Overall, the development of politics in Hungary over the past few years has been disturbing. Right wing populists with fascist tendencies have been voted into power, large rallies of uniformed believers in the streets of Budapest, overt and unapologetic antisemitism, overt and violent threats against other minorities, pointless nationalist posturing towards neighbouring countries.
It has nothing to do with racism or antisemitism. These guys are simply the first real politicians of the last 60 years - unfortunately, in a negative sense. They started as liberal democrats (not the Liberal Democratic Party), and they're just changing the ideologies as they see fit.
I think one of the big issues is that people believe that these guys are driven by ideology, and that's how they want to fight them. They aren't. They want to stay in power and they'll do what's necessary. Simple as that.
They are patriots. They are being called fascist because they want to stop the current practice of paying 2000$ for Roma families for raising children, while Hungarian families get 1/20 of that for the same task, all this while the average Hungarian works for 400$ a month.
Don't believe everything what you see on TV.
Go figure.
I would say his post was misunderstood. There is a great deal of frustration in Eastern Europe (not only Hungary) coming from difficulties with integration of minorities (especially Roma minority) into society. Democracy didn't solve this problem nor money from EU did. Of course this topic is being misused by populists. The bad thing is that people who doesn't really care about the future of our countries take advantage of this problem for their personal power and wealth ambitions. Slovakia citizen (Hungary neighbor).
My point should be perfectly obvious: the people that you nauseating describe as patriots are nothing more than racists, thugs and nationalists. I've provided several different independent and credible sources to support this claim - can you do the same?
Those are quite reliable sources, while you are just one person who seem to sympathize with Jobbik. If you post 5 links to (kind of) neutral sources, i'll gladly read them.
In those links, please tell me, what proves that the Jobbik is a fascist party? Also, I am not a person sympathizing with Jobbik, I am first and foremost a Hungarian, who lives here.
If people are murdering my family, no amount of your links will prove that they are alive and well. It's that simple.
Why should a party be anti-semitic? Do I sleep better if the guys in Israel have a bad time? No. I wish them the best. On the other hand, if a country (be it Israel or any other) threatens my country why can't I speak up?
Because he is anti-semite, in their modern form they say "...but israel!" whenever you criticize them or even question their ideology. There's a strong myth about liberals/jews being responsible for the devastating economic policies of the government in hungary.
Fun fact: Most Jobbik members and sympathizers are describing themselfs as apolitical hungarians who are "just patriotic".
> They are being called fascist because they want to stop the current practice of paying 2000$ for Roma families for raising children, while Hungarian families get 1/20 of that for the same task, all this while the average Hungarian works for 400$ a month.
In all fairness, the uniforms, the cozy media bill and all that don't help very much, either.
No racial group is a threat to my country.
The leadership who intentionally creates these problems between racial groups so they can steal everything while the public is occupied with these visible problems is.
Is that because welfare payments going towards many of the children of 5% of the population are somehow crippling the Hungarian economy, or because racial identity is strengthened by attacking minorities?
Whether a Hungarian supports or is against what is happening in Hungary, they always seem to confirm what I'm seeing on TV. Go figure.
Just a note, for anybody jumping on the Oh My God Hungary bandwagon: the people who passed this law and the people who are vocal antisemites and anti-Roma are not the same people.
Fidesz is likely to lose the next election; they've really been overstepping their power. But it's a small country. As long as nobody outside supports them, they'll move on.
What you read in Western European media is Eurocorporates being sure that if Hungary should ever endanger the profit they extract from the Hungarian poor (which is essentially everybody), they'll be sure to be knocking on the door with military force in the name of democracy. I think we know whose playbook that came from.
Source: I'm an American living in Budapest.
Racism is a convenient way to marginalize those who see inequity. They so very much want to understand why they don't have the money they see on TV. The answer is simple, as it always has been to the Eurogentile: the Jews took it! The Gypsies took it! It's never "The Swiss banks took it by giving you loans in a foreign currency knowing that the forint would slump", and God forbid it should ever be "Two years' worth of the Hungarian GDP was stolen and deposited in Swiss (and Cayman, etc.) banks by the old regime when it became obvious the handwriting was on the wall."
