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Viktor Orbán Versus the Enlightenment
Orbán, the wily ruler of Hungary — and as a result of his statesmanlike endeavors, rumored to be one of the richest men in Europe, his huge fortune managed (and, formally, owned) by dummy companies and shady middlemen; his family, retainers, flunkeys, and servitors buying up ducal castles and vast landed estates, hotels, harbors, factories, restaurants, tourist resorts, shopping malls, newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, internet journals; his firms building motorways, railway lines, sports complexes and restoring palaces and town halls at the public’s expense — achieved victory running on a very substantive policy platform. Regarding the economy, society, health, education, public transport, trade, taxation, etc. his electoral manifesto consisted of one sentence: “We’ll go on as before.” He does not give interviews and participated in no debates.
This was his message to Hungarians:
Hungary will not allow dark-skinned Muslim refugees or immigrants to enter the country, and will resist all forces of “mongrelization” (masquerading as “multiculturalism,” “internationalism,” and “cosmopolitanism”), which seek to destroy “White Christian Europe”;
Hungary will not disarm in the face of “political correctness,” which is nothing more than godless communism;
“Mongrelization,” or the dilution of Hungary’s racial stock, is pushed by the “international Jew,” George Soros, who bankrolls the anti-national, liberal-Bolshevik Hungarian opposition and who will even harm the only kind of Jew we like, the religious Zionist. Our dear friend, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, agrees with us as he, too, hates the Yids;
The European Union, the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the western press, the social-democratic, liberal, and Green parties are simple tools in the hands of George Soros — that is, of rootless cosmopolitan Jewry;
Pope Francis is an internationalist liberal Bolshevik;
“Gender madness” or “genderism,” radical feminism,” “human-rightsism,” gay marriage, the Istanbul treaty (which prohibits domestic violence against women and children) — all of these will suppress the Christian family and make “faggotry” the new model of morality;
We shall save Europe from itself, which allows Muslim terrorists and hard-left rioters to plunge it into chaos, unlike the true allies of Christianity like Erdoğan, al-Sisi, Berdimuhamedov, Aliyev, and the rest;
The Roma people — just like Muslims — cannot be integrated because they do not like to work. They ought to be disciplined, separated, segregated, and, if need be, resettled;
Freemasons, illuminati, cultural Marxists, stock-exchange speculators, anarchists, and sundry intellectuals wish to convince us to renounce anti-Romanian revanchism and irredentism because they have, of course, no understanding of our souls;
Our main enemies are journalists and human rights groups in the pay of You-Know-Who.
You may think this is a joke. But it isn’t. It is similar, in a way, to the 1930s, but it is a pastiche, a parody.
A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd.
A few days earlier, in another small town, a local woman left the hairdressers’. It was raining, and she did not want to ruin her new hairdo, so she covered her head with a shawl. Within a few minutes, a small crowd had gathered in the street, crying, “Migrant! Migrant!” and began shoving the poor woman against a wall. She protested loudly that she was Hungarian, that she could not speak anything but Hungarian, and that she had lived all her life in that little place. Some passersby recognized her and tried to rescue her, but to no avail. Finally the police came and people calmed down. But her hair was ruined.
There are no refugees in Hungary. The country has a zero-immigration policy, and a huge barbed-wire fence sits at the southern border, patrolled by police and the army. Would-be immigrants are kept in detention. The few black people one sees are American or French tourists.
This quotidian hysteria is taking place against the backdrop of mass hysteria launched by the state media and Orbán himself. The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes. Groups that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration — those looking after Hungarian citizens’ human rights, advocating education and prison reform, representing the homeless and ethnic and religious minorities, etc. — will be persecuted. And this comes on the heels of the shuttering of the biggest newspapers and radio stations and the shanghaiing of television and the largest-circulation internet journal.
You might expect that the opposition tried to block such moves and combat Orbán’s racist propaganda. But no. He was met with a bit of resistance, but was certainly not contradicted.
