Saturday 30th of March 2024

the orbanisation of the balkans...

orbanorban

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US guest of honour and Fox News host Tucker Carlson was granted a lightning visit by military helicopter to Hungary's 175km (109-mile) high-tech, high-cost razor-wire border fence with Serbia this week. 

He liked what he saw. After praising the fence for being so "clean and orderly", in contrast to the "chaos" on the US-Mexican border, he told his viewers: "It doesn't require a GDP the size of the US, it doesn't require high-tech walls, guns, or surveillance equipment. All it requires is the will to do it."

And he praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for not allowing "this nation of 10 million people to be changed forever by people we didn't invite in and who are coming here illegally". 

To make sure his US viewers understood his message, he contrasted Mr Orban's policies with those of US President Joe Biden. 

"Because the lessons are so obvious, and such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have, and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked: 'It's authoritarian, they're fascists…' There are many lies being told right now, that may be the greatest of all."

Carlson is attending a three-day festival organised by the Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Esztergom, the former Hungarian capital and home of the Roman Catholic Church.

 

MCC is an extremely well-funded school for top students, whom Mr Orban's Fidesz government are carefully grooming to become the country's new right-wing elite. Both Carlson and Mr Orban are due to address the crowds from the main stage. 

Carlson's visit comes at a useful time for Mr Orban.

 

Read more:

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58104200

 

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either way, their way...

One does not have to be woke to fight for freedom. But in these days of confused liberties, when Hitler can appear in drag and freedom is GMO-promoting industries, we need to be careful as to what we do. Below are two views about the situation in Hungary. One is by Rod Dreher, a fanatical Christian who has not realised that religions were the Big Brother of the past, making sure the ants work for the queen. The other is from The Atlantic, where an "opposition leader" is trying to unseat Orban.

 

Either way, the bourgeois play a double game. The establishment does not care whether a Trump or a Biden has been chosen. The people live in their happy choice. Socialism has been defeated. Moneys are being printed. The establishment collects. We, the pseudo-philosophers of the West are privileged to play in the room of delusions in which we argue about ideals of social constructs... 

 

First, here is Rod:

 

 

Maybe it’s because I have a personal intellectual investment in the Hungary story, but I can’t think of anything in ages that has revealed the biases and bigotries of the American Establishment like the reaction to Tucker Carlson’s current visit to Budapest. I hope you’ll forgive me for writing about it again, but liberal and Establishment conservative Twitter is going crazy about it. This is a teaching moment.

I had dinner with Tucker last night in Budapest. We talked about why American conservatives should be interested in Hungary. We agreed that it is an example of a country where — unlike our own — conservatives have successfully fought against wokeness and other aspects of the liberal globalist agenda. It’s a country that has successfully stood up to the cultural imperialism of the European Union, and reminded them that the EU was not designed to be a political entity in which rich and powerful Western European countries laid down the law, and the poorer Central European members obeyed unquestioningly. Here’s something Tucker broadcast about Hungary in 2019; it gives you an idea of why conservatives like Tucker and me are interested in Hungary:

Tucker Carlson on Hungary’s Steps to Boost Birth Rate

“Hungary’s Leaders actually care about making sure their own ppl thrive. Instead of promising the nation’s wealth to every illegal immigrant from the 3rd world they’re using tax dollars to uplift their own ppl, imagine that.”

 

You don’t have to agree with everything that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done in order to come here, study what’s going on, and think about what lessons it might have for American conservatives, who have been routed by the Left and the Establishment Right, which apparently welcomes our new Woke Overlords, and would like to remind them that as trusted public intellectuals, they can be helpful at rounding up others. The key insight about Orban is that he believes that the future of his nation and of Western civilization hangs in the balance. He’s right about that. His various strategies for how to address that existential challenge may be wise or correct, or ineffective or morally wrong, but what sets him apart from American conservative leaders is that he recognizes the nature of the crisis, and is prepared to act boldly to address it. He believes that contemporary Western liberalism has surrendered to a civilizational death wish. I prefer the (possibly flawed) ways that Orban is meeting the crisis than the ways that the American Right is failing to do same.

 

 Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tucker-to-hungary-nixon-to-china/

 

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Here is the Atlantic article by Yasmeen Serhan

 

After 12 years, Orbán claims near-complete control over Hungary’s public funds, its institutions, and its media ecosystem. Hungarian elections are “free in the sense that no one stuffs the ballot box,” Péter Krekó, the director of the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute, told me. “I think we are heading towards a point of no return where it will be practically impossible to replace the government through elections.”