This is the first I'd heard of this ridiculous law. There's a reason it's a problem when one well-disciplined party gets a supermajority so they can pass whatever the hell law they like. I hope the door strikes them soundly on the ass as they leave next year.
Addendum to this, by the way, after talking it over with my wife (who is herself Hungarian):
Hungary is a small country. There are 10 million people here, and for five hundred years they've been subjects of one or another foreign king - until the 90's (I count the USSR as a foreign king for the purposes of this post).
In short, they're a country governed by rank amateurs.
Orbán in particular is an odd duck, as well as the Fidesz party. They're a student protest movement who abruptly found themselves in control of a whole sovereign nation. As such, they have a lot of ideas about how to fix things - most of which are harebrained.
In the last election, Fidesz obtained a supermajority of Parliament, meaning that whatever Orbán says, becomes law. And here's the thing: Orbán says a lot. And Fidesz says, "Hyuck, hyuck, sure, let's write it down and pass it!"
Then the other 10 million Hungarians try to figure out how to pay for it, what kind of procedure might be involved, how to make decisions fairly - all in the sure and certain knowledge that those clowns in Fidesz are going to change it all next month anyway.
It's easy to look at something like this surveillance law and think "OMG! Hungary will be 1984!" - but no. First, nobody even knows who would be in charge of the surveillance. Who will pay for the program. What procedure will be followed. It'll be yet another clusterfuck of massive proportions.
Case in point from two months ago: Fidesz suddenly decided that tobacco sales would require a permit, and that there would be a fixed number of permits, effective immediately. Since the corner tobacconist is a staple of the retail distribution system here, this immediately put a large number of long-term family businesses at risk.
So they sued. It came out that Spar automatically got permits - and Orbán openly said, "Sure, I've got financial interests in Spar, so it's natural we'll trust them." But Fidesz swore that other than that political considerations would not determine who got permits.
Until somebody got recordings of some local Fidesz mayor determining who would be given permits, based on their Fidesz loyalty, and people sued to see the procedure. No, Fidesz said, that's confidential. Well, but procedure can't be confidential by law. So Fidesz wrote a new law retroactively declaring confidentiality for that class of procedure.
They still have to win an election in 2014, and right now people would be perfectly happy to stew them up and eat them whole. The only stick they've got is maintaining that if people don't vote Fidesz that Jobbik will win - and we all know what fascists they are! That, or the Socialists will win - and we all know how corrupt they were!
Point being, people see through this shit and mostly just get on with their lives, because it's all Keystone Kops anyway. Short of closing the borders, Orbán can't actually impose a dictatorship, and if he actually tried to do it, what real force would he have? The military isn't going to back him up. He's already pissed off the police by calling their union clowns (remember the cops dressing as clowns in protest a couple of years ago? No? Maybe because that doesn't fit with the budding-fascism story line?)
In short, it's chaos. Interesting times indeed! But it's not the Third Reich, and it's not going to be. Racism is a real problem, that's true. The only thing that would fix that would be economic prosperity - and honestly, Orbán has been doing pretty well resisting Union demands for austerity, so I'll give him that much.
Discount the gloom-and-doom. It's just more theater.
> if people don't vote Fidesz that Jobbik will win - and we all know what fascists they are!
Sure, they are born evil people. They would sacrifice their own children just to kill others - anyone who differs in skin color.
Am I right?
There were multiple cases of Jobbik supporters rallying in Roma populated cities, for various reasons. Nobody got hurt. Nobody will. How fascist are them then exactly?
Jobbik has some good principles. I like the idea of a little pride in Hungary. But the Roma are part of Hungary that you need to have some pride in. You're not Magyars freely riding across the plains any more, if indeed you ever were.
The Roma are not your problem, man, no matter how many knife attacks there are - and I know there are. But there aren't as many as you think, and there are plenty of violent attacks in the other direction, like people burning Roma houses down with the Roma still in them.