All opposition parties, including those ostensibly of the Left, have solemnly declared that they would not remove the “race-protecting” border fence and that they reject the EU’s refugee quotas like the Central European right and far right everywhere else (a far right that includes sometimes nominally communist and socialist parties). Protest against round-the-clock Islamophobic and anti-African, racist hysteria has been less and less intense in what remains of the erstwhile left-liberal press, except against the clearly anti-semitic nonsense that presents Soros as the mastermind behind the mass demographic war against white Christian Europe (and against white Israel, of course: Zionism and anti-semitism are becoming perfectly reconcilable).
Luther Blissett » Sun Apr 15, 2018 5:25 pm wrote:I’m curious about any hard evidence for anything, really, even the more moderate liberal stuff. Any claims about Soros seem to fail any kind of paper trail test, it seems.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Open Society money used liberal means to suppress / subvert the far left, if anything.
Empire - Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that globalisation is transforming individual nation states into a system of diffuse national and global institutions of power - in other words a new type of Empire - which raises the possibility for a "multitude" of people to fight it.
Hungary’s Orbán Dismantles Checks & Balances, Fans Anti-Semitism, Draws U.S. ‘Pro-Family’ Praise
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Image from France 24.
The April 8 re-election victory of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party was seen by many Europeans and Americans, including some conservatives, as an ominous sign, given Orbán’s dismantling of institutional limits on his power such as an independent judiciary and free press. In contrast, some U.S. Religious Right leaders celebrated Orbán’s victory as “a beam of hope for Western Christian Civilization” and called him a defender of Hungary’s Christian identity.
Orbán has positioned his opposition to Muslim immigration as a way to defend Europe’s Christian heritage. In December, he declared, “We must defend Christian culture.” At the time, anti-LGBTQ leader Brian Brown gushed over what he called Orbán’s “extraordinary essay on Christian culture, Christmas and the essence of Europe as a Christian continent.”
Orbán’s aggressive actions to consolidate his power have reportedly led some EU leaders to call him “The Viktator.” Orbán himself declared back in 2014, “‘Checks and balances’ is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt and use in European politics.” In 2015 author Colin Woodard warned about Orbán’s “dictatorial tendencies.” Freedom House calls Orbán’s Hungary the “least democratic country” in the EU. The New York Times reported that thousands of people took to the streets in Budapest to protest his victory. “Democracy is just inconceivable without the rule of law and free media,” said one protester.
But Brown and his colleague Allan Carlson at the International Organization for the Family and World Congress of Families called Orbán’s April triumph a victory for “true liberty” and “a victory for friends of the Natural Family around the globe.”
As we have noted before, many Religious Right leaders are happy to overlook a regime’s attacks on freedom of speech, press and religion as long as the government promotes policies that align with “traditional” Religious Right views on abortion, marriage, and sexuality. In their open letter of congratulations to Orbán, for example, Brown and Carlson praise Fidesz’s “exemplary” commitments to “the promotion of natural marriage” and “the protection of children from sexual radicals.”
That’s why so many U.S. Religious Right groups have fawned over Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as he restricts the rights of religious minorities. But Orbán’s case may be even more troubling because Hungary is a member of the EU. The Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin called his victory “a profound challenge for the European Union.”
Orbán won re-election with his party winning a big enough majority in parliament that it can essentially do more rewriting of the country’s constitution. Orbán had threatened “moral, legal and political recourse” against his opponents, and shortly after the election a pro-government magazine denounced 200 Orbán critics, including journalists and civil society advocates, as anti-government “mercenaries.” A further crackdown on civil society is expected to top the government’s agenda in May.
In April, a group of academics, writers and activists signed an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling for stronger action against Orbán:Since he was elected prime minister in 2010, Viktor Orbán has turned public broadcasting stations into propaganda outlets, forced the sale of private stations into the hands of his political allies and taken effective control over the most important courts in the land.
He has also massively impeded the work of the country’s NGOs and independent academic institutions, stuffed the country’s electoral commission with his own cronies and rewritten electoral rules to favor his political party, Fidesz. As a result, leading experts believe that the recent elections in Hungary were less than free and hardly fair.
