SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014
Note from The Saker: amongst my many blind spots and list of topics I know practically nothing about there is, to my great shame, the topic of Hungarian politics. Therefore please address your comments, criticisms and reactions (and thanks!!!) to American Kulak but not to me. I am most definitely the least qualified to say anything at all about this.
Cheers and enjoy!
The Saker
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Return of the Magyars: Hungary’s President Calls Out the US as Morally and Financially Bankrupt
by American Kulak
With so many developments in Ukraine and now a renewed US war on Syria with the Islamic State as the pretext, it has been easy to overlook important developments in the struggle to restore sovereign nations in Europe. As described in my last guest post here at the Vineyard, Scottish independence vote on Thursday, September 18 has forced Anglo-American mainstream media to cover the topic of ‘separatism’ as a wave spreading from the Scottish Highlands to Spain’s Catalonia. Many mainstream media outlets have repeated ridiculous propaganda about NATO or the EU coming apart and the economic sky falling from a Scottish ‘Yes’ vote (James Bond film reference deliberate in that sentence). Some of the usual Russophobic voices have started whining about ‘pro-Kremlin bloggers’ trolling Washington and London on Twitter with humorous captions supporting Scotland’s independence [https://twitter.com/torrek_info/status/509325448338472960], or the positive statements Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond has made about Vladimir Putin.
[http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/30/alex-salmond-vladimir-putin-remarks]
A Short Disclaimer Regarding Hungary
Today’s topic is the next target for the Empire’s Two Minutes Hate propaganda in Europe (besides Marie Le Pen and the National Front of France): the ancient nation of Hungary and her proud president, Viktor Orban. Let me start by saying that as an American citizen and independent blogger, I have no financial or blood ties to Hungary, nor is my intent to defend all of Budapest’s policies. My purpose in this post is to examine why the Empire increasingly views the Hungarian government with disdain and has sent out its usual NGO and media mouthpieces to trash President Viktor Orban personally and attack his ‘Putinist’ pro-Russian worldview. In doing so I approach this post from the perspective of someone who is a neophyte to Hungarian politics, but not to the overall games the European Union plays to keep its member nations as vassals to what Saker calls the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ Empire.
Why is Budapest Emerging as a Key Russian Ally Within the European Union?
A Millennium of Hungarian History and Its Relevance to Novorossiya
The Hungarians, for those Saker readers who may not be familiar with their history, are descended from the same great migrations out of central Asia in the first millennium AD as the Bulgars, with Russian scholars believing the Magyars came out of a southern Urals homeland east of the Volga steppe. Driven by ancient enemies known as the Pechenegs who alternated between warring with the Orthodox Christian Eastern Roman Empire and serving as mercenaries of Byzantium, the Hungarians settled in the Danube River and Carpathian basins. Their language, like that of the Finns, is non-Indo European and easily exceeds Finnish and Basque as the most widely spoken non-Indo-European language on the European continent. Only a few decades after Prince Vladimir baptized the Kievan Rus in 987, the first Christian monarch of the Magyars Saint Stephen I converted the traditional seven Hungarian tribes to Christianity in the early 10th century. Under Stephen’s successful reign prior to the Great Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople, Hungary prospered as the major trading route between the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantines. Stephen’s younger sister married a Venetian prince who at that time was a key ally of Byzantium, while Stephen’s wife was a Bavarian princess. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_I_of_Hungary]
The historic parallels between Hungary and Rus did not stop with Stephen and the Second Rome, but continued in the 13th century. During those turbulent decades the Mongol Tartars, who subjugated nearly all of Russia, were turned back by Hungarian knights and their Holy Roman Empire allies. Unfortunately, wars in the following two centuries with the Poles and German kingdoms and dynastic struggles weakened the Hungarians, until they succumbed to the Ottoman Turkish advances and were forced into alliance with the Catholic Hapsburgs. This also led to the counter-reformation in the Hungarian lands, with negative consequences for Protestants and Orthodox Christians alike. In 1686 after the Turks decisive defeat by the Polish-led armies at the Battle of Vienna the future Hungarian capital of Buda was liberated from the Ottoman yoke, and the last Ottoman raid from Crimea into Hungary was recorded in 1717. After the 1708 Battle of Trenscen the Hungarians were fully absorbed into the Papist Hapsburg Empire which became known as Austro-Hungary. During World War I the Hungarians suffered huge casualties fighting the Serbs and Russians on behalf of their Hapsburg emperor.
After WWI the key document many Hungarian nationalists to this day regard with bitterness, the Treaty of Trianon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Trianon], was signed in 1920 which cost Hungary 71% of its territory and 66% of its pre-war population -- an even more punitive outcome than the Allied diktats imposed on the Germans in the punitive Treaty of Versailles produced by the same victors. This lost territory included the TransCarpathian region which is today in far southwestern Ukraine, where the Hapsburgs had kept thousands of ethnic Rusyns in concentration camps for returning to Orthodox Christianity or refusing to convert to Papism during the First World War. It is from this territory that ethnic Rusyn and ethnic Hungarian community leaders have issued a joint statement in both languages about their desire to achieve the full autonomy within Ukraine they were promised in 1991 and denied since then by Kiev. In the same early August statement viewable with English subtitles on the Anti-Maidan YouTube channel, the Hungarian and Russian-speaking Rusyn leaders denounced Kiev’s war against Novorossiya and mentioned Rusyn/Hungarian solidarity based on a 1,000 years of peaceful coexistence. This statement was carried on Hungarian television and is viewable here: [http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e14_1408064269]. More background on the Rusyns undergoing Hapsburg and other persecutions from a pro-Rusyn/Russian perspective can be found here: [http://02varvara.wordpress.com/tag/rusyn/].
