We will never get European liberty by demonising rebels

Yesterday, the New York Times published this risible piece on Hungary. As The Slog warned readers some time ago, because there are now free thinkers in charge of Hungarian affairs (and such open minds are banned in the EU) self-styled ‘progressive’ titles like the NYT will follow the US neoliberal/EU fascist line of rubbishing anyone who dares to stand up to globalist colonisation. The Viktor Orban hunting season has thus been officially open since July.

A few points about this article will suffice to wake Americans up:

1. The author of the NYT piece – ‘Philip N. Howard, a professor at the Central European University and at the University of Washington’ – sounds pukka, but he is a neolib appatchik: the Central European University was founded by, and to this day is financed by, that nice liberal philanthropist and traitor to his race, George Soros.

2. Howard is being particularly misleading when he uses this quote: “If there is a paper of record in Hungary, it’s HVG magazine,” said Amy Brouillette, a media analyst and a colleague of mine at the Central European University. “It survived communism, but may not survive Orban.”

In reality, HVG has not been a weekly there of great importance for many years. These days it is steadfastly neoliberal, and therefore not very popular at all in Hungary outside its rigid niche. What Howard fails to note is that HVG’s survival had nothing to do with help from the Opposition to Orban….almost all of whom are former Moscow yes-men who simply switched their loyalty from the USSR to the EUSSR. Rather like Angela Merkel, in fact.

3. Amy Brouliiette is a card-carrying EU enthusiast affiliated to endless Brussels ‘forums’. She is an outspoken critic of the Orban regime which has won two elections on the trot with a massive majority. She reported on April 9th 2014 that ‘Unsurprisingly, the government’s victory was met with widespread domestic and international criticism and concerns over slanted media coverage and restrictive campaign rules’. This does not fit terribly well with the views of independent observers, for example the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which noted that ‘the Fidesz-KDNP coalition would have won the parliamentary elections in any kind of election system – the only question could have been the rate of their winning’.

4. The allegation that Viktor Orban has staged ‘an autocratic crackdown on the nation’s press’ is not so much sparing in its truthfulness as homoaeopathically accurate. I’m not a fan of Orban’s penchant for media controls, but his agenda is clear enough: he doesn’t want too much of the tireless bollocks put out by Bloomberg, CNN, and the New York Times globalising the minds of his countrymen. The Times piece talks of ‘the government starting a new policy of favoring friendly media companies’, but what the ruling Party has actually done is favour Hungarian media over US and Brussels-controlled media. Two wrongs don’t make a right: I accept that. But Hungary’s leader is a passionate opponent of colonisation by the corporatocracy.

5. In 2012, the European Commission threatened Hungary with legal action over its ‘authoritarian measures’. The legal action never materialised, but this is standard stuff from the EC – an organisation which is itself entirely unelected, and routinely ignores election results (as in Ireland and France) until it gets the ‘right’ result.

I’ve said many times before that I regard Viktor Orban as a curate’s egg. But in Hungary, the alternative to him is a hail of rotten eggs from Brussels, neoliberals, US propagandisers, and former Soviet collaborators.The days of white and black hats have, for the time being, gone. Meanwhile, Orban enjoys the support of around two-thirds of Hungarians. That, in case the EC, the Guardianistas and the New York Times liberals have forgotten, is democracy. Choosing a corrupt Luxembourgeois drunk as the new President of Europe because the German Chancellor likes him is not.

Connected from The Slog: The attempts to destabilise the Orban regime