politicians-from-hungary

"Hungary is a sovereign country, and no one from outside can tell us how to live."

"Following 2015, the Ukrainians step by step, law after law, hurt and reduced the Hungarian national community’s rights. The fact is, they took from ethnic Hungarians the right to access the entire spectrum of national language education. This not only violates bilateral agreements at such a level, including even the European Union’s laws, which puts to question many of Ukraine’s declared intentions. When the war started, we put this entire question in a bracket. We didn’t forget it, we only put it in a bracket. Because we thought it was not correct to come forward with this question during a war. Then, recently, Ukraine adopted another law in connection with the national minorities, which was a law that further worsened the situation for the national minorities. And they took more rights from the national minorities."

"In the last few days, news has emerged that the president of Ukraine (Volodymyr Zelenskyy) has threatened to detonate the Druzhba oil pipeline to Hungary. We are all aware that Hungary is currently supplied with oil through this very pipeline. If no more oil were to come to Hungary through this pipeline, the Hungary's oil supply would simply not be physically possible. Not to mention the fact that other countries are also fundamentally dependent on the Druzhba pipeline for their oil supplies. Therefore, such a threat is obviously against Hungary's sovereignty because the security of energy supply is a matter of sovereignty. Therefore, if someone calls for Hungary's energy supply to be made impossibile, they are in effect attacking Hungary's sovereignty."

"We will not support any meaningful integration approach towards NATO or the European Union with regard to Ukraine until the rights of the Hungarian national community are restored in Ukraine."

"Suffering and persecution are not a competition, there cannot be a martyrdom race. We emphasize that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world because the numbers show it and we need to talk about it because the mere existence of the persecution of Christians is currently being debated in public discourse. So it’s not that we want to show Christianity as being in a martyr position, we just want to present the facts and we want the world to accept it."

"Hungary has been a Christian country for more than a thousand years. Europe was also created by Christian culture. Remembering it to is not a question of image, but of self-defense and humanitarian concern."

"It is easier to be forthcoming with such an incredible majority behind us. Our colleagues certainly lack this, so for them, going against fashionable politically correct language is more difficult, that is for sure. In a situation like that we consider that it is our job to show the facts to the Western world, that often lacks information and at other times shows incredible hypocrisy."

"We believe that the solutions chosen by Western governments are not satisfactory. They have chosen to support migration, inviting people to leave their homeland, while Hungary argues, on the contrary, that it is the primary interest of every person to remain in their homeland."

"It is the biggest human rights crisis of our time, and also the most silenced - silenced because it is too significant."

"The whole objective of our program is not only to save the persecuted Christian communities, but save them in their homeland, to save the Christians of the Middle East in the Middle East, which is the cradle of Christianity."

"If it is provocation for the good cause and for saving hundreds of millions of lives, then so be it."

"If you truly seek peace, you don't shake hands with a bloody dictator, you put all your efforts to support Ukraine."

"Just because a state is not liberal, it can still be a democracy. And in fact we also had to and did state that societies that are built on the state organisation principle of liberal democracy will probably be incapable of maintaining their global competitiveness in the upcoming decades and will instead probably be scaled down unless they are capable of changing themselves significantly."

"[T]here is a clear correlation between the illegal immigrants who are flooding into Europe and the spread of terrorism."

"Today’s enemies of freedom are cut from a different cloth than the royal and imperial rulers of old, or those who ran the Soviet system; they use a different set of tools to force us into submission. Today they do not imprison us, they do not transport us to camps, and they do not send in tanks to occupy countries loyal to freedom. Today the international media's artillery bombardments, denunciations, threats and blackmail are enough – or rather have been enough so far. The peoples of Europe are slowly awakening, they are regrouping, and will soon regain ground. Europe’s beams laid on the suppression of truth are creaking and cracking. The peoples of Europe may have finally understood that their future is at stake: not only are their prosperity, their comfort and their jobs at stake, but their very security and the peaceful order of their lives are in danger. The peoples of Europe, who have been slumbering in abundance and Christian, free and independent nations; it is the equality of men and women, fair competition and solidarity, pride and humility, justice and mercy. This danger is not now threatening us as wars and natural disasters do, which take the ground from under our feet in an instant. Mass migration is like a slow and steady current of water which washes away the shore. It appears in the guise of humanitarian action, but its true nature is the occupation of territory; and their gain in territory is our loss of territory."