It’s no accident, that on the heavily Empire-manipulated platform of Wikipedia, the Rusyns are covered under ‘Peoples of Ukraine’ despite the fact that they are spread across borders with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and that the Rusyn autonomy or separatist movement dating back to 1991 is dismissed as a Kremlin project [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyns#Trans-Carpathian_separatist_movement]. In short, regardless of Hungary’s willingness to sell the Kiev regime hundreds of T-72 battle tanks to replace catastrophic Ukrainian losses of armor in recent months, Kiev views Hungarian nationalism with suspicion. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and Galicia Nazis (correctly in my opinion) suspect alongside their Anglo-American globalist patrons that if Ukraine completely implodes Trans-Carpathia could secede like Novorossiya, but with Hungarian rather than Russian sponsorship.
The worst nightmare of the Kiev junta is not only losing Kharkov, Zaporozhe and Odessa regions to Novorossiya, but facing a simultaneous NAF and Russian-allied uprising in the guerrilla-friendly Carpathians backed by Hungarian guns and fighters. Even a peaceful, anti-war and anti-oligarchic Hungarian/Rusyn Maidan would have to be crushed by the Kiev Nazis using brutal methods Washington and Brussels would have trouble excusing or imposing a news blackout over.
One other point is relevant to the paragraph above. Under the notorious 1938 Munich agreement between Nazi Germany and her allies and the Western powers, Hungary made territorial gains at the expense of Czechoslovakia, which was completely carved up between Nazi Germany, Hungary, the pro-Nazi Slovak regime of the time, and the sainted ‘Christ between two thieves’ Poles. This included Carpatho-Ruthenia, which became western Ukraine after the War. The Nazis cultivated the fascist Arrow Cross Party as allies, and had no interest in any maintaining Czech-granted autonomy for any Russophilic peoples as they plotted to invade the Soviet Union. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALmLkFmAF8&src_vid=biy1mH8o8_M&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_105606].
The Hungarians participated in Operation Barbarossa and fought alongside their uneasy Romanian and German allies until the Soviets smashed the Axis lines near Stalingrad in November 1942. The Hungarians like the Bulgarians sought to switch sides as soon as it was obvious Nazi Germany was doomed in mid-1943 but a fascist puppet regime was installed to keep Hungary in the war. The Arrow Cross Nazi puppet state collapsed under Red Army guns in early 1945. In October and November of 1956 a Hungarian uprising against the Soviets was crushed by Red Army tanks sent by Nikita Khrushchev. This uprising had been inspired by broadcasts into Hungary by Radio Free Europe, but the Eisenhower Administration did very little to help the Hungarian freedom fighters besides raise token protests. Washington notably refused to cancel US grain shipments to the Soviet Union at that time and hosted Khrushchev (as pointed out in a recent column by Patrick J. Buchanan) within months of the Soviets killing thousands of Hungarians. The anniversary of the October 23rd uprising became a national holiday in 1989 when Communist regimes across the Warsaw Pact collapsed. Among the young Hungarian activists celebrating their country’s return to the West was a then 26-year-old co-founder of the Hungarian Alliance of Young Democrats, Viktor Orban. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz]
Why President Viktor Orban is Viewed as a Traitor to the Atlanticists and the Empire
James S. Denton is listed as the publisher and editor of World Affairs on his bio. World Affairs is the magazine of Freedom House, one of the many taxpayer-funded NGOs that has been in the business of regime change in Eastern Europe and Eurasia since the CIA and State Department decided to ‘outsource’ these propaganda functions during the mid-1980s. Interestingly enough, despite Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s alleged turn towards ‘Putinism’ Mr. Denton still lists himself as a former adviser to then Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary here: [http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/staff-bios]. Presumably Denton was an advisor to Orban in 1998 when the democratic, anti-Communist reformer became the second youngest Prime Minister in Hungarian history. With a generally positive world economy during the years from 1998 to 2002 Orban’s government was able to cut taxes, abolish university tuition for qualified students, and expand maternity benefits, while attracting German industry with low-cost Hungarian labor. Most importantly to the Empire, in 1999 Hungary joined NATO along with Poland and the Czech Republic over Russia’s objections. That same year Hungary was forced to participate in the war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by participating in a trade embargo against Belgrade.
In recognition of Orban’s loyal efforts on behalf of NATO in 2002 he was awarded the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute’s Freedom Award and awards from the ‘New Atlantic Initiative’ and Germany’s ‘Förderpreis Soziale Marktwirtschaft’. Orban was clearly accepted by the trans-Atlantic elites. But everything started to change in 2010 when his Fidesz returned to power after six years in opposition. Suddenly Orban’s party had a two thirds majority, enough to change the Hungarian constitution, and Orban became a ‘European Hugo Chavez’ in the words of the German Green party politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- ironically, a former 1968 radical whose younger self would’ve appreciated Red Chavismo. This started a wave of propaganda against the Hungarian government alleging that it was crushing the opposition, restricting a free press, in short demonizing Fidesz as the Hungarian version of United Russia and Orban as the Hungarian Putin.
