Ethnic homogeneity and the Liu brothers

In the last few years Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary has talked about how Europe is being overrun by people from Asia and Africa and of the importance of “ethnic homogeneity.” Mr. Orbán says that Hungary is for Hungarians; the country doesn’t need foreigners or immigrants. According to him “Christianity is Europe’s last hope” and Hungary is the bastion in this struggle.

Last October Mr. Orbán declared that “assimilation, the adoption of other languages and mixed marriages” represent mortal dangers to the Hungarian nation. Mixed marriages? I wonder how Mr. Orbán will respond to the gold-medal win by the bi-racial Liu brothers?

Sándor Liu Shaolin, Shaoang Liu, Viktor Knoch and Csaba Burján were the members of the winning speed skating team at the Winter Olympics. They all skated superbly, but the team’s “backbone” is the pair of the Liu brothers, children of a Chinese immigrant father and a Hungarian mother. Christian and white Hungary now has sports superstars with names like Shaolin and Shaoang.

The Liu brothers with their family at Budapest Airport.

In 1932 Emília Rotter and László Szollás won the first Winter Olympic medal for Hungary, a bronze, in figure skating at Lake Placid. They were proud Hungarians and the nation celebrated them. In 1938 when Hungary’s horrendous Jewish Laws were enacted both realized that they had “problems” in their pedigrees. Both had enough Jewish ancestry that they were not considered “pure Hungarians” by the Horthy regime. Rotter and Szollás suffered tremendously during World War II, but survived.

Emília Rotter and László Szollás won the first Winter Olympic medal for Hungary in 1932.

Today, the very same racist ideas are back in fashion in Budapest. Populist Mr. Orbán, just like Horthy, prefers people with pure Hungarian blood and tells them “we belong together.”

Hungary is not white and it is not a Christian country; it has never been one. Mr. Orbán’s government not only opposes “mixed marriages” but provides benefits to “Hungarian” babies even if they were not born or live in Hungary. The government just started a program called “Köldökzsinór” (Umbilical Cord) to encourage the birth of “Hungarian children in any part of the world.”

Poster- the Orbán government encourages the birth of “Hungarian children in any part of the world.”

The program reminds me of the Nazi Lebensborn campaign of the 1930s encouraging the birth of racially pure babies in several countries in Europe.

Mr. Orbán’s scary ideas belong to the dustbin of history.

György Lázár

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