"The main danger to Europe's future does not come from those who want to come here, but from Brussels' fanatical internationalism. We should not allow Brussels to place itself above the law. We shall not allow it to force upon us the bitter fruit of its cosmopolitan immigration policy. We shall not import to Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism. There shall be no urban districts beyond the reach of the law, there shall be no mass disorder, no immigrant riots here, and there shall be no gangs hunting down our women and daughters."

"By 2050 Egypt's population will increase from 90 million to 138 million. The population of Nigeria will increase from 186 million to 390 million. Uganda's population will rise from 38 million to 93 million, and Ethiopia's from 102 to 228 million. It is János Martonyi who usually warns us – and how right he is – that projecting current trends into the future requires caution, because in history there are always events which can change their course. But as we cannot prepare for unforeseeable events in the future, common sense tells us that we must project these figures into the future, and we must prepare for them. They clearly show that the real pressure on our continent will come from Africa. Today we are talking about Syria, today we are talking about Libya; but in fact we must prepare for the population pressure coming from the region beyond Libya – and its magnitude will be far greater than anything we have experienced so far. This warns us that we must be steely in our determination. Border protection – particularly when we need to build a fence and detain people – is something which is difficult to justify in aesthetic terms, but believe me, you cannot protect the borders – and thus ourselves – with flowers and cuddly toys. We must face this fact."

"With regard to migration, I welcome Europe's increasing movement towards a sensible policy and sensible measures. I would like to make it clear that recently Hungary has closed all the legal loopholes, and it is also prepared for the potential failure of the agreement between the EU and Turkey. At the Hungarian-Serbian border we are able to stop a migration flow of any size. Hungary has also taken the first steps towards elimination of the migrant business: several NGOs clearly see the migrant issue as a business issue, so we shall create conditions for the full transparency of NGOs in Hungary. In my opinion, on the whole we are moving closer to a sensible policy. Those arguments are invalid which seek to link the issue of migration to funding which European policy entitles us to. In the future I shall continue to maintain that we in the V4 must not allow ourselves to be intimidated: we must remain committed to a sensible migrant policy."

"For a country to be strong, demographic decline must be out of the question. At this point in time, this is Hungary's Achilles heel. A country which is in demographic decline – and, to put it bluntly, is not even able to sustain itself biologically – may well find that it is no longer needed. A country like that will disappear. Only those communities survive in the world which are at least able to sustain themselves biologically; and let's be honest with ourselves, Hungary today is not yet such a country."

"[T]here is no cultural identity in a population without a stable ethnic composition. The alteration of a country's ethnic makeup amounts to an alteration of its cultural identity."

"It is some improvement that for married couples – or male-female couples in general – the fertility indicator expressing the nation's demographic situation has risen from 1.2 to 1.44, and this is promising, but 1.44 is still very far from 2. In order to feel safe demographically, the average statistical ratio of children to Hungarian couples should be 2.1. In practice this is hard to implement, but this is the average figure we should have. Until we reach that point, Hungarians must be seen as an endangered species demographically; and the people – but the Government above all – should understand the imperative which is implicit in this."

"Over the next few decades the main question in Europe will be this: will Europe remain the continent of the Europeans? Will Hungary remain the country of the Hungarians? Will Germany remain the country of the Germans? Will France remain the country of the French? Or will Italy remain the country of the Italians? Who will live in Europe?"