As to your point of Jobbik rallies in Roma cities - yeah, that's true as far as official rallies go. I do quite clearly remember a strongly Jobbik demonstration over near the Tisza last year that was not exactly sunshine and butterflies, though. Hatred does not pay.
And if you think the taxes going to support Roma kids are sapping your economic strength - there are a few ethnic Magyarok who stole 100 trillion forint from you thirty years ago and still have it. You could stack every Roma baby in the world end to end and they wouldn't be as tall as that. Those guys are your enemy, and they are Magyar, not Roma.
Jobbik is misguided, but I don't think they're fundamentally misguided. Their nationalistic principles show promise, like I say. Somebody has to start keeping the money in-country, and they'd be likely to work on that if they can get their heads out of their asses long enough.
Add to that the fact that Jobbik will have to be part of a coalition if they do gain more representation in Parliament (there's no danger whatsoever of a Jobbik supermajority!), and that would temper them a little and let them learn about government, and I think there's hope for the future.
Hungary has only been newly independent for twenty years. They've got time to make a few mistakes before everybody has any right to throw up their hands and say they can't be trusted.
All that said, yeah - your topmost point about the rhetoric used to paint the Jobbik as a threat is 100% dead on. They're all just Nazis reborn! Look at the laws Hungary is passing! Oh, wait, that's another party? Oh, well, all Hungarians are the same anyway.
Thank you for taking the time to write these replies, I appreciate it. I agree on certain points, but I still hold my opinion of that you were tricked by the media which demonized the Jobbik.
I personally know multiple politicians who are members of the Jobbik. None of them want to burn Romas. None of them even blame them, they blame the government.
I'll give you that, I know a few Jobbik myself and they're exactly as you describe. And I also remember the party official who discovered last year that he himself was ethnically Jewish and was forced out.
But fair's fair, I haven't personally been at any such demonstrations - but I'll bet you haven't been at any knife fights, either.
As to the media - after 25 years of marriage to a Hungarian, and now a year living in Budapest, my Hungarian still sucks. I can keep up my end of a conversation if I've had enough sleep and I can read text fine, but I usually have to ask my wife what any given news story is about. Most of my exposure to current events consists of her watching the news while I'm finishing up one job or another on the laptop. So I'm not 100% up to speed on detail.
The media here honestly seems less slanted than in the States, but that is a really vaguely anecdotal judgement. It would be nice if a study were actually possible, but such is the nature of media that it isn't, really.
Also: they may personally believe that Roma are not the problem - but is that the rhetoric they use to sway voters? Even subtly? Because you started out trying to justify the Jobbik by citing knife attacks, and got widely slapped down for using local rhetoric in a global forum - that's a good sign that your local rhetoric is a lot more slanted than you think. And what you say ends up being what you believe.
I don't think I ever mentioned anything about knife fights on this forum. I also use no local rhetoric. I just wrote what I see on the country side. If you think it is a rhetoric to trick voters into voting then I am glad - you must be very far away from the problems these voters experience, and that's fine.
You live in Budapest you say. That's an entirely different place then the rest of the country.
The amount of poverty and suffering people endure in the country side is almost unimaginable. Unfortunately I can imagine it because I grew up in it.
PS:
I have been at knife fights unfortunately. That can happen when you want to drink an orange juice in a pub here.
PS2:
How do you like the Hungarian language? I am a natural language geek. What do you think how does it sound? Any thoughts appreciated.
Oh, and also I should note: if you have a party rallying in a city populated by an ethnic minority - that's not evidence of a lack of fascism. The KKK holds rallies in South Chicago from time to time - nobody gets hurt, sure, but that is not done out of a sense of national unity and mutual trusting support.
As an American I'm proud that we don't have such non-issues dividing us and that our electorate is well informed and are primarily issue voters, not mindless sheep voting party lines.
Nothing I said there doesn't apply to people anywhere in the world, and most especially including America. But I can't tell your intent with this statement - you could be ironically noting that America is in the same boat, or you could be implying that I'm coming off as arrogant. Either way, my paragraph about racism may be couched in Hungarian terms but it's most definitely a universal means of manipulating people who are too busy to think much about politics.
