I will continue with the same theme: U.S.-Hungarian relations, but this time in a lighthearted way. I discovered a short and very funny opinion piece in HVG which I would like to share with those readers of Hungarian Spectrum who haven’t yet mastered the intricacies of the Hungarian language. I just hope that my limited skills as a translator will be sufficient to capture the flavor of this short spoof. The author is Tamás Gomperz, a regular at HVG. I might add that a lot of right-wingers and Jobbik voters don’t seem to have a sense of humor. When Mandiner republished it, its readership (which unlike the editorial board is anything but moderately conservative) accused Gomperz of all sorts of evil intentions.
The quotation at the beginning of the article should be familiar to the readers since I cited it a couple of days ago. It is one of László Kövér’s ruminations. So, here goes.
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YANKEES, COME HERE!
We would be okay without Europe but only if the Americans came instead
“If that is the future of the European Union, then it is worthwhile to contemplate that perhaps we should slowly, carefully back out.” It’s hard to remember the last time that this deeply tormented man said anything intelligible or did anything useful, but now it seems that at last he wants to change his doleful course. But one should not take him terribly seriously and nobody should worry about our speedy departure from the Union.
There are two moral considerations here. One is that most of the money that can be stolen comes from the Union, and we all know that one cannot heat the swimming pool with patriotism. The second is that Hungary’s departure from the Union is not in Moscow’s interest. On the contrary, the Russians would be not at all happy if the Trojan horse suddenly bolted from the fortress and found itself outside its walls.
As long as this remains the situation, we stay. Moscow pays because it has managed to acquire an agent; the Union pays because it is stupid. Meanwhile the prime minister is convinced that he is very clever and cunning because he can take advantage of both sides. Based on his pocketbook, his reckoning is pretty accurate, although that does not mean that he would hesitate even for a second if he had no other choice. Then he would quit without the slightest hesitation. So, all those who love Europe should hold their collective breath for two things: Hungarian foreign policy will still be conducted from Moscow and the European Union will remain as stupid in the future as it has been in the past.
Given the cast of characters, the prospects are good for both. On the other hand, it is worth contemplating that America managed to do more for Hungarian democracy in one week than all the European political leaders have in the last four years. Therefore, perhaps it would be useful to rethink the situation. Perhaps we should slowly retreat from all that vacillation over Europe. Instead we could perhaps beg for a real American occupation, colonization, protectorate, whatever. They didn’t come in 56, they can make up for it now. We will take over the constitution, M. André Goodfriend could be the nádor,* governor, or sheriff, we are open to all solutions. He could start immediately with a proclamation. Because it is a good thing that people representing our worst features can’t go across the ocean. Actually, it would be even better if someone would expel them from here. We can’t solve the problem alone.
So, as the saying goes: there is life outside the Union but one must swim farther.
*nádor/palatinus local representative of the king in Hungary
It was only a few months ago, on March 15, 2013, that Ferenc Szaniszló, a so-called journalist who has a show twice a week on Echo TV, received the Táncsics Prize, the highest award that can be given to a Hungarian journalist. You may recall that the minister of human resources, Zoltán Balog, first claimed that he was not familiar with the work of Szaniszló and that eventually, when the whole Hungarian media was up in arms, he practically begged Szaniszló to return the award. He did, but as often happens with members of the Orbán government, Balog didn’t tell the truth. It wasn’t an oversight that Szaniszló, who is an anti-Semitic extremist, was chosen. On the same national holiday the lead guitarist of a far-right rock group called Kárpátia and the composer of the Hungarian Guard’s anthem, also received a state decoration.
So, let’s first say a few words about Echo TV. Wikipedia describes it as “a conservative Hungarian television channel” (although Wikipedia’s entry does go on to say that the channel “is a favorite among neofascists in Hungary”). “Conservative” is not an adjective I would use in connection with Echo TV. The channel was established in 2005 by Gábor Széles, one of the richest men in Hungary. Széles also purchased the financially ailing liberal Magyar Hírlap and transformed it into a far-right newspaper where one of the regular contributors is the anti-Semitic Zsolt Bayer. He is also one of the chief organizers of demonstrations called Peace Marches in support of the present Hungarian government.
Szaniszló’s half-hour program is called “Világ–Panoráma.” It airs twice a week, on Monday and Friday, in prime time between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m and can be seen by everyone who has a cable connection. Most people do.