"Naturally, when considering the whole issue of who will live in Europe, one could argue that this problem will be solved by successful integration. The reality, however, is that we're not aware of any examples of successful integration... In countering arguments for successful integration, we must also point out that if people with diverging goals find themselves in the same system or country, it won't lead to integration, but to chaos. It's obvious that the culture of migrants contrasts dramatically with European culture. Opposing ideologies and values cannot be simultaneously upheld, as they are mutually exclusive. To give you the most obvious example, the European people think it desirable for men and women to be equal, while for the Muslim community this idea is unacceptable, as in their culture the relationship between men and women is seen in terms of a hierarchical order. These two concepts cannot be upheld at the same time. It’s only a question of time before one or the other prevails. Of course one could also argue that communities coming to us from different cultures can be re-educated. But we must see – and Bishop Tőkés also spoke about this – that now the Muslim communities coming to Europe see their own culture, their own faith, their own lifestyles and their own principles as stronger and more valuable than ours. So, whether we like it or not, in terms of respect for life, optimism, commitment, the subordination of individual interests and ideals, today Muslim communities are stronger than Christian communities. Why would anyone want to adopt a culture that appears to be weaker than their own strong culture? They won’t, and they never will! Therefore re-education and integration based on re-education cannot succeed."

"We can never show solidarity with ideologies, peoples and ethnic groups which are committed to the goal of changing the very European culture which forms the essence, meaning and purpose of the European way of life. We must not show solidarity with groups and ideologies which oppose to the aims of European existence and culture, because that would lead to surrender."

"We must make it clear that the reform of Europe [the EU] can only start with stopping the migrants, putting an end to immigration, and everyone using their national competence to protect their borders. After that, as part of a joint programme the migrants who have already arrived in Europe illegally must be transported back to some place outside the territory of the European Union."

"Our Western European friends, who are tired of enlargement, must frankly admit that there will be no peace in Europe without the full EU integration of the Balkans. We must therefore enlarge the European Union, and must first of all admit the key state, Serbia."

"We must fight against an opponent which is different from us. Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view; they do not fight directly, but by stealth; they are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs."

"Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues – say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favour of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept."

"Instead of migrants, European families must be given the money to enable them to commit to having as many children as possible."

"In a liberal system, society and nation are nothing but an aggregation of competing individuals. What holds them together is the Constitution and the market economy. There is no nation – or if there is, it is only a political nation... When there is no nation, there is no community and no community interest. In essence this is the relationship between the individual and society from a liberal point of view."

"Is it possible to successfully reject migration, to protect families, to defend Christian culture, to announce a programme of national unification and nation building, and to create an order of Christian freedom? Is it possible in all this to survive against the full force of an international headwind, and indeed to make it succeed?"

"Hungary was led to bankruptcy by a government of former communists pursuing liberal policy. This example strengthens the conviction that in fact there is no such thing as a liberal: a liberal is nothing more than a communist with a university degree. If we had taken their advice, right now Hungary would be in the intensive care ward, with the tubes of IMF and Brussels credit attached to every limb. And the fingers on the valves regulating the flow of credit would belong to George Soros. This is no exaggeration. I’ve been plying the craft of politics for more than thirty years now, and with my own eyes I’ve seen George Soros attempt to plunder Hungary on three separate occasions. The first time was in the early nineties, when he wanted to buy up all the country’s state debt: all of Hungary’s state debt in the hands of one person, the fate of every Hungarian in the hands of George Soros. It’s spine-chilling even thinking about the situation we managed to avoid. Gratitude and recognition are due to József Antall for preventing this from happening. And I remember 1994, when Soros wanted to plunder us a second time. He tried to acquire OTP Bank, which was then the uniquely dominant Hungarian retail bank. No less spine-chilling is the vision of almost every Hungarian's money in the hands of one person. Gratitude and recognition are due to Gyula Horn for not allowing that to happen. Today the soaring success of OTP is proof that he was right to do so. Even young people can remember the third attempt. In 2015, people-smuggling networks disguised as human rights organisations brought hundreds of thousands of migrants to the Hungarian border. And when Europe was already straining under the weight of migration, Soros announced that he was ready to offer credit to finance the settlement of one million migrants a year. Please bear in mind that the Soros Plan, the planned settlement of foreign population groups, is still on the agenda: the operation is in progress and we must man the defences, stoutly and unwaveringly."