Karácsony, the main challenger to Orbán’s dominance, is undeterred. Speaking from his office in the Hungarian capital, he told me the country’s best—perhaps its only—chance at defeating Orbán lies in opposition parties banding together, as they have since the beginning of the year. While the individual parties in this united coalition each claim only a fraction of the total vote, together they are projected to be neck and neck with Fidesz when the country heads to the polls next spring. For the first time in more than a decade, no one knows what the outcome of the Hungarian elections will be. “It might be the last chance,” Karácsony said. “If we lose now, that would have major consequences.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/07/viktor-orban-autocracy-hungary-election/619351/

 

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Note: I had to post this comment in several bits (and rewrite it 7 times), in order to find and eliminate subliminal blockers from copied articles.

 

hungry for hungary's anger...

 

“Western liberals cannot accept that inside the Western civilisation there’s a conservative, national alternative, which is more succesful in the level of everyday life than the liberal ones.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban correctly named they key reason why our small Central European country is at the center of the world’s attention. Speaking to Tucker Carlson this past week, the prime minister reached millions of American viewers.

We as Hungarians cannot possibly overestimate the importance of this interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Finally American viewers had the opportunity to hear Orban’s own words, without the blatant lies and constant vilifications of the mainstream liberal media. Two years ago, President Donald Trump received Viktor Orban in the White House, but ahead of their meeting, most of the press’s questions were addressed to the president. Our colleagues in D.C. had the opportunity to ask things of Orban himself, but once again it turned out that liberal media is not really interested in facts. They have painted a picture of Orban and they wouldn’t let reality ruin it.

Liberal commentators have gone crazy since Carlson announced that he is in Budapest, and speaking to Viktor Orban. Suddenly it seems that there are more Hungary experts in the United States than Hungarians in Hungary. Most of the articles and tweets have been examples of sloppy journalism, arrogance, and entitlement. Fake news about Carlson’s visit was shared by mainstream outlets proud of their strict fact-checking policies.

One of the most astonishing thing about these ridiculous articles was the idea that U.S. conservatives and Trump supporters can follow Hungary’s example. Here are a few revealing examples: “Authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is everything American authoritarians wish Trump was,” Slate warns. “Tucker Carlson is broadcasting from Hungary because its authoritarian, anti-immigrant leader has set a model for America’s far right,” Insider explained. “U.S. conservatives yearn for Orban’s Hungary,” the Washington Postnotes. “Tucker Carlson’s Orban Lovefest Is a Dark Glimpse of the Future MAGA Wants,” the Daily Beast adds hysterically.

Well this is flattering, isn’t it? We are a Central European country of 10 million and our Prime Minister can apparently change the course of U.S. politics. This is pretty cool.

According to some tweets, the possibility of American conservatives following Hungary’s example is “chilling.” Liberals are terrified by the thought that more and more people realize there’s a successful conservative alternative to their open societies. Illegal immigration can be stopped. Your children don’t have to attend Drag Queen Story Hours. Your identity, your heritage, your family can be protected. You won’t be cancelled if you disagree with liberal dogmas. People can regularly share their opinion via the national consultations and referanda to ensure that the government has the support of the people in the questions which determine the country’s future for several generations. This is all possible!

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-note-from-hungary-we-are-not-a-colony/

 

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Note: Woke isn't socialism. Freedom isn't woke... Conservatism isn't freedom... 

 

freefree

orban effect...

From the New York Times, we get this view on the Victor Orban effect...

 

 

By Elisabeth Zerofsky

 

For one week this summer, Fox News beamed the face of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary into the homes of Tucker Carlson’s 3.2 million viewers. In a two-tiered library adorned with dark wood and the Hungarian flag, Carlson sat across from the prime minister in Budapest with an expression of intense concentration, though he evinced little familiarity with the internal affairs of Hungary. The trip was hastily arranged after Orban agreed to the interview: Carlson dined at the prime minister’s office the evening before the broadcast, and earlier in the week, he was taken in a military helicopter to a tightly controlled area along the country’s southern border, generally off limits to journalists, in the presence of a Hungarian minister. There, Hungary became the idealized backdrop for Carlson’s habitual preoccupations: Thanks to a barbed-wire fence, Hungary’s border area was “perfectly clean and orderly,” free of the “trash” and “chaos” that mark other borders of the world. Consequently, “There weren’t scenes of human suffering.” He did not bring up the fact that civic groups have repeatedly taken the Hungarian government to court for denying food to families held in immigration detention centers.

