Upon Reading Scotland on Sunday on Hungary
Sunday 15 January 2012 00:00
As a (Lutheran) roommate of a dear and late (Catholic) friend from Scotland during my Canadian years, I bow with profound respect to his memory for his brotherly friendship, but also extend my deep gratitude for his native country’s inimitably eloquent, deeply insightful, and brave treatment of what’s going on in today’s Hungary with the below editorial penned by today’s Scotland on Sunday.
The editorial disposes point by point the calumnies of a veritable international media vendetta, coupled with an ever-tightening financial squeeze by the IMF, the European Central Bank ECB), and the unelected European Union commissars, err, commissioners, unleashed by the internationalist-turned-globalist power brokers of the New York-Washington-Brussels axis of the New world Order. They are being aided and abetted by the still powerful progeny of the Bela Kun, Mayas Rákosi, and Kadar-Aczel opposition of Communists-turned Socialists and their fellow-traveling neo-left-liberal Free Democrat allies. The former were roundly defeated and the latter booted out of the Hungarian Parliament altogether by a Hungarian electorate that, finally shedding over four decades of historical amnesia, returned in the April 2010 elections what is perhaps Europe’s most legitimate government with a clear-cut conservative-national mandate.
With its virtually unprecedented supermajority, the Orban coalition government (with the Christian Democrats) has proceeded to implement its massive mandate to complete the 1989-1990 systemic but flawed transition from Communist rule by the restoration of Hungarian historical constitutional continuity and a series of implementing legislation. In so doing, it had the temerity to reflect a thousand-year Hungarian tradition by making reference to the moral precepts of Christianity (something for which the erstwhile Euro-Communist authors of the European Union’s constitution, the Lisbon Treaty, found no room – not even for a mere reference – that then was rejected wherever it was put to the public, as in France, Holland, and Ireland. Not surprisingly, the disgraced Hungarian Socialist Gyurcsany government rushed headlong to be the first to ratify the Lisbon Treaty.
Despite, or rather because of, their glaring parliamentary diminution, the current generation of the Communist-era opposition has retained its tight grip on the mainstream Hungarian media and on its wealth amassed during the fire-sale privatization schemes during the twilight years of the Kadar era and their own 12-year rule after the 1989-90 end of the Soviet one-party and command-economy model. The international finance also dreads the possible contagion effect of Orban government’s “unorthodox” measures, e.g., “spreading the burden” of the eurozone-crisis fallout on a heavily indebted Hungary by imposing a temporary crisis-tax on the mostly foreign-owned banks, and other one-off measures to minimize the impact on the public.
Ominously, the IMF, ECB, and the EU thinly disguised designs are to bring down the Orban government. Or, at a minimum, undermine its popularity by holding it hostage to accepting further belt-tightening measures on an already impoverished Hungarian populace, and forcing it to repeal or emasculate the new constitution in return for extending a standby credit that the country does not now need.
Make no mistake: what the trounced domestic Hungarian opposition and its foreign handlers are up to is nothing less that to turn the Hungarian public on the Orban government for the new austerity measures in return for extending a new a credit facility, thus compounding the country’s already heavy debt burden, much of which a legacy of the elder Communist generation of today’s Socialist and neo-lib opposition.
There is no telling that the nefarious tactic will not work. The average Hungarian, misled and misinformed by the opposition-controlled media, and already feeling the sting of the Orban-government imposed austerity measures needed to deal with the debt, may not see through the real cause and motive behind the new hardships and myopically may turn to blame the incumbent government.
The Scotland on Sunday editorial is so profound and humbling that I hesitate to note a “missing” historical link” between the two countries that is left unmentioned, a reference to St. Margaret, Queen of Scotland (1045-1093), a Saxon princess who was born and raised in the royal court of King Andrew I of Hungary. But then, who is to say that it is not her spirit shining through the editorial.
With this preamble, I offer this rare exception of a gem for your Sunday reading enjoyment and edification on the assumption that hardly any one of the recipients of this collective message could have escaped at least some exposure to the vitriolic torrent of invectives leveled at the legitimate Hungarian government. Some of the anti-Orban diatribe goes so far as to call for a “regime change,” “legally” if possible or by “other means” if necessary, all in the name of “restoring democracy.”
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Second Hungarian uprising is as inspirational as the first
Published on Sunday 15 January 2012 00:00
WHEN all the usual suspects – the European Union, the United Nations, the IMF, the leftist commentariat, Hillary Clinton et al – are hand-wringing and getting their underpinnings in a twist over some alleged affront to the New World Order, it is a pretty reliable indication that someone, somewhere is doing something uncharacteristically constructive.