"After the Communist era we made many mistakes. By the time we noticed what was actually going on, we had lost control over key national resources – the energy system, the banking sector, the media – all of which passed into the hands of foreigners, and not on the basis of some rational plan, it was simply taken away from us. I've been working for 10 years to get back what we should not have wasted."

"The Westerners have chosen to live in a post-national and post-Christian world, and we respect that. But they want even more. They want us to live that way too. For this reason, if any spirituality emerges in regional cooperation that includes the protection of national Christian cultures, ideological attacks immediately follow – a left-liberal attack that stems from Brussels but which is linked to American liberal and economic powers. They don’t want us to be free, they want us to be free only in the way they would like us to be."

"[Putin] is 100, more than 100% rational person. When he negotiates, when he starts explaining, when he makes an offer, saying "yes" or "no", he is super, super rational. As they say in Hungarian, "cold-blooded." You know, cold-blooded, reserved. You know, very careful, punctual, prepared. You know, disciplined. So negotiating and being ready for them is a real challenge if you want to maintain an equal intellectual and political level with him."

"What should the United States be? Should it become a nation state again, or should it continue its march towards a post-national state? President Donald Trump's precise goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to raise them back to the nation state. This is why the stakes in the US election are so enormous. This is why we are seeing things that we have never seen before. This is why they want to prevent Donald Trump from running in the election. This is why they want to put him in jail. This is why they want to take away his assets. And if that does not work, this is why they want to kill him. And let there be no doubt that what happened may not be the last attempt in this campaign."

"The problem is the war. If we integrate Ukraine into the European Union, we would integrate the war. And we would not like to be together in one community with a country who is in war and represent an imminent danger to us. Because if a member of the European Union is in war, it means that the European Union is war and we don't like it."

"It's not clear who attacked whom."

"The "ideological" abyss between the parties and their followers is widest in regard to the young democrats: A "typical" FIDESZ fan cannot be regarded as liberal even with the greatest stretch of imagination. ... Viktor Orban, the nation's enfant terrible, is fully authentic, and so are primarily his angry outbursts that raise blood pressure, and his arrogant pride. But due to his jabbering, one never finds out what he really wants to say, and this could even be fortunate."

"Orban's political battles, especially successive standoffs with [Gábor] Demszky, the former dissident mayor over infrastructure projects in the capital, seem most revealing of the prime minister's ideological DNA: his abiding distrust of the left; his suspicion of the Budapest elite; his desire to cleave the country's politics into clear-cut left and right parties; and his willingness to get in anyone's face to achieve his goals."

"When is it correct to use the F-word? Not the four-letter one that has become so common it barely raises an eyebrow, the seven-letter political word: fascist. The term arose with the early 20th century European political movement that gave us Hitler and Mussolini, so it weighs heavy with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. But, arguably, there are 21st century fascist regimes, even if they do not brand themselves with the term. Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, probably qualifies as a fascist. Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly does. Even the supposedly communist regime in China is more fascist than Marxist. Broadly defined, what is a fascist? Here are some key characteristics: A fascist supports a charismatic nationalist leader who seeks total or near total power. A fascist is a member of a party or a movement that supports that leader without question. Fascists believe political opposition is illegitimate and subversive and that perceived enemies of the state -- whether in the media, in popular culture, in academia or in competing political parties -- must be suppressed or, if it is the leader’s wish, prosecuted and tossed into prison. A fascist believes private industry, the courts and elected officials should all be in thrall to the leader. And a fascist has no objection to the leader’s quasi-military secret police committing acts of political violence and rounding up alien groups perceived to be a detriment to the homeland."