Carlson’s trip to Hungary was prompted, in part, by a text message from Rod Dreher, a conservative writer. Dreher, who spent the spring and summer there on a fellowship and helped Carlson secure the interview with Orban, understands, as the activist Christopher F. Rufo recently observed, that Carlson doesn’t report the news for American conservatives; he creates it. Bringing Carlson to Budapest was meant to persuade Americans to pay attention to Orban’s Hungary. The effort appeared to be successful: The following week, several Republican senators told Insider, an online news publication, that Carlson’s broadcasts from Budapest had given them a favorable opinion of Orban. In September, Jeff Sessions, the former U.S. attorney general, went to Budapest for a panel discussion on immigration, and Mike Pence traveled there to address a meeting on family and demographic decline, with Orban in the audience. Next year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential annual gathering of conservatives in America, will be held in Budapest.

Dreher doesn’t speak in Carlson’s terms, and has sought to distance himself from Carlson’s vigorous endorsement of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats are replacing white Americans with nonwhite immigrants in order to increase their vote tallies. But Dreher believes, as do many in his circle of right-wing intellectuals, that high levels of immigration threaten the “stability and cultural continuity of the nation.” He frequently points to the French, to the anger and isolation in their immigrant-populated banlieues, and argues that immigrants have a responsibility to adopt their new country’s culture and often decline to do so. He has even suggested that Orban’s restrictions on immigration have kept the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Hungary to a minimum. (While the number of reported incidents is indeed low, Dreher’s analysis belies Orban’s tendency to play to both sides; he has forged a close relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu while demonizing the Jewish liberal benefactor George Soros with anti-Semitic dog whistles at home.) Dreher believes Orban was right to refuse to take in Syrian refugees in 2015. “If you could wind back the clock 50 years, and show the French, the Belgian and the German people what mass immigration from the Muslim world would do to their countries by 2021, they never, ever would have accepted it,” Dreher wrote in his influential blog for The American Conservative. “The Hungarians are learning from their example.”

 

Dreher’s motivations nonetheless differ somewhat from Carlson’s. In his daily blog posts, Dreher writes mainly against what he refers to as “wokeness” — ideas about racial justice and gender identity that he believes lead Americans to hate America and children to reject their parents. After Carlson’s visit, Dreher wrote that he admires Orban because he “is willing to take the hard stances necessary to keep his country from losing its collective mind under assault by woke loonies.” When I asked him what he was hoping to learn during his sabbatical in Budapest, Dreher told me that he wanted to observe “to what extent politics can be a bulwark against cultural disintegration.” Having seen how ineffectual the Republican Party has been, he told me, “I’m wondering, Can it be done somewhere else, and what is the cost, and is the cost worth it?” He didn’t want to force his view on others, he said. But such passivity, he felt, was becoming self-defeating. The turn toward illiberal democracy — a state that rejects pluralism in favor of a narrow set of values — seemed imminent to him. “I realize that we’re at a point now where we have such cultural disintegration in the U.S. that the choice might actually be between an illiberal democracy of the left or an illiberal democracy of the right,” Dreher told me. “And if that’s true, then I want to understand as fully as I possibly can what the implications are.”

 

Dreher arrived in Budapest this spring as the city was emerging from a harrowing stretch of the pandemic. I found him across from the splendidly columned National Museum in a coffee shop where he had quickly become a regular, which offered, in addition to espresso, a bike-repair service and a carefully curated selection of Hungarian wines, the bottles affixed playfully to the walls.

Dreher, 54, is gregarious and personable, traits that he has translated into his posts, in which he intersperses commentary with long quotations from whatever he’s reading at the moment. In a white-tipped beard, thick owlish glasses and a light blue flannel button-down over a black T-shirt imprinted with the Medal of Saint Benedict, he looked like an aging hipster. He addressed the barista in a booming Louisiana drawl. As foreigners, we didn’t have documentation to sit inside; the Hungarian government responded to a steep rise in the Covid death toll the previous month with an aggressive vaccination campaign and vaccination registry that provided citizens with an immunity card granting permission to dine indoors. So we took our coffees to the garden apartment across the street that had been provided to Dreher. It had elegantly arched ceilings and white slipcovered chairs. Several Christian icons leaned against the fireplace mantle, and on a drying rack in one corner white dress shirts alternated with floral printed button-downs.

Dreher’s host for four months was the Danube Institute, a think tank run by John O’Sullivan, a genteel British Thatcherite in his 70s who developed a fondness for Budapest during a long career as a journalist. The institute is financed, indirectly, by the Hungarian government. Nonetheless, Dreher told me that he was entirely free to do as he pleased. “I don’t think Viktor Orban is any kind of saint,” he told me. He did, at times, write critically of Orban’s government. In July, press accounts revealed that the Hungarian government had infected the mobile phones of investigative journalists and political opponents with spyware to track their communications. Dreher condemned the behavior, writing that it “confirmed the worst authoritarian stereotypes” about Hungary. He also criticized Orban’s announcement that he would welcome the construction of a giant Chinese-funded university in Budapest, worrying that it would be an inroad for spies.