To be fair, Orban did not take the German and Anglo-American/Atlanticist criticism lying down. He denounced German TV propaganda against Hungary, reminding Merkel about Nazi occupation of his country during WWII, and refused to back off the anti-EU rhetoric he had cleverly promoted since at least 2006. Orban’s critics doubled down on their shrill rhetoric accusing him of destroying democracy and minority rights in Hungary, signing sweetheart nuclear energy and gas deals with Russia, and pandering to the ultra-nationalist if not fascist Jobbik party which has won 20% of the vote and made anti-Jewish statements. The same Jobbik party the Empire’s propaganda shills like Jamie Kirchick of the neocon propaganda-staffel ‘Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ alleges is part of a vast Putinist conspiracy to bring right wing parties to power across Europe using covert Kremlin cash. [http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/168942/why-hungarys-jobbik-party-won-while-it-lost]
Orban’s ‘Infamous’ ‘Illiberal’ Speech of July 26, 2014 and Why the Empire (Correctly) Sees It as Treason Against the ‘New World Order’
Which brings us to the present controversies -- not only over Orban’s stubborn refusal together with the Austrians to support more sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, but above all over Orban’s speech this summer denouncing the USA’s dominance of Europe and the EU’s subservience to a declining American Empire. To the Atlanticist elites who had long condemned Orban as an aspiring dictator -- the ‘Mussolini of Hungary’ as the shriveling circulation Newsweek dubbed him -- Orban had declared war on democracy. [http://www.newsweek.com/hungarys-mussolini-vows-make-eu-member-illiberal-state-262127]
For Charles Gati, a Senior Research Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at Johns Hopkins University [http://www.sais-jhu.edu/charles-gati], the sense of betrayal was personal: Orban had been one of his brightest young students in the heady days after the fall of Communism in Hungary. For Orban to describe the United States as a malign cultural and economic influence on Europe was a slap to the face to Gati and others like Freedom House’s James S. Denton who had groomed Orban to be a reliable satrap of benevolent US hegemony. Gati’s op-ed for the same AEI that had once given Orban its Freedom Award was titled, “Putin’s Mini-Me: The Mask is Off”. [http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/08/07/the-mask-is-off/] In his American Interest piece Gati quotes Orbán telling a room in Washington back in 1998: “whatever I know about contemporary politics and history I’ve learned from Professor Gati.” Gati accused his former pupil of issuing an “incoherent” rant against the USA that made no sense in the original Hungarian or when translated into English, full of anti-American “clichés”. Nearly all Western media outlets that covered Orban’s speech delivered to a group of peaceful Hungarian nationalists at a ‘right-wing’ youth summer camp in late July concurred. No one apparently wanted to quote the speech or take it seriously as a patriotic cry from the heart against the decadence and decline of the Western civilization Orban had embraced as a young man.
The Essence of ‘Orbanism’ -- Disillusionment with the West and the Search for a Eurasian Future
So, what exactly did Orban say in Kotscse near Lake Balaton, that was so shocking the press-titutes were terrified to quote it at any length? Here are the most important excerpts, in my opinion, as translated by The Budapest Beacon and preserved here: [http://hungarianspectrum.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/viktor-orbans-speech-at-the-xxv-balvanyos-free-summer-university-and-youth-camp-july-26-2014-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo/]. Orban starts by referring to the defining moment of Hungarian politics, the change or Die Wende of 1989, saying for too long Hungarians have clung to the recent past rather than addressed the 21st century future:
To proceed further, according to a well-recognized analyst, the strength of American “soft power” is deteriorating, because liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence and with this liberal values discredit America and American modernization [This is the so-called ‘cliche’ that Gati found so intolerable, which appears self-evident to the Kulak and millions of other Christian and traditionalist Americans - AK]. Also, the Open Society Foundation [funded by George Soros - AK] published a study not long ago analyzing Western Europe. In this, we could read a sentence which says that Western Europe was so preoccupied with solving the situation of immigrants that it forgot about white working class. Or the British prime minister said that as a consequence of the changes happening in Europe, many became freeloaders on the back of the welfare systems. One of the richest Americans, who was one of the first investors in the company Amazon stated that we are living in a society that is less and less capitalist and more and more feudal, and if the economic system does not reform itself then middle class will disappear, and, as he puts it, “the rich will be attacked by pitchforks”. Therefore, he [Orban is referring to the German-born Amazon.com billionaire investor Nick Hanauer’s article published in Politico here: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.VBJjGfldV8E -AK] thinks a middle-up economic model is needed instead of a top-down model. It is not my intention to interpret these sentences, simply to cite them here in order to show the novelty of these ideas that were impossible to talk about only six years ago.
Or, similarly from America, the number of unemployed youth has drastically risen [Mr. Orban clearly doesn’t buy the ‘cooked’ US unemployment numbers contrasted with the real 16-20% unemployment figures compiled by John Williams published at ShadowStats.com - AK], and in the case of the most promising career options, children from families with affluent families receive a far greater advantage – this is said in the homeland of social mobility [a reference by Orban, perhaps, to the millions of Hungarians who emigrated to the USA prior to and after WWII - AK]. Or to cite something else: another respected analyst said that the internet, understood by the liberal world as the greatest symbol of freedom for many long years, is being colonized by big corporations. His statement suggests that the big question is whether great capitalist companies, meaning international corporations, would be successful in doing away with the neutrality of the internet. Going forward, to quote a development that is both dear and unexpected for us, the English prime minister, who awkwardly avoids his party being identified as Christian Democratic, stands up in before the public stating that Christianity is a core principle of British values, and despite multiculturalism, Great Britain is a Christian country in heart, and this is a fact to be proud of.
