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On the occasion of the launch of the book by the distinguished sociologist Paul Hollander, Mária Schmidt, Széchenyi Prize-winning historian and Director General of the House of Terror Museum, said that although the first chapter of the book was written more than fifty years ago, it is still highly relevant today, as Western intellectuals are blind to the crimes of communism and refuse to acknowledge them. Rajmund Fekete, Director of the Institute for the Study of Communism, pointed out that communism has not only not been thrown into the dump of history, but has become a legitimate ideology in the West, therefore it is clear that communism is not dead.

At the ceremonial launch of Paul Hollander's book Marx and the Koran, Széchenyi Prize-winning historian Mária Schmidt, Director General of the House of Terror Museum, said that the Hungarian-born author sought to answer the question of why countless Western intellectuals were tempted by the communist ideology and served this anti-human idea in their own way.

She pointed out that the book is still relevant today, because "intellectual blindness" is still present among the ranks of the Western elite in 2024, as it was in 1973, when the sociologist wrote the first chapter of the book. In his view, even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not encourage them to revise their previous views, so they keep saying that the idea is excellent, except that there were problems with its implementation in Eastern Europe.

Mária Schmidt added: Hollander's work is an excellent, revealing book, which takes a hard look at the characteristics of communism, those that still dominate the media of the Western world.

In his laudation, Rajmund Fekete, Director of the Institute for the Research of Communism, said that Paul Hollander was born in Hungary at the time when Joseph Stalin was famishing the Ukrainian people in 1932, which caused millions of people to starve to death in the Soviet Union. At the age of twelve, the author suffered the horrors of the Arrow Cross terror, and then the Soviet occupation of our country, experiencing the horrors of communism first hand: he and his family were declared class enemies and deported from the capital. As a politically untrustworthy citizen, he emigrated from Hungary after the 1956 Revolution and Freedom Fight, first to England and then to the United States, where he taught sociology at the world-renowned Harvard University.

Paul Hollander spent his whole life studying and researching Soviet-style regimes, while he had to realise that while in the West Nazism was - quite rightly - relegated to the dustbin of politics and daily life, the communist regime not only failed to do so, but became a legitimate ideology in the West, and communism did not "die".

Rajmund Fekete highlighted that representatives of the idea are present in the media, universities and politics. While the former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, unveiled a statue of Marx, the Greens quote Lenin, and here at home Anna Donáth, a Momentum politician, relativises the crimes of her grandfather, the grandfather who was once the head of the secretariat of Mátyás Rákosi...

Paul Hollander did not tolerate that the world and the intellectuals give the communist criminals a pardon, and for that we owe him a great gratitude," concluded the Director of the Institute for the Study of Communism. Gábor Balogh, the chief historian of the House of Terror Museum, recalled that it has been 105 years since the Hungarians got to know the first communist dictatorship, the Soviet Republic, which went hand in hand with the Red Terror, violence and nationalisation. Hollander's book also examines this idea and Islamism.

At the roundtable discussion held at the book launch, Dorottya Baczoni, Director of the XX. Century Institute, said that the author showed great courage in putting his thoughts on paper, and that communism was seen as a kind of replacement for religion. He said that Western intellectuals did not want to see the real face of communism, and that in their salons and newspapers they only talked about the excellence of the idea, but the flaw in its execution.

According to Sayfo Omar, a researcher at the Migration Research Institute, anyone who picks up the book is reading the work of a skilled and accomplished scholar. He pointed out that Islamism, like communism, proclaims absolute truth, i.e. it believes that it is the "owner of the Holy Grail".

According to Sayfo Omar, if the author had been born a few decades later, he would not have been able to succeed in England or in the United States, where communist ideology virtually dominates public discourse and intellectuals, and would probably have returned home. In the Western world - most of all - universities sympathise with violent Islamic movements, excuse their violence, see them as oppressed, in fact, and so 'forgive them'.  The researcher said that, in addition to domestic readers, Western intellectuals should definitely read the book, but added that he was under no illusions, suspecting that they would unfortunately refrain from doing so.