattering their faces with the mayonnaise shot from his phallus, and the hardcore of the terrace happily swallowed it, because the Boss had taught them that Ukraine is the enemy and Moscow is the ambassador of peace. After a few years of brainwashing, you've reached the point where you're cheering for the empire that raped our grandmothers, dragged our grandfathers off to the Gulag, and in 1956 murdered Hungarians in the streets of Budapest with tanks and machine guns. The overwhelming majority of these fans call themselves nationalists. Logically, that should mean it's doubly forbidden to whistle the Ukrainian anthem, since Ukraine is fighting precisely that Russia which decimated, occupied and enslaved us Hungarians for decades. And yet the nationalist hardcore of Hungarian fans is now, for Moscow's sake, defiling the anthem of a people who are bleeding on our behalf too. That takes a special kind of moral backbone. Or rather, the complete absence of one.

That whistled anthem belongs to the Ukrainian children killed by the Russian army in their own homes. It belongs to those who still lie beneath the concrete rubble of the Mariupol theatre, because they couldn't even be properly buried. It belongs to the civilians in Kherson hunted by Russian drone operators. It belongs to the prisoners of war who were tortured and executed, or even beheaded — among them a Hungarian. It belongs to the families who have nothing left of their home, their lives, and often their child, but a single photograph. And you whistled at them, so that Putin and his governors in Hungary would pat you on the head with satisfaction.

This is not ultra behaviour. This is not hooliganism. This is not rebellion, not defiance, and it is most certainly not national loyalty. This is common lackeydom. You have become the regime's lackeys, tough only for as long as the master allows it. You whistle at whoever you're pointed at, you hate whoever is put in front of you, and you fall silent whenever the master demands silence. Someone who hates on orders from power is not a rebel — he's living scenery at a party rally, at best wearing a black T-shirt.

Yet there was a time when the Hungarian terraces didn't work this way. Back when we still believed Orbán was anticommunist, Ferencváros's fans made it clear to him, in the summer of 2006, that he was not the Boss, and that no one rules over us (our first second-division match, and "who's not jumping is a shitty Újpest fan!"). Then came the Jobbik members, the Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement crowd, and the missionaries of the "Eastern Opening," who slowly but surely explained that the final stop of the great national freedom struggle was actually Moscow's asshole. Orbán elevated the infection into national policy, and Kubatov did the groundwork on the terraces: tame, buy off, push out or silence anyone who didn't want to be an ornamental prop of the NER.

Meanwhile the Hungarian hooligan world kept telling itself its own heroic legend. We chased the Germans away at Keleti station, we showed Millwall where the God of the Hungarians lives, Váci Street practically rippled with us — and truly, those weren't necessarily bad times. Then, sometime in the second half of the 2000s, we got a taste of Dynamo Kyiv's young starters at a prearranged brawl, and they wiped the floor with us. Against the Serbs we hardly dared make a sound, because the people of Crvena Zvezda weren't coming for a photo op. Dynamo's young lads at least showed what standing your ground means. What you just showed is what cowardice means: you didn't act tough against the one who attacked you, but against the one who's already been knocked to the ground and is bombed every day. You didn't send a message to the Russian aggressor — you humiliated the victim, because that's safe, and the Hungarian state will even pat you on the back for it.

There was once something that stood above all this: the Hungarian national team. We stuck by it even when the Dutch thrashed us so badly it became football history, and we were still there when Malta — do you get it, for fuck's sake, Malta! — beat us two-one. There were fights, there was shame, there were chants you couldn't be proud of and no end of stupidity, but there was a line we didn't cross.

Yesterday you crossed it. Not with your heads down, either, but proudly, chests thumping, wrapped in the national colours. You've become Putin's lackeys, and you still think that makes you patriots. But a Hungarian patriot doesn't whistle during the anthem of a people who are fighting our historical oppressor. A Hungarian patriot doesn't regurgitate Moscow's propaganda. A Hungarian patriot doesn't kick a man on the ground just so those in power will call him a good boy for a few minutes. And an ultra, of all people, would never do such a thing.

Because "Ultra! Not a bitch!" was never just a T-shirt slogan — it was a vow: we will not be anyone's whores.

You broke that vow. You lay down for the NER, you spread your cheeks for Moscow, and then, on the terraces of the Puskás, you proudly celebrated that you still had enough strength left to kick a bleeding country. So don't call yourselves ultras. Don't talk about honour, about standing your ground, about nation and loyalty. You sold your honour to a political master, your defiance turned into lackeydom, you turned the nation into Putin's doormat, and your loyalty lasts only as far as the NER's leash allows.

Fuck your mothers!