Meanwhile, the Hungarian government has, over the past months, repeatedly fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. Orbán has used public funds for a mass propaganda campaign that suggested that a Jewish banker is the puppetmaster behind an international conspiracy to destroy Hungary’s Christian culture.
Religious Right leaders from the U.S. and around the world have lavished praise on Orbán’s government, which hosted the World Congress of Families’ global summit in 2017. WCF called Orbán “the hero of pro-family and pro-life leaders.” Brown’s colleague E. Douglas Clark wrote at the time, “Hungary’s heroes are lighting the way for the rest of the world as they protect and strengthen the family, the foundation of their nation and all nations everywhere.” A year before, WCF ally Luca Volontè wrote for Public Discourse, “Hungary has seen a refreshing return to traditional values.”
Peter Sprigg and Travis Weber from the Family Research Council, who were also in Budapest for the World Congress of Families Summit, noted approvingly that the location “was partially chosen because of the pro-family policies of the country’s current Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose government helped organize the World Congress.” FRC wrote about Hungarian evangelicals, “Like us, in addition to working against secular cultural forces, they have to contend with those like George Soros—who is of Hungarian ancestry and continues to push his destructive notions of sexuality through Gender Studies degrees at his Central European University in Budapest.”
A 2017 petition on CitizenGo, a right-wing social media platform on whose board of trustees Brian Brown sits, urges European governments to follow Hungary’s lead and “sweep out” non-governmental organizations funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Among those on the U.S. right celebrating Orbán’s most recent victory was Breitbart, which celebrated Orbán’s win as a defeat for globalists, bureaucrats and George Soros. The Washington Times editorialized on April 17 against the “unelected Eurocrats” and their “politically correct positions.” At National Review, Jack Fowler hailed Orbán’s “Euroweenie-shocking sweep” and said Orbán “can now claim to have the moral and democratic authority of the Hungarian people and others behind his quest.”
In contrast, Yascha Mounk, a senior fellow at New America, called the election “a milestone in the decline of democracy,” saying that Hungary’s trajectory has disproven many political scientists who believed that democracy was “safe” once a country has experienced a few peaceful transfers of power and achieved a measure of economic stability. Mounk writes that too many observers have interpreted the election as conferring democratic legitimacy on Orbán’s regime when in reality Orbán has turned Hungary from a liberal democracy into an illiberal democracy and now “it is effectively a dictatorship with a thin electoral veneer.” Making Mounk’s point at National Review, John O’Sullivan said the size of the victory (just under 50 percent of the vote in multi-party election) “more or less destroys the arguments of his opponents and critics that his governing Fidesz party could win only through authoritarianism, gerrymandering, and the dominance of the media by Fidesz and its business allies.”
Mounk warns that “Orbán’s anti-Semitism is already finding eager imitators in Western Europe.” Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan picked up on Mounk’s theme in a New York magazine article titled “A Democracy Disappears.”
Orbán is a former liberal who attended Oxford on a scholarship funded by philanthropist George Soros, but he moved to the right to get and maintain political power.
James Kirchick, a conservative who supported Hillary Clinton over Trump, wrote about the Orbán government’s Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation in his book The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick writes that the monument is an example of Hungary manipulating its history for political purposes. “This distortion of history obscures both the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Holocaust and the Hungarian state’s active collaboration in mass murder.” Orbán, in defending the memorial, said that the victims of the Nazi occupation, “whether Orthodox, Christian, or without faith, became the victims of a dictatorship that embodied an anti-Christian school of thought.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Orbán was an early supporter of Trump. For his part, Trump admires strongmen like Putin and Orbán. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright notes in her warning about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, “Mr. Trump appears to like bullies, and they are delighted to have him represent the American brand.”
Among those admiring Orbán’s moves are populist leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic. Slovakian Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini slammed the EU for considering some kind of punishment for Hungary after the election.
JackRiddler » 02 May 2018 00:35 wrote:We will have reached Full Onion on the day the Kochs explicitly condemn Soros (instead of merely funding the condemnations anonymously).
"And Soros brags he's funding 'em"
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