This trend is also notable in Slovakia. Similar attitude toward Roma minority and sparks of shocking nationalism[1]. This is combined with nonfunctional judicial system and one party rule[2](recent poll).
There doesn't seem to be any upside to this, long-term.
Don't sign the consent: You get fired.
Sign the consent: In the short-term you get to keep your job, but you and your spouse get spied upon and you potentially lose your job one day anyway. And probably face criminal proceedings because you did something someone else didn't like.
The top echelon is exempt from being spied on. This is just a tool to exclude those who don't toe the party line. Family members will not have any problems.
Now that the law has passed, potential targets of surveillance must sign a “consent” form. If the targets have spouses, the spouses must sign consent forms, too. And if the targets or their spouses don’t consent to this surveillance, the targets lose their jobs. In short, this “consent” is not optional and the whole family is fair game for surveillance.
All elected politicians (and maybe their cabinet) with the "spying" being done by the populace who elected them seems fair. By "spying" I just mean full transparency.
For anyone who is appointed or hired, this spying is most certainly a bad thing that leads to cronyism and nepotism.
This is written by a Princeton colleague of Krumgman, not by himself. And Krugman is in no sense in power - he is an economist that works in private sector (for a newspaper and a private university) and hasn't had a job in government in 30 years (and it wasn't a decision-making job.)
For the folks who are interested, as a Hungarian I can give you a small report based on first hand experience.
The current Fidesz government is simply a Mafia. They are the sons and grandsons of the communists who killed hundreds of thousands of Hungarians. Sándor Pintér[1], Minister of the Interior of Hungary is the biggest godfather in the country currently. They kill rivals, or send them into prison.
Hungarians have the fewest rights in this country. They intentionally positively discriminate the Roma population to spark a civil war. Divide and conquer.
There is also an ongoing international propaganda about how "antisemitic" are we. Nothing is further than the truth, there are 0 jewish people beaten per year. But this will be a good excuse to further decrease our liberty.
A bill is going to pass (in a couple of weeks) which will allow foreigners to buy unlimited amounts of land without any control exposed on the process. This will result in the poor Hungarians losing land to wealthy people. If the bill passes (it will), Hungary will cease to exists in decades.
The Jobbik and a couple of true politicans fight against these issues, they want to preserve the Hungarian nation.
That's why you see a propaganda about them, framing them as evil, fascist, hateful people. Because the Jobbik and the defense of the homeland interferes with the bussiness of the Mafia government.
Edit: a little bonus, worthless anecdote, probably I am crazy and fascist because I find it disturbing:
The Fidesz announced that to prevent minors from smoking they will move the selling of tobacco products to certain specialized shops.
Poor dumb masses were like "ohh, not a stupid idea, young people smoking is bad hmmkay". Then, came the news, that the government decides who can run these shops. Of course all the winners were Fidesz friends (parts of the Mafia).
Then first they raised the price of tobacco products, to provide bigger margins to these shops because "this is their only source of income".
Then they allowed to sell other products, like chips, ice cream, whatever, they allowed such a wide range these products combined make up 40% of shop sales.
So basically, with this move, the Fidesz took the right to run shops from the common people and gave it to the Mafia members.
Well played!
This is how the Hungarian middle class is being erased.
And this is just a recent story! There is more to come I am sure.
I'm a fellow Hungarian. After reading your posts here, I'm not proud of that.
While you're right about the new tobacco regulations, I disagree with everything else you said. There's widespread antisemitism,holocaust denial and xenophobia in this country.
There's a far right wing party in the Parliament. Next year they might actually form a government. They are racist, advocate killing and deporting gypsies, and radical protectionism, leaving the EU, and homophobia.
Things like this are also broadcasted on national television. I don't watch TV so I only know about one such person [0]. He talkes about how Jews want to take over our country, that there's an international conspiracy against Hungary, that they're using chemtrail to poison us. He even thinks that the hungarians are God's chosen people. All on TV. And people buy this shit. I count find any video of his with English subtitles unfortunately.