Besides suggesting the USA is a power in cultural and economic decline, Orban added blasphemy to heresy by suggesting Hungary could learn much from the rising BRIC nations, plus the Hungarians old Ottoman overlords the Turks who have modernized their economy under the authoritarian and double-dealing (between Iran, Russia, and China on one side and NATO and the Sunni Persian Gulf states on the other) Recep Tayyip Erdogan:
Clearly when Orban says ‘competitive in this great world-race’ he means preserving the Hungarians as a people rather than seeing them slowly replaced by peoples from the Middle East [North Africa, the Levant and Turkish Kurdistan all seem primed for population explosions and lengthy unrest in the years to come- AK] or elsewhere during this century. Just in case there was any confusion about what Orban meant, his reference to the ‘white working class’ of Great Britain should make it clear: the purpose of a sovereign nation is the health and long-term well-being of the majority population of that nation, not globalist ‘values’ or economic growth divorced from human needs. While I am personally not a fan of Alexandr Dugin, one most acknowledge this is much closer to Duginism and Eurasianism than Orban’s old Atlanticist, pro-EU positions. Orban’s use of the phrase ‘non-liberal state’ is in fact, almost pure Duginism, perhaps taken straight from the pages of Dugin’s book The 4th Political Theory by an Orban speechwriter. In the book, Dugin contends that after three centuries liberalism dating to the acts of tolerance that ended Europe’s bloody 30 Years Wars and restored the British crown after Cromwell’s revolt, liberalism has exhausted itself. [You can watch English subtitles of Dugin summarizing his book in less than ten minutes, and describing how many European languages it has been translated into here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrnJKf-hhE]
Orban Vows to Resist the Empire’s Colored Revolution and ‘NGO-istan’ Tactics
Consequently, what is happening today in Hungary can interpreted as an attempt of the respective political leadership to harmonize relationship between the interests and achievement of individuals – that needs to be acknowledged – with interests and achievements of the community, and the nation. Meaning, that Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc.. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.
Is Orban a Eurasianist?
Like Dugin, like Igor Strelkov, and like Vladimir Putin, Orban calls out a fifth column in his country. These are, of course, the same Rockefeller and Fortune 500 funded foundations, think tanks, and NGOs that cultivated Central European politicans like... former AEI employee and husband to the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum Radek Sikorski. [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/22/poland-foreign-minister-alliance-us-worthless] And former Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who has called the EU the 4th Reich (German Continental economic dominance under Washington’s tutelage
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/cyprus/9948545/Southern-Europe-lies-prostrate-before-the-German-imperium.html]) and compared Brussels bureaucrats to their Soviet predecessors [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8289920.stm]. And of course, the AEI and Johns Hopkins ‘educated’ Viktor Orban, who now defies the EU.
Whereas Sikorski was caught on tape bitterly telling a fellow Polish politician when he thought no one was listening that Poland has sexually serviced the US and received nothing in return; Orban has turned on his former handlers and now calls them out for what they are -- foreign agents of influence and globalist occupiers of his country:
Now the only question that remains, honorable ladies and gentlemen, and it is a question that I am not entitled to answer, that in times like this, when anything could happen, should we be afraid, or should we instead be hopeful? Because the present order of the world is not exactly to our taste, that this future, although it is uncertain, it could even cause huge trouble, it also holds opportunities and developments for our Hungarian nation. So instead of seclusion, fear and withdrawal I recommend courage, prospective thinking, rational, butbrave action to the Hungarian communities in the Carpathian basin [the old Rusyn lands - AK] but also throughout the world. As anything can happen, it can easily happen that our time will come. Thank you for your honorific attention.
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian Cheers and enjoy!
The Saker
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Return of the Magyars: Hungary’s President Calls Out the US as Morally and Financially Bankrupt
by American Kulak
With so many developments in Ukraine and now a renewed US war on Syria with the Islamic State as the pretext, it has been easy to overlook important developments in the struggle to restore sovereign nations in Europe. As described in my last guest post here at the Vineyard, Scottish independence vote on Thursday, September 18 has forced Anglo-American mainstream media to cover the topic of ‘separatism’ as a wave spreading from the Scottish Highlands to Spain’s Catalonia. Many mainstream media outlets have repeated ridiculous propaganda about NATO or the EU coming apart and the economic sky falling from a Scottish ‘Yes’ vote (James Bond film reference deliberate in that sentence). Some of the usual Russophobic voices have started whining about ‘pro-Kremlin bloggers’ trolling Washington and London on Twitter with humorous captions supporting Scotland’s independence [https://twitter.com/torrek_info/status/509325448338472960], or the positive statements Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond has made about Vladimir Putin.
[http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/30/alex-salmond-vladimir-putin-remarks]
A Short Disclaimer Regarding Hungary
Today’s topic is the next target for the Empire’s Two Minutes Hate propaganda in Europe (besides Marie Le Pen and the National Front of France): the ancient nation of Hungary and her proud president, Viktor Orban. Let me start by saying that as an American citizen and independent blogger, I have no financial or blood ties to Hungary, nor is my intent to defend all of Budapest’s policies. My purpose in this post is to examine why the Empire increasingly views the Hungarian government with disdain and has sent out its usual NGO and media mouthpieces to trash President Viktor Orban personally and attack his ‘Putinist’ pro-Russian worldview. In doing so I approach this post from the perspective of someone who is a neophyte to Hungarian politics, but not to the overall games the European Union plays to keep its member nations as vassals to what Saker calls the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ Empire.
Why is Budapest Emerging as a Key Russian Ally Within the European Union?
A Millennium of Hungarian History and Its Relevance to Novorossiya
The Hungarians, for those Saker readers who may not be familiar with their history, are descended from the same great migrations out of central Asia in the first millennium AD as the Bulgars, with Russian scholars believing the Magyars came out of a southern Urals homeland east of the Volga steppe. Driven by ancient enemies known as the Pechenegs who alternated between warring with the Orthodox Christian Eastern Roman Empire and serving as mercenaries of Byzantium, the Hungarians settled in the Danube River and Carpathian basins. Their language, like that of the Finns, is non-Indo European and easily exceeds Finnish and Basque as the most widely spoken non-Indo-European language on the European continent. Only a few decades after Prince Vladimir baptized the Kievan Rus in 987, the first Christian monarch of the Magyars Saint Stephen I converted the traditional seven Hungarian tribes to Christianity in the early 10th century. Under Stephen’s successful reign prior to the Great Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople, Hungary prospered as the major trading route between the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantines. Stephen’s younger sister married a Venetian prince who at that time was a key ally of Byzantium, while Stephen’s wife was a Bavarian princess. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_I_of_Hungary]
The historic parallels between Hungary and Rus did not stop with Stephen and the Second Rome, but continued in the 13th century. During those turbulent decades the Mongol Tartars, who subjugated nearly all of Russia, were turned back by Hungarian knights and their Holy Roman Empire allies. Unfortunately, wars in the following two centuries with the Poles and German kingdoms and dynastic struggles weakened the Hungarians, until they succumbed to the Ottoman Turkish advances and were forced into alliance with the Catholic Hapsburgs. This also led to the counter-reformation in the Hungarian lands, with negative consequences for Protestants and Orthodox Christians alike. In 1686 after the Turks decisive defeat by the Polish-led armies at the Battle of Vienna the future Hungarian capital of Buda was liberated from the Ottoman yoke, and the last Ottoman raid from Crimea into Hungary was recorded in 1717. After the 1708 Battle of Trenscen the Hungarians were fully absorbed into the Papist Hapsburg Empire which became known as Austro-Hungary. During World War I the Hungarians suffered huge casualties fighting the Serbs and Russians on behalf of their Hapsburg emperor.
