Double standards in the international press - Hungary and Romania (Hang 'em up high?)

Yes I complain a lot about hypocrisy and double standards; the whole blog is about them, after all. They infuriate me, regardless of whom they are applied against; and there's a good deal of them directed against my own country, which infuriate me even more.

Enter Romania.

The PM said something non-sensical (if you take the literal translation which Romanians insist), or he threatened with violence (which is the underlying meaning of his words) -depending on how you look at it. Regardless he said something unacceptable.

He threatened Transylvanian Hungarian politicians with hanging.

Let this sink in for a bit.

This is not an isolated thing. Hungarians have been severely mistreated in Romania since Transylvania was "reunited" with Romania a hundred years ago. Anti-Hungarian sentiments have been (and still are) quite high, as we can judge by other statements and actions.

Yet, not a peep from the Western, enlightened media.

Let's see what happens when an idiotic MP (and not the prime minister) says something stupid in the Hungarian Parliament. (You actually could make a rational argument why dual citizenship is not good in case of a lawmaker, but this statement did not do that.)

The reaction? The whole world went up in protest, while absolutely misinterpreting what he said (or rather, twisting it into some sort of a call for putting all Jews in the country on a list.) They also twist and lie about other things, too, while we're at it.

Not to mention the whole silence about Romania's corruption problem. Neither the media nor the EU leadership seems to be worried about that, but they pull the "nuclear option" on Poland.

I wonder why.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the real problem here. The term "fake news" have been overused a bit lately; I strongly suspect it's because the original practitioners feel slighted that Russia and others they don't like got better at it than they are.

When are news news?

Weird stuff. Any time something happens in Hungary that can be used to put the country into negative light, the press is all over it. Yet it's absolutely not newsworthy to report about the continuation of mistreatment of Hungarian minorities abroad, and it never has been. You might argue that in Slovakia the situation is much better, but then again an American friend of mine who works there as a businessman asked me a couple of months ago why there is so much hatred against Hungarians in Slovakia, so there's that. It does not point to an improving situation.

Yesterday there was a great demonstration for the autonomy of Transylvania (well, Szekelyfold, which is part of it) within Romania. The ill treatment of Hungarian minorities are pretty well known and still ongoing in neighbouring countries: Slovakia, the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia all have their own ongoing histories of both state level discrimination.

I've only found one non-Hungarian report of this demonstration. It's funny how the fate of a minority in EU countries does not worry anyone, yet everyone is condemning an entire country when it is unable to deal with the influx of 400k people. (Weirdly when others do the same things -tightening borders, building fences, talking about defending European values-, nobody bats an eye.) I would be very curious what the reason is behind the anti-Hungarian attitudes of the Western press; after all, when the Keleti Railway station was full of migrants, the whole world was up in arms against the brutality and indifference of the Hungarian nation in general. After all, what civilized nation would allow such conditions within its own capital, asked these newspapers. Well, yesterday the French police started clearing out similar camps within Paris.

Fair enough. There's one issue here, though. I haven't even read about the existence of these camps beforehand.

I find it very curious. Apparently it's fine when the very same process is happening in France; after all, they cannot possibly as barbarous and xenophobic as the Hungarians, can they? And make no mistake, it is the very same process: a mass of people refuses to register in the country they are in, and instead opt to live under horrible conditions in makeshift camps in the hopes they could go to a more attractive country instead. You might be able to forcibly move them into closed migrant camps until they are properly registered, but that would be akin of the Holocaust. So that's out. There's not much more a state can do. It is well understood with the French or anyone else- but it's apparently not an issue when you condemn the Hungarians.


There's a clear double standard at work here- it's fine when us, enlightened Westerners do something (even when its horrendous), but god forbid something happened we don't approve somewhere else. I would be curious to know the reason.