@friendly_chap: I would love to see some sources about the political murders you mention. I haven't heard anything about those, and haven't anything while searching either.
> Hungarians have the fewest rights in this country. They intentionally positively discriminate the Roma population to spark a civil war. Divide and conquer.
So, government is positively discriminating Roma population now just to try to fix the problem that Roma population was systematically discriminated for decades (centuries), and they can't possibly go out of mud on their own. It's sad that some Hungarians see that as a problem.
> There is also an ongoing international propaganda about how "antisemitic" are we. Nothing is further than the truth, there are 0 jewish people beaten per year. But this will be a good excuse to further decrease our liberty.
No Jews, no racism, isn't it? Maybe there are 0 beaten Jewish people per year now, but only because there were 0 Jewish people left in Hungary after the WW2, where democratically elected Hungarian government got rid of them.
I don't say that your government isn't corrupt, but whenever I hear talks about "preserving the nation", "Roma and Jews has more right in my country than me" and similar claims, my nazi detector starts to alert.
Well, I know nothing about Hungary, but one thing I can say for sure. Positive discrimination is discrimination. If you want people to be equal, they must be equal. The moment you make people different, they are not equal anymore, and you are discriminating.
Positive discrimination doesn't fix wealth unequality, because it fights no cause of unequality. Doesn't reduce the etinic hate, it's the other way around, it causes more of it. And doesn't integrate groups.
There are policies that actualy solve each of those problems, but they are not usefull for dividing the population... and for some reason lots of governemnts prefer a non-solution that does that.
Not to attack your larger argument, but the Hungarian Jews were not entirely exterminated, although an attempt was certainly made. My wife's father's family is ethnically Jewish, some of them survived the concentration camps, and they stayed in Budapest after the war. There is a synagogue in Budapest. So tone down your own rhetoric a little, if you would.
They do, actually, because it wins them votes. But the issues with corporatism that the parent is citing are very real ones; Hungarian politicians and business leaders alike (anyone who sees an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the nation) have been very quick to sell parts of Hungary to anybody in Europe. There is one remaining grocery chain that is Hungarian. The malls are Austrian. The phone company is German. The gas company is French.
Land ownership is being concentrated in the hands of a very few, very rich individuals - partly simply because the average salary here is about $500 a month, and partly because of policy explicitly crafted to this end. (For example, the government now requires agricultural certification for you to work your own land. The only option is often to sell.)
All this works to the benefit of the richer European countries, so they're cool with it. Jobbik is one of the very few voices in the Hungarian political scene that questions any of this at all - so it's not just out of the goodness of European media's hearts that they report on the most lurid details of their admittedly unfortunate rhetoric.
Do you really think Germany is worried about antisemitism? Did you realize that Angela Merkel actually "joked" (scare quotes intentional) that the Hungarian situation wasn't yet dire enough to require Germany to come in here with tanks? Because you can bet that Hungarians do, in fact, remember the last such incident - and some of my wife's own family died in the concentration camps.
And no, my wife's family never left Hungary, and yeah, they're Jewish. She didn't even know about it herself until about twenty years ago, but I will say that the synagogue downtown is still there. Nobody burns it down, and they still have services as far as I know. They certainly have lots of papers posted in Hebrew.
The entire latter half of your "evidence" video is completely mistranslated. I would have to say deliberately.
Shimon Peres is talking about how amazing it is that Israel has achieved developed-country status.
Pashut ein lanu maspik shuk mekomi gadol. That doesn't mean anything about our talents or dynamism. It literally reads: "We simply don't have enough of a large local market." He's talking about Israeli exports.
The sentence "Anachnu konim et Manhattan, et ...." (literally: We are buying Manhattan, ....) does occur early in the video, but without a whole lot of additional context it's meaningless. He's using a simple, conversational mode of Hebrew there, in which it could mean "We're conspiring to purchase all the buildings in these countries with our Joo Moniez", but it much more likely means, "Israelis can now buy apartments in these locations."