What kind of information do devoted right-wingers receive about world affairs through Szaniszló’s interpretation of twentieth-century history and more recent events? We regularly complain about the general lack of knowledge of the vast majority of Hungarians and express our astonishment that they seem to believe all the propaganda they receive from their own government. If you listen just once to Ferenc Szaniszló, you will not be at all surprised.
Since non-Hungarian speakers don’t have the benefit of listening to this man in the original, I took copious notes on his ten-minute-long attack last Friday on the United States and on Jews, although he doesn’t refer to them explicitly. In the past Echo TV wasn’t that shy. I suspect the word came from above that the Orbán government is working very hard to convince the world that it is doing everything in its power to curtail anti-Semitic occurrences, so please refrain from being too obvious about the subject of international Jewry. As for attacks on the United States, Magyar Nemzet, Fidesz’s own favorite newspaper, has also been full of anti-American articles for some time. So, don’t think that only the far right specializes in U.S. bashing.
Ferenc Szaniszló on the set of his program on Echo TV
Szaniszló’s harangue begins with a rehash of the Kennedy assassination, a topic he talked about earlier. Here the story serves as an introduction to the main theme. Kennedy was assassinated by “financial powers that conquered the United States.” According to Szaniszló, Kennedy was not the first victim of this financial power group because “there were earlier presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries” who were killed by these people. I myself couldn’t come up with any president whose assassination was in any way connected to the financial world. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Southerner; James Garfield’s assassin was mentally unbalanced; and William McKinley was killed by an anarchist. As for vice presidents, no vice president of the United States has ever been assassinated. And as for secretaries, there was an assassination attempt on the life of William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, at the same time as the president’s assassination, but he survived.
Soon enough Szaniszló moves to more dangerous grounds. With a quick turn we are at 9/11, which is according to him “the biggest lie of world history” because it was a “willful self-provocation, one of many.” In plain English, the United States government itself attacked the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. And there were many similar faked attacks. The same thing happened with the Lusitania, the British ocean liner, which according to Szaniszló was not torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat but by the United States to have an excuse to enter World War I. Just as the United States bombed and destroyed practically the whole U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor to justify entering World War II.
Those who committed atrocities in New York disappeared because “they became extinct in the fire of 9/11,” but “the Arab passport remained among the ruins of the Twin Towers where even steel beams became dust. And naturally they kill Osama bin Laden, but quickly they throw his body into the bottom of the ocean. They destroy his house. These financial conspirators consider people idiots and indeed they are right because they are duped by those who possess all the power, all the money, the media, the film industry, the propaganda, and the brain washing machinery.” Yet, this is all so clear. “The plane that few into the Pentagon simply disappears, Building # 7 collapses on its own without any attack, and the helicopter that was used in the Osama raid is destroyed by a nonexistent Taliban anti-aircraft defense force.” That is not all. After the Boston marathon attack two American agents fall out of an airplane because they know the truth about Chechnya. Two other agents are killed for the same reason. In brief, the politicians who run the United States are murderous criminals.
Szaniszló goes so far as to say that all the terrorist attacks were fakes. Every time there was an attack an official anti-terrorist exercise took place. For example, on September 11, 2001 planes of the American Air Force were not flying between New York and Washington because of exercises. The Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut was staged by the American anti-terrorist group. “They sacrificed their own children and their teachers.” During the Boston marathon the same thing happened. The U.S. Air Force was doing routine exercises “in order to hide the truth which was a murderous attack organized from above.” All that to incite anti-Muslim feelings in the United States. “These were attacks against their own people disguised as anti-terrorist exercises. Their goal is to acquire more oil and gas fields and gold mines.
“What kind of morality is this? And the West builds its fortune on that? On this filth, on this garbage? Is this supposed to be the liberal democracy? This morass?” Thanks to Edward Snowden we now know that “they don’t even trust their closest friends, they spy on their own henchmen, and they even record when Angela Merkel does her number one and number two in the Reichstag or what Queen Elizabeth wears under her train.”
Once Szaniszló finished with the United States he moved on to Ukraine, a country that doesn’t want to supply slaves to the European Union. It would rather turn to Russia, which at the moment is trying to undo its own Trianon.
This is what Hungarian television viewers learn about the world. Hatred against the United States, the European Union, the West in general. And then we are surprised at the general ignorance and hatred of foreigners? We shouldn’t be.