"Hungary’s parliament on Monday passed the emergency law, [...] allowing President Viktor Orbán to rule by decree for an indefinite period. This arguably makes Hungary the first dictatorship within the EU and the first democracy to fall victim to the coronavirus."

"My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.” This is where Viktor Orbán comes in. It was Dreher who prompted [[Tucker Carlson|[Tucker] Carlson]]’s controversial trip to Hungary last summer, and Hungarians were a strong presence at the National Conservatism Conference. Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.” This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents’ political categories get scrambled along the way."

"[B]oth of these forces are driving illiberal political movements in many parts of the world... India was a liberal society created by Nehru and Gandhi but under the BJP and Prime Minister Modi it's shifted its national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. In Hungary, with the rise of Viktor Orbán and the party Hugarian national identity has been redefined. Orbán has said Hugarian national identity is based on Hugarian ethnicity, which... is one of the reasons that World War II happened, because the Germans wanted to define German identity on the basis of German ethnicity, and there were many Germans living in... surrounding... central Europe... and that was... the trigger that led to the outbreak of the Second World War."

"When nationalists marched in Hungary in 2015, and Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, spoke that summer about the threat posed by illegal immigrants, his speech itself goose-stepped along, in the words of one social media wag, to the theme of "fear, hate, fear, hate, fear, fear." Orban's speech as the authoritarian populist's to make: the government was "to adopt stricter regulations . . . allowing us to detain people who have illegally crossed Hungarian borders, and to deport them within the shortest possible time," he said, as he pointed to a sham consultation that confirmed this as the "people's will." But it was democratic Europe's own handling of an unfolding refugee crisis, which had in weeks packed full the grand train station in Budapest with a mess of bodies and their carted possessions: and this provided him with the tools. These are lessons that America under Donald Trump is now learning the hard way."

"Here's what Viktor Orban knows: that "liberalism" has produced a society and a culture that despises itself, and is committing suicide. It hates the traditional family. It hates Judeo-Christian religion and moral norms. It hates the history and traditions of the countries where it governs. It hates certain people because of the color of their skin, and loves others because of the color of their skin — in both cases, irrespective of the content of their character. It has no respect for free speech, freedom of religion, and other traditional liberties. It believes that it has the right and responsibility to spread its beliefs globally. It has conquered every institution in the West — most importantly, Big Business — and is using soft power to silence and marginalize the "deplorable" people who disagree. The news media lie by commission and omission in order to prop up the Narrative. This is not liberalism. This is illiberal leftism, which wears liberalism like a skin suit."

"Our present needs should surely drive us to a re-examination of Marx's method of inquiry, and put an end to a situation in which so many historians, philosophers and sociologists of the English-speaking world (the economists, impressed by the economic foundations of Marxism, have done rather better) by-pass Marx altogether or treat him as of barely peripheral interest to their concerns. Lukacs's extreme anti-empiricism may be an exemplar of the opposite vice. But this should not excuse our myopia. It is rather as if a modern mathematician did not take the trouble to master Einstein, and went on with his studies as if Einstein had never existed."

"The work of Lukacs is important, not because he solves but because he poses in its sharpest and most acute form the fundamental dilemma of the Marxist conception of class and of the proletariat, the dilemma of the gap between the proletariat as an empirical entity and the role assigned by history to the proletariat as a class—the gap which Marx revealed, but did not explore, when he invented the dismissive category of the "Lumpenproletariat"."

""We are in the war," said Lukacs, when I cried out against the shooting of six men from that first regiment which "quite simply ran away at the first fire." "In war, fugitives and traitors must be shot. If not, all right, then, let the Czechs in and the revolution will be lost." I hope there is some pacifist revolutionary with an answer to that. I have none."

"Only the dialectical conception of ... reality as a social process ... dissolves the fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary."