The central crisis management of the ‘central power field’ has taken on a rather unique turn. The politicians and their key backers are also displaying mighty strange signs of what they are able to actually process of the world. What we get includes: slow, cautious backing out, the labeling of the American chargé d’affaires as a fifth-rate CIA agent and […]
1. How did Fidesz, the party which stood up against the ‘yes-man’ parties that roamed the corridors of power, the same parties that were essentially Mamelukes, and which shook their fists at the West, winking instead at the East, parties that played to the choirs of Kádár’s people, that rejected the civic ethos, that understood ever less of the modern […]
If I had to define or characterize the reaction to the news of Barack Obama’s speech, I would call it frustrated and helpless anger. Right-wing pundits and some in government (Lajos Kósa or the Christian Democrats – KDNP, in specific) responded like an indignant teenager with a deep inferiority complex. KDNP politician Imre Vejkey wondered if the “fate of Ökotárs kept Obama […]
The pro-government (although essentially neoconservative and occasionally libertarian) Mandiner blog published an opinion piece, noting that Viktor Orbán’s infamous statements in Tusnádfürdő/Băile Tușnad represent nothing new in how the prime minister views East vs. West, certainly nothing novel in his nationalist and irredentist rhetoric or in his serial vilification of liberals, leftists and the “1968 generation.” I should note that […]
Mária Schmidt, a prominent Hungarian pro-government academic, wrote that “the historian cannot project the ideological schemes of his age on the past and cannot observe the past’s narratives with today’s sensibilities.” Ms. Schmidt took issue with the much-maligned “left-liberal intellectuals” who she believes are trying to insert a type of “intellectual terror” into any discussion of twentieth century Hungarian history […]