I simply can’t understand the Hungarian opposition’s lack of initiative and its sluggish reactions to unacceptable actions that are being taken day in and day out by Fidesz and the Fidesz-ruled parliament. Often, opposition politicians wake up only when a government official reveals by a slip of the tongue the real intention of a piece of legislation. A good example of this kind of opposition lethargy is its recent discovery that the government is up to no good with its laws governing the voting rights of new Hungarian citizens who were born and lived all their lives in one of the neighboring countries. No opposition politicians raised the possibility of electoral fraud until the head of the National Election Commission made the mistake of revealing some of the details of the voting procedures contemplated by the government. Then suddenly the politicians of the democratic opposition woke up. But, for Pete’s sake, the particulars of the electoral law have been known for months. Where were these people when the proposal was duly voted into law sometime in December?
I wrote about some possible problems with the absentee ballots on July 29 after Ilona Pálffy, the government official in question, made the mistake of outlining the procedure in terms that made it clear that the safety of the ballots cannot be guaranteed. It will be extremely easy to manipulate the ballots of dual citizens. It took another two weeks for the opposition to discover that there are serious problems with the voting rights of Hungarian citizens living abroad.
Currently perhaps as many as half a million Hungarian citizens work abroad. This number is a guesstimate, but the true number is surely more than 300,000, the number of dual citizens in the neighboring countries. And while these dual citizens can vote via absentee ballot, Hungarians working abroad must vote in person either in Hungary or at a Hungarian embassy or consulate. Let’s take, for example, Great Britain since it has a large Hungarian presence. In the United Kingdom both the Hungarian embassy and the consulate are in London. There are no consulates anywhere else. So if a Hungarian lives in Glasgow and would like to vote he would have to travel to London, more than a six-hour trip by rail. And we’d better not mention Northern Ireland.
The situation is slightly better in Germany but not much. There a Hungarian citizen can vote either in Berlin or in Munich. In the United States there are three places you can vote: Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. If you happen to live in Kansas City you can look forward to a 2,000 km trip to New York City. You are even worse off in Canada where there are a lot of Hungarians. There you can vote only in Ottawa; the distance between Vancouver and Ottawa is 3,538 km. For sake of comparison the Hungarian government maintains four consulates in Romania: in Bucharest, Cluj/Kolozsvár, Miercurea-Ciuc/Csíkszereda, and Constanta. Of course, this comparison doesn’t really speak to the issue since Hungarian dual citizens in Romania don’t have to show up in person at one of these consulates.
Fidesz obviously doesn’t want Hungarian citizens living in the West to vote in the forthcoming elections. I don’t think they’re focused on votes coming from Canada and the U.S. What worries them is those recent emigrants to Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. who left the Orbán government behind. Their connection to Hungary, family and friends is much more intense and direct than that of earlier emigrants to North America. Moreover, most of them left Hungary recently because of economic hardship, and most of them seem to be satisfied with their new circumstances. They find life in Great Britain and Germany much more pleasant and career opportunities more merit-based. There is a good likelihood that a great majority of these people would not vote for Fidesz.
And there’s another reason to discourage these potentially anti-Fidesz Hungarians in the West from voting. A Romanian-Hungarian dual citizen can vote only for party lists while Hungarians living in the West but with a valid address in Hungary can theoretically vote for both individual candidates who represent a district and for party lists.
This blatant discrimination against Hungarian emigrants in the West was introduced as an amendment to the electoral law. It was an afterthought. I suspect that Fidesz figured out that the number of Hungarians seeking employment abroad was growing by leaps and bounds and that if these people can vote as easily as the by-and-large pro-Fidesz crowd in Romania and Serbia their actions might counterbalance the gains coming from the Romanian-Hungarian vote. In that case, the whole exercise of giving the vote to Hungarians in the neighboring countries would have been for naught.
The opposition was asleep at the switch when the Fidesz amendment was approved. It was only today that Gergely Karácsony on behalf of Együtt 2014-PM announced that he is planning to submit an amendment to the electoral law that would put an end to this discrimination against Hungarians temporarily living in countries of the European Union.
The answer from the other side came in no time. Gergely Gulyás, who is deeply involved with constitutional and electoral issues, said that he considers Karácsony’s proposed amendment a desperate move on the part of the opposition forces. The opposition already knows that they will lose the election so they are now trying to convince the world that their loss is the sole result of electoral fraud. He claimed that the Hungarian electoral law ensures equal opportunity to all Hungarian citizens. Well, you can judge for yourself whether a Hungarian citizen living in Great Britain has the same opportunity to cast his vote as his counterpart in Romania.
I highly doubt that Fidesz will be willing to change the existing law that clearly favors them. At least this is how I interpreted Gulyás’s words.
Hungarian Spectrum 