So it is with the chorus of condemnation of Hungary over its new constitution, which came into effect on 1 January. As the lamentations of the bien-pensants suggest, it is a long time since any western nation produced a document of such intellectual and cultural integrity, moral worth and wholly admirable quality. In the moral desert of 21st-century Europe, it is startling to find this gem of traditional values, patriotic assertion and respect for genuine freedom. Naturally, Brussels and Obama-occupied Washington are anxious to force its repeal: they should read some Hungarian history before embarking on such a futile confrontation.
The first issue that has provoked dismay among critics is that Hungary is no longer a republic. The words “Republic of” have been excised from the nation’s official title. According to left-wing commentators, this suggests democracy is in danger. Considering that Hungary was declared a republic on 1 February, 1946, by a Communist-controlled government that had gained power with 17 per cent of the vote, the term hardly seems redolent of civic liberties. By its immemorial constitutional tradition, Hungary is ruled by the Holy Crown of St Stephen, the ultimate symbol of authority. The royal seal of Hungarian kings did not bear the monarch’s name but the inscription: “The seal of the Holy Crown of Hungary.” [Yes, time has come to inform Madame Secretary and her principals that Hungary owes nothing to the US, with the possible exception of its safeguarding in Fort Knox, Kentucky, the Holy Crown of St. Stephen from May 1945 until its ill-timed and insensitively executed return to the Communist regime in January 1978. I know because I was called upon as intelligence and foreign affairs analyst for Poland and Hungary to shield the Carter administration from the fury of the majority of the Hungarian–American community. Ironically, official confirmation of the Crown’s pending return “fell” on November 4, 1977, the 21st anniversary of the massive Soviet attack that crushed the David and Goliath glorious October 1956 Revolution and Freedom Fight. Comment added.]
The removal of republican nomenclature was the culmination of a process begun under a new law, the Lex Millenaris, when the royal regalia were carried in procession to the Hungarian parliament on January 1, 2000, as the symbols of authority. Although the monarchy has not been restored in the person of an individual, if a Habsburg restoration were eventually thought politic the Archduke Georg [actually Gyorgy], the Magyarized son of the late Crown Prince Otto, already resides in Budapest. Hungary’s post-Habsburg history has been tragic. At the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Woodrow Wilson robbed Hungary of 71 per cent of its territory, 66 per cent of its population and its only seaport. That was a preliminary taste of American foreign policy initiatives.
The new constitution makes the classic statement of Burkean philosophy: “Our Basic Law is the foundation of our legal system; it is a contract between Hungarians past, present and future.” That recognition of the seamless continuum of history and the transience of generations stands head and shoulders above the trashy verbiage of EU treaties. Not only does it “recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood”, it “professes that the family and the nation constitute the principal framework of our coexistence”. No wonder it is anathema to the Frankfurt Marxists of the EU.
It protects human life from the moment of conception and defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. It lists the crimes of Communism and lifts the statute of limitations that protected the criminals of the Soviet era who despatched 600,000 Hungarians to concentration camps. Hungary’s transition to democracy is often called painless, because the Red nomenklatura saw the game was up, liquidated state assets and became the new rich. The Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party dropped one word [Workers’] from its title and soon regained power: Ferenc Gyurcsány, prime minister from 2006 to 2009, was the former president of the Communist Youth Organisation. In a world where nonagenarian Nazis who should have been hanged in 1945 are carried into court in oxygen tents, why is it an outrage for Hungary now to target Red murderers? Well, err, because the right commits atrocities, the left commits mistakes.
Judicial activism is also being curbed by lowering the retirement age for judges from 70 to 62. The president of the Supreme Court requires at least five years’ Hungarian judicial experience, which eliminates the incumbent who instead has 17 years’ experience of going native in the European Court of Human Rights. Yet the biggest canard is that it is “undemocratic” for the government to gain influence within the Hungarian Central Bank. Why? Because elected representatives may overrule cronyism among the bonus-entitled classes – exactly what every European electorate yearns for in vain.
The Hungarian constitution reflects an awakening of cultural and moral sensibilities, a revolt against Brussels-directed integration and PC impositions. It is the product of a highly civilised nation reclaiming its heritage and autonomy. It should be an inspiration to the rest of Europe, marinated in moral relativism and political passivity. As this noble document states, “we have an eminent need of spiritual and intellectual renewal”.«
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