After WWI the key document many Hungarian nationalists to this day regard with bitterness, the Treaty of Trianon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Trianon], was signed in 1920 which cost Hungary 71% of its territory and 66% of its pre-war population -- an even more punitive outcome than the Allied diktats imposed on the Germans in the punitive Treaty of Versailles produced by the same victors. This lost territory included the TransCarpathian region which is today in far southwestern Ukraine, where the Hapsburgs had kept thousands of ethnic Rusyns in concentration camps for returning to Orthodox Christianity or refusing to convert to Papism during the First World War. It is from this territory that ethnic Rusyn and ethnic Hungarian community leaders have issued a joint statement in both languages about their desire to achieve the full autonomy within Ukraine they were promised in 1991 and denied since then by Kiev. In the same early August statement viewable with English subtitles on the Anti-Maidan YouTube channel, the Hungarian and Russian-speaking Rusyn leaders denounced Kiev’s war against Novorossiya and mentioned Rusyn/Hungarian solidarity based on a 1,000 years of peaceful coexistence. This statement was carried on Hungarian television and is viewable here: [http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e14_1408064269]. More background on the Rusyns undergoing Hapsburg and other persecutions from a pro-Rusyn/Russian perspective can be found here: [http://02varvara.wordpress.com/tag/rusyn/].
It’s no accident, that on the heavily Empire-manipulated platform of Wikipedia, the Rusyns are covered under ‘Peoples of Ukraine’ despite the fact that they are spread across borders with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and that the Rusyn autonomy or separatist movement dating back to 1991 is dismissed as a Kremlin project [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyns#Trans-Carpathian_separatist_movement]. In short, regardless of Hungary’s willingness to sell the Kiev regime hundreds of T-72 battle tanks to replace catastrophic Ukrainian losses of armor in recent months, Kiev views Hungarian nationalism with suspicion. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and Galicia Nazis (correctly in my opinion) suspect alongside their Anglo-American globalist patrons that if Ukraine completely implodes Trans-Carpathia could secede like Novorossiya, but with Hungarian rather than Russian sponsorship.
The worst nightmare of the Kiev junta is not only losing Kharkov, Zaporozhe and Odessa regions to Novorossiya, but facing a simultaneous NAF and Russian-allied uprising in the guerrilla-friendly Carpathians backed by Hungarian guns and fighters. Even a peaceful, anti-war and anti-oligarchic Hungarian/Rusyn Maidan would have to be crushed by the Kiev Nazis using brutal methods Washington and Brussels would have trouble excusing or imposing a news blackout over.
One other point is relevant to the paragraph above. Under the notorious 1938 Munich agreement between Nazi Germany and her allies and the Western powers, Hungary made territorial gains at the expense of Czechoslovakia, which was completely carved up between Nazi Germany, Hungary, the pro-Nazi Slovak regime of the time, and the sainted ‘Christ between two thieves’ Poles. This included Carpatho-Ruthenia, which became western Ukraine after the War. The Nazis cultivated the fascist Arrow Cross Party as allies, and had no interest in any maintaining Czech-granted autonomy for any Russophilic peoples as they plotted to invade the Soviet Union. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALmLkFmAF8&src_vid=biy1mH8o8_M&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_105606].
The Hungarians participated in Operation Barbarossa and fought alongside their uneasy Romanian and German allies until the Soviets smashed the Axis lines near Stalingrad in November 1942. The Hungarians like the Bulgarians sought to switch sides as soon as it was obvious Nazi Germany was doomed in mid-1943 but a fascist puppet regime was installed to keep Hungary in the war. The Arrow Cross Nazi puppet state collapsed under Red Army guns in early 1945. In October and November of 1956 a Hungarian uprising against the Soviets was crushed by Red Army tanks sent by Nikita Khrushchev. This uprising had been inspired by broadcasts into Hungary by Radio Free Europe, but the Eisenhower Administration did very little to help the Hungarian freedom fighters besides raise token protests. Washington notably refused to cancel US grain shipments to the Soviet Union at that time and hosted Khrushchev (as pointed out in a recent column by Patrick J. Buchanan) within months of the Soviets killing thousands of Hungarians. The anniversary of the October 23rd uprising became a national holiday in 1989 when Communist regimes across the Warsaw Pact collapsed. Among the young Hungarian activists celebrating their country’s return to the West was a then 26-year-old co-founder of the Hungarian Alliance of Young Democrats, Viktor Orban. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz]
Why President Viktor Orban is Viewed as a Traitor to the Atlanticists and the Empire
James S. Denton is listed as the publisher and editor of World Affairs on his bio. World Affairs is the magazine of Freedom House, one of the many taxpayer-funded NGOs that has been in the business of regime change in Eastern Europe and Eurasia since the CIA and State Department decided to ‘outsource’ these propaganda functions during the mid-1980s. Interestingly enough, despite Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s alleged turn towards ‘Putinism’ Mr. Denton still lists himself as a former adviser to then Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary here: [http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/staff-bios]. Presumably Denton was an advisor to Orban in 1998 when the democratic, anti-Communist reformer became the second youngest Prime Minister in Hungarian history. With a generally positive world economy during the years from 1998 to 2002 Orban’s government was able to cut taxes, abolish university tuition for qualified students, and expand maternity benefits, while attracting German industry with low-cost Hungarian labor. Most importantly to the Empire, in 1999 Hungary joined NATO along with Poland and the Czech Republic over Russia’s objections. That same year Hungary was forced to participate in the war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by participating in a trade embargo against Belgrade.