So basically, your far-right is playing the Jooz Card to pacify your proper rage against the consequences of neoliberal economic policies in Hungary.
I'm descended from a once-somewhat-prominent Hungarian Jewish family, but if you actually believe this kind of crap, the chance I'm visiting Budapest where my great-grandparents lived any time soon is basically null.
I don't have actual sources (and I don't think they exist) about how widespread antisemitism is in Hungary, but anecdotally it's like one in three. I know way too many who openly hate Jews.
I've heard people talk openly about how there should be another holocaust.
I find it depressing, or even scary that I live in a county with people like this. While I'm not aware of any recent attacks against Jews, so technically you should be safe, but I still can't wholeheartedly recommend you to come here.
The recent history of Hungary is very sad, and we must remember also that it was also a model in education in the past and the best minds, including John von Neumann, came from Hungary.
The list on Wikipedia is illustrative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarians
I will also say that John von Neumann was (ethnically) Jewish, and left because of rampant antisemitism among the academic community at the time. Antisemitism is an endemic problem in Hungary, and it would be foolish of me to pretend it wasn't.
For an American, the weirdest thing about Hungarian racism is the fact that they widely discriminate against people who are visually exactly identical to one another. There are many people who don't know they're Jewish here - that Jobbik guy being a case in point (sorry, I don't remember his name, but it was pretty funny).
I just heard a joke the other day. There are three women at a hospital giving birth on the same day - a Magyar, a Roma, and a African woman. Unfortunately, all the paperwork is misplaced, and nobody is sure which baby is which. So the Magyar woman grabs the black baby and screams, "I'm keeping this one until we can figure out which of the other ones is a gypsy!"
This was told to me by a Hungarian - an older guy who always says hi when we walk the dog past his workshop - laughing about the racist element who discriminates based on nothing. Food for thought.
Remember that the population of Hungary is about 1/30th of that of the United States. Correct for population size and you may get more interesting statistics.
You would not believe how excellent math education is here, and how important education is in the culture in general. Very stark difference from the United States.
The theoretical foundations for math and CS is very strong, however, most newgrads has no real world experience neither particularly useful practical skills.
Don't worry, you're safe in Budapest. What's going on with Jobbik is pretty clearly the rich fanning the flames of division in order to cement control of the economy.
Although I suppose that's what most antisemitism always is, when you boil it down. But (for example) Hit Gyülekezet is a large, powerful, pro-Israel church here.
I am also descended partly from a Hungarian Jewish family.
I think Shimon Peres is not talking about "Israelis can now buy apartments in these locations" scenario, Jewish people can do that for like decades, that would have no frigging information content. So why should I believe that?
I think Shimon Peres is not talking about "Israelis can now buy apartments in these locations" scenario, Jewish people can do that for like decades,
It was allowed for decades, yes, but it's only in the past decade or so that Israel has achieved the wealth of a First World country. It used to be that an Israeli would need a foreign, First World source of income to buy property outside Israel. Hell, it sometimes used to be (and still is, in the premier locations of Israel!) that an Israeli would need an exogenous income source (family savings or illicit money or something) to afford property in Israel!
But the thing is, given only 40 seconds of footage clipped out and mistranslated by a far-right nutter, I can't tell you for crap what Peres actually meant. I can, however, assure you that neither Jews nor Israelis own whole cities.
Downvote him all you want, but foreigners buying up the country really is a serious problem here. It's very unfortunate that the only politically coherent party questioning it happens to be antisemitic, but it's still a real issue.
And friendly_chap? I hate to break this to you, but we have bought your country. Who do you think owns Gyõri Keksz now? Wholly owned subsidiary of Kraft Foods - I just noticed that label last week. Sorry, man. I've stopped buying Gyõri Keksz in protest, but I don't think it's going to help.
Also, they're made in Slovakia now. I'm sure they work cheaper.
Tell me more about how the majority is being persecuted and the neo-nazis are helping it to defend itself. In exchange, I'll tell you about Machtergreifung[1].