Still, the institute is meant to serve as a conduit between Central Europe and the English-speaking world, and the visitors’ program is part of a broader effort by Orban to capitalize on the outsize interest that his Hungarian-style “illiberal democracy” has prompted. He is inviting, at an increasing pace, important conservative thinkers and politicians to Budapest and encouraging them to learn about Hungary, while profiting from the attention that they bring with them. Budapest is to be the “intellectual home,” as he put it, of 21st-century conservatism. Dreher accepted partly on the basis of his most recent book, “Live Not by Lies,” which was based on conversations with Eastern and Central Europeans who’d lived under communism. In it, Dreher argues that leftist identity politics in America is bringing about a cultural revolution, in which the punishments for transgressors echo those of Soviet totalitarianism.

 

The problem of how to stem this perceived cultural revolution has been roiling the Republican Party. At a conference outside Washington in July titled “The Future of the American Political Economy,” attended by dozens of young conservatives, a panel devoted to the ideal role of the state devolved into an uproarious brawl. A few party members argued, as they have for decades, that all government is bad. In response, Julius Krein, the 35-year-old editor of the heterodox right-wing magazine American Affairs, countered with some rough statistics: Conservatives compose a minimal percentage of Silicon Valley; their influence is declining in the corporate world; and they are all but absent from mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. But with nearly half of Congress and possibly more government control in the future, conservative cultural power would come from the state.

On the question of whether politics can serve as a “bulwark” against cultural “disintegration,” Orban had given Dreher much to think about. Orban is the politician he wishes Trump could have been: In 2018, just after re-election, Orban’s government defunded gender-studies programs at universities (then offered by only two colleges in Hungary). “A few years ago, I would have said, No, the government cannot get involved in the freedom of universities,”’ Dreher said. But now, “having seen how incredibly destructive these sorts of programs have been to American society,” he went on, “and how extremely intolerant people who support them are when they’re in power, I’m much more sympathetic.” As Dreher saw it, studying gender theory, which holds that gender is a social construction, led not to the consideration of ideas, but to enforced dogmas that had taken over one institution after another. This year, the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican had flown, for the first time, a rainbow flag during pride month; recently, some Jesuits had come down in favor of referring to God as “they.” Dreher cited a story he’d just read about a university chaplain in Britain who told students it was OK to question new L.G.B.T.Q. policies at the school; the college reported him to the country’s antiterrorism unit for radicalization. In his blog, Dreher often cites examples of what he considers an egregious practice, like in Oregon, where 15-year-olds can be treated with puberty-suppressing drugs or cross-sex hormones without parental permission (the age of medical consent in Oregon is 15), and then extrapolates to half the country: “This is where the Left wants to take all of us,” Dreher wrote in his blog this summer. “Don’t believe them when they say otherwise.” As an Orthodox Christian, he believes that this “gender ideology” denies “Christian anthropology” and “shatters the authority” of the Bible.

What’s more, he maintains, in America those who raise objections to such measures are vulnerable to persecution. “If you resist, you get targeted by a multibillion-dollar industrial complex that has the full support of the U.S. government, high and low culture, the legal establishment, the courts, etc.,” he continued. The Republican Party “seems to exist mainly to ratify whatever the Democrats were advocating about five years ago.” The handful of recent court decisions that favor conservatives have offered little comfort amid a profound societal transformation. In this light, Orban’s latest legal move — restricting the exposure of children under 18 to books or other materials that “promote” homosexuality or transgenderism — was nothing short of heroic, even if the European Union declared it would sue Hungary for violating anti-discrimination statutes. As Dreher wrote: “This is what an actual pro-family, socially conservative government acts like.”

Dreher didn’t seem to be concerned about the violent potential of stigmatization. I told Dreher about Hungarian friends of mine who were helping immigrants and had been subject to lurid harassment by right-wing groups as “traitors” to the nation. In some instances, red stickers were plastered onto buildings by the youth wing of Orban’s party, labeling them as an “organization helping migrants.” One such house had been marked with a yellow star in 1944. “I find that appalling,” Dreher said. “But it’s hard for the American left to see how similar things are happening in America, not from the state, but from activists and institutions.” We were in the airy sitting room of the Danube Institute apartment, and Dreher took off his glasses, leaned forward and rubbed his eyes. This was why he had clung to classical liberalism, he said; he didn’t even believe in it as a philosophy, and yet here he was depending on it. “It’s an ironic and maybe even tragic position to be in,” he said. “If not for the First Amendment, then it’s all about power. And all the power in America now is against people like me.”

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/magazine/viktor-orban-rod-dreher.html

 

 

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