In recognition of Orban’s loyal efforts on behalf of NATO in 2002 he was awarded the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute’s Freedom Award and awards from the ‘New Atlantic Initiative’ and Germany’s ‘Förderpreis Soziale Marktwirtschaft’. Orban was clearly accepted by the trans-Atlantic elites. But everything started to change in 2010 when his Fidesz returned to power after six years in opposition. Suddenly Orban’s party had a two thirds majority, enough to change the Hungarian constitution, and Orban became a ‘European Hugo Chavez’ in the words of the German Green party politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- ironically, a former 1968 radical whose younger self would’ve appreciated Red Chavismo. This started a wave of propaganda against the Hungarian government alleging that it was crushing the opposition, restricting a free press, in short demonizing Fidesz as the Hungarian version of United Russia and Orban as the Hungarian Putin.
To be fair, Orban did not take the German and Anglo-American/Atlanticist criticism lying down. He denounced German TV propaganda against Hungary, reminding Merkel about Nazi occupation of his country during WWII, and refused to back off the anti-EU rhetoric he had cleverly promoted since at least 2006. Orban’s critics doubled down on their shrill rhetoric accusing him of destroying democracy and minority rights in Hungary, signing sweetheart nuclear energy and gas deals with Russia, and pandering to the ultra-nationalist if not fascist Jobbik party which has won 20% of the vote and made anti-Jewish statements. The same Jobbik party the Empire’s propaganda shills like Jamie Kirchick of the neocon propaganda-staffel ‘Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ alleges is part of a vast Putinist conspiracy to bring right wing parties to power across Europe using covert Kremlin cash. [http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/168942/why-hungarys-jobbik-party-won-while-it-lost]
Orban’s ‘Infamous’ ‘Illiberal’ Speech of July 26, 2014 and Why the Empire (Correctly) Sees It as Treason Against the ‘New World Order’
Which brings us to the present controversies -- not only over Orban’s stubborn refusal together with the Austrians to support more sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, but above all over Orban’s speech this summer denouncing the USA’s dominance of Europe and the EU’s subservience to a declining American Empire. To the Atlanticist elites who had long condemned Orban as an aspiring dictator -- the ‘Mussolini of Hungary’ as the shriveling circulation Newsweek dubbed him -- Orban had declared war on democracy. [http://www.newsweek.com/hungarys-mussolini-vows-make-eu-member-illiberal-state-262127]
For Charles Gati, a Senior Research Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at Johns Hopkins University [http://www.sais-jhu.edu/charles-gati], the sense of betrayal was personal: Orban had been one of his brightest young students in the heady days after the fall of Communism in Hungary. For Orban to describe the United States as a malign cultural and economic influence on Europe was a slap to the face to Gati and others like Freedom House’s James S. Denton who had groomed Orban to be a reliable satrap of benevolent US hegemony. Gati’s op-ed for the same AEI that had once given Orban its Freedom Award was titled, “Putin’s Mini-Me: The Mask is Off”. [http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/08/07/the-mask-is-off/] In his American Interest piece Gati quotes Orbán telling a room in Washington back in 1998: “whatever I know about contemporary politics and history I’ve learned from Professor Gati.” Gati accused his former pupil of issuing an “incoherent” rant against the USA that made no sense in the original Hungarian or when translated into English, full of anti-American “clichés”. Nearly all Western media outlets that covered Orban’s speech delivered to a group of peaceful Hungarian nationalists at a ‘right-wing’ youth summer camp in late July concurred. No one apparently wanted to quote the speech or take it seriously as a patriotic cry from the heart against the decadence and decline of the Western civilization Orban had embraced as a young man.
The Essence of ‘Orbanism’ -- Disillusionment with the West and the Search for a Eurasian Future
So, what exactly did Orban say in Kotscse near Lake Balaton, that was so shocking the press-titutes were terrified to quote it at any length? Here are the most important excerpts, in my opinion, as translated by The Budapest Beacon and preserved here: [http://hungarianspectrum.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/viktor-orbans-speech-at-the-xxv-balvanyos-free-summer-university-and-youth-camp-july-26-2014-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo/]. Orban starts by referring to the defining moment of Hungarian politics, the change or Die Wende of 1989, saying for too long Hungarians have clung to the recent past rather than addressed the 21st century future:
My speech today is not connected to the elections. Our acting president introduced us as regime changers, and did it by recalling the regime change. This represents well that for our generation the regime change is the generational experience to which we compare everything, against which we measure everything, from where we start to define everything that happens around us. It seems natural, although it is rather a disadvantage for us, not an advantage.As speeches go, this is hardly controversial stuff. But what follows is what has angered Washington’s propagandists of unshakable Western hegemony and unending Anglo-American dominance:
I would suggest to shortly remind ourselves that in the 20th Century there have been three major world-regime changes. At the end of World War I, at the end of World War II, and in 1990. The common points in these were – I might have mentioned this here once – that when the changes manifested it was clear for all of us that we are going to live in a different world overnight. Let’s say it was very clear here after Trianon [the previously mentioned Hungarian ‘Versailles diktat’ of 1920 that cut off Budapest from ancient lands - AK], just as it was in Budapest after World War II as well. If the people looked around and saw the invading Soviet troops they knew that a new world was about to begin. In ’90 when we succeeded in breaking and displacing the communists, it was clear after the first parliamentary elections that a new world had arrived for us: the wall in Berlin collapsed, elections were held and this is another future.Now I must quote Orban at length, for he gets to the essence of his statement -- ‘the West’ as a unitary entity led by the USA with a [soon to be Scotland-less] United Kingdom sidekick looks washed up, and it’s Davos-attending Western politicians and tycoons themselves who are saying so. Orban also -- shock, horror -- dismisses the so-called ‘economic recovery’ in the United States since 2008 as the middle class destroying, Federal Reserve-pumped up and fake stats fraud that it is:
The statement intended to be the basic point of my talk here is that the changes in the world nowadays have the similar value and weight. We can identify its manifestation – that point when it became clear – as the financial crisis of 2008 or rather the Western financial crisis. And the importance of this change is less obvious because people sense it in a different way as the previous three. It was unclear in 2008 during the huge Western financial collapse that we are going to live in a different world from now on. The shift is not that sharp as in the case of the three previous world regime changes and it somehow slowly resolved in our minds, as the fog sets on the land. If we look around and analyze the things happening around us, for six years this has been a different world from the one we lived in. And if we project the processes for the future – which always has a risk – it is a reasonable intellectual exercise, and we see well that the changes will only have a bigger impact.Very briefly: In America, the President of the US has made numerous and repeated statements regarding how America has been engulfed by cynicism, and the task for American society and the American government is to declare war on cynicism originating from the financial sector. Before 2008, such a statement would have resulted in exclusion from gentlemanlike international discourse, additionally because of the characteristics of the financial system, it would probably have even been tainted with as being sinister, making any utterance of such sentences extremely perilous. Contrary to this, these ideas constantly appear in the American press as of late. The US president says that if a hardworking American constantly has to choose between career and family, that America will lose its place in the world economy. Or the President openly speaks about economic patriotism. He [Obama] says such sentences that would still earn beating and stoning in today’s provincial Hungarian public life. For example, he openly speaks about how companies employing foreigners should pay their fair share in taxes. Or he openly speaks about how companies employing Americans should be supported before anyone else. These are all voices, ideas and sentences that would have been unimaginable six or eight years earlier.
Well, Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen, for the sake of illustrating the deepness of this change, without any particular order, I assembled a few sentences, ideas from the Western World, as well as one or two from the Eastern World, too, that are stunning. If we assessed them through the lens of the pre-2008 liberal worldview, we would be shocked. Yet if we do not view it that way but understand from these sentences how long a way we have gone in terms of public speech, topics and their articulations in these last six years, then these sentences to be quoted will help us understand how profound the change is that is taking place in the world today.
To proceed further, according to a well-recognized analyst, the strength of American “soft power” is deteriorating, because liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence and with this liberal values discredit America and American modernization [This is the so-called ‘cliche’ that Gati found so intolerable, which appears self-evident to the Kulak and millions of other Christian and traditionalist Americans - AK]. Also, the Open Society Foundation [funded by George Soros - AK] published a study not long ago analyzing Western Europe. In this, we could read a sentence which says that Western Europe was so preoccupied with solving the situation of immigrants that it forgot about white working class. Or the British prime minister said that as a consequence of the changes happening in Europe, many became freeloaders on the back of the welfare systems. One of the richest Americans, who was one of the first investors in the company Amazon stated that we are living in a society that is less and less capitalist and more and more feudal, and if the economic system does not reform itself then middle class will disappear, and, as he puts it, “the rich will be attacked by pitchforks”. Therefore, he [Orban is referring to the German-born Amazon.com billionaire investor Nick Hanauer’s article published in Politico here: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.VBJjGfldV8E -AK] thinks a middle-up economic model is needed instead of a top-down model. It is not my intention to interpret these sentences, simply to cite them here in order to show the novelty of these ideas that were impossible to talk about only six years ago.
Or, similarly from America, the number of unemployed youth has drastically risen [Mr. Orban clearly doesn’t buy the ‘cooked’ US unemployment numbers contrasted with the real 16-20% unemployment figures compiled by John Williams published at ShadowStats.com - AK], and in the case of the most promising career options, children from families with affluent families receive a far greater advantage – this is said in the homeland of social mobility [a reference by Orban, perhaps, to the millions of Hungarians who emigrated to the USA prior to and after WWII - AK]. Or to cite something else: another respected analyst said that the internet, understood by the liberal world as the greatest symbol of freedom for many long years, is being colonized by big corporations. His statement suggests that the big question is whether great capitalist companies, meaning international corporations, would be successful in doing away with the neutrality of the internet. Going forward, to quote a development that is both dear and unexpected for us, the English prime minister, who awkwardly avoids his party being identified as Christian Democratic, stands up in before the public stating that Christianity is a core principle of British values, and despite multiculturalism, Great Britain is a Christian country in heart, and this is a fact to be proud of.
Besides suggesting the USA is a power in cultural and economic decline, Orban added blasphemy to heresy by suggesting Hungary could learn much from the rising BRIC nations, plus the Hungarians old Ottoman overlords the Turks who have modernized their economy under the authoritarian and double-dealing (between Iran, Russia, and China on one side and NATO and the Sunni Persian Gulf states on the other) Recep Tayyip Erdogan:
Everyone was only talking about competition in the world economy. Globalization on the international scale made it necessary to do a lot of talking, writing and analysis about it, and this phenomenon is known in details. We can more or less know why a major economic interest group, for example the European Union, is competitive, or why it is losing its competitiveness. However, according to many, and I belong to them, today this is not the principal question. It remains an important question. As long as people live off money and economy, this will remain an important question. Yet there is an even more important race. I would articulate this as a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful. As the state is nothing else but a method of organizing a community, a community that in our case sometimes coincides with our country’s borders, sometimes not, but I will get back to that, the defining aspect of today’s world can be articulated as a race to figure out a way of organizing communities, a state that is most capable of making a nation competitive. This is why, Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen a trending topic in thinking is understanding systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet making nations successful. Today, the stars of international analyses are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia. And I believe that our political community rightly anticipated this challenge, and if we think back on what we did in the last four years, and what we are going to do in the following four years, than it really can be interpreted from this angle. We are searching for and we are doing our best to find – parting ways with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them – the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.By great world race and dismissing mere economic competition as the only deciding factor of the 21st century, Orban was hinting strongly that the first duty of any Hungarian government is the preservation of the Hungarian peoples, wherever they may live. Because some Jobbik members who may indeed be fascists speak this way, as do the Ukrainian Nazis who imagine the Cossacks of Rostov or Krasnodar oblasts don’t realize that they are Ukrainians, it’s easy to label such ideas ‘fascist’. But Hungary, as many observers of its demographics have pointed out, is a nation experiencing or facing severe graying and population decline.
Clearly when Orban says ‘competitive in this great world-race’ he means preserving the Hungarians as a people rather than seeing them slowly replaced by peoples from the Middle East [North Africa, the Levant and Turkish Kurdistan all seem primed for population explosions and lengthy unrest in the years to come- AK] or elsewhere during this century. Just in case there was any confusion about what Orban meant, his reference to the ‘white working class’ of Great Britain should make it clear: the purpose of a sovereign nation is the health and long-term well-being of the majority population of that nation, not globalist ‘values’ or economic growth divorced from human needs. While I am personally not a fan of Alexandr Dugin, one most acknowledge this is much closer to Duginism and Eurasianism than Orban’s old Atlanticist, pro-EU positions. Orban’s use of the phrase ‘non-liberal state’ is in fact, almost pure Duginism, perhaps taken straight from the pages of Dugin’s book The 4th Political Theory by an Orban speechwriter. In the book, Dugin contends that after three centuries liberalism dating to the acts of tolerance that ended Europe’s bloody 30 Years Wars and restored the British crown after Cromwell’s revolt, liberalism has exhausted itself. [You can watch English subtitles of Dugin summarizing his book in less than ten minutes, and describing how many European languages it has been translated into here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrnJKf-hhE]
Orban Vows to Resist the Empire’s Colored Revolution and ‘NGO-istan’ Tactics
Consequently, what is happening today in Hungary can interpreted as an attempt of the respective political leadership to harmonize relationship between the interests and achievement of individuals – that needs to be acknowledged – with interests and achievements of the community, and the nation. Meaning, that Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc.. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.
Is Orban a Eurasianist?
Like Dugin, like Igor Strelkov, and like Vladimir Putin, Orban calls out a fifth column in his country. These are, of course, the same Rockefeller and Fortune 500 funded foundations, think tanks, and NGOs that cultivated Central European politicans like... former AEI employee and husband to the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum Radek Sikorski. [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/22/poland-foreign-minister-alliance-us-worthless] And former Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who has called the EU the 4th Reich (German Continental economic dominance under Washington’s tutelage
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/cyprus/9948545/Southern-Europe-lies-prostrate-before-the-German-imperium.html]) and compared Brussels bureaucrats to their Soviet predecessors [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8289920.stm]. And of course, the AEI and Johns Hopkins ‘educated’ Viktor Orban, who now defies the EU.
Whereas Sikorski was caught on tape bitterly telling a fellow Polish politician when he thought no one was listening that Poland has sexually serviced the US and received nothing in return; Orban has turned on his former handlers and now calls them out for what they are -- foreign agents of influence and globalist occupiers of his country:
Now, Hungarian NGO landscape shows a very particular image. Ideally a civil politician as opposed to professional is an individual who is organizing bottom-up, financially independent and the nature of his work is voluntary. If we look at civil organizations in Hungary, the one that appears before public, now debates around the Norwegian Fund brought this on the surface, then what I will see is that we have to deal with paid political activists here. And these political activists are moreover political activists paid by foreigners. Activists paid by definite political circles of interest. It is hard to imagine that these circles have a social agenda. It is more likely that they would like to exercise influence through this system of instruments on Hungarian public life. It is vital, therefore, that if we would like to reorganize our nation state instead of the liberal state, that we should make it clear, that these are not civilians coming against us, opposing us, but political activists attempting to promote foreign interests. Therefore it is very apt that a committee was being formed in the Hungarian parliament that deals with constant monitoring, recording and publishing foreign attempts to gain influence, so that all of us here, you as well will be aware of who are the characters behind the masks.Since this piece has been exceptionally lengthy even by the Vineyard’s standards, I will leave the Saker and his readers with Orban’s conclusion for his compatriots who happen to live outside Hungary’s present borders -- in what is a clear message to Kiev, Bucharest and ultimately Washington that national identity won’t be crushed under EUro-globalism:
Now the only question that remains, honorable ladies and gentlemen, and it is a question that I am not entitled to answer, that in times like this, when anything could happen, should we be afraid, or should we instead be hopeful? Because the present order of the world is not exactly to our taste, that this future, although it is uncertain, it could even cause huge trouble, it also holds opportunities and developments for our Hungarian nation. So instead of seclusion, fear and withdrawal I recommend courage, prospective thinking, rational, butbrave action to the Hungarian communities in the Carpathian basin [the old Rusyn lands - AK] but also throughout the world. As anything can happen, it can easily happen that our time will come. Thank you for your honorific attention.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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