2017 French elections

The news has been full lately about how Le Pen wants to "exploit" the latest terror attack in Paris; also a lot of lamenting is about of how the Far Right is surging ahead. (Although it seems like these news outlets like to blame Le Pen herself, as if she was doing everything on her own, and the French had nothing to do with the whole thing, unlike those pesky Eastern Europeans, who are en bloc racist, and that's why they keep reelecting Nazis. Interesting contrast.)

This amount of blindness is simply astonishing.

If the Far Right wins in France, they win because they were handed the election on a golden plate. They were the only ones who expressed any unease about the increase of Islamic fundamentalism (and terrorism) in France; they were the only ones who dared to say anything about uncontrolled immigration. If the electorate shares some of these worries, some of these opinions, and nobody else picks them up, what do you think will happen? Sure, you can come up with statistics about how many more people die of other acts of violence than terrorism, but you'd miss the major point: most of those acts of violence happen between people who know each other. They don't involve thinking about speeding trucks when you take a stroll in a Christmas market, or gunmen when you're attending to a rock concert. You can say that if a drug dealer is murdered that it has nothing to do with you, and in some respect you'd be right. If you don't mix with the bad sort of people, in general, you have a good chance of avoid being beaten, knifed or shot. You can't say the same thing about terrorism; it's random, and it can kill you. The last couple of years have shown how inept security services are identifying individuals who may be planning acts of terrorism. Politicians have been shown to be delusional of what their electorate thinks about the influx of large number of largely uneducated Muslim migrants, and quick to condemn anyone who does. There has been an incredible amount of accusations of racism, xenophobia and Fascism for everyone who dared to voice any worries, devaluing the meaning of these words. In Western Europe only the Far Right was willing to address these issues, and now it does not shock anyone if you call them racist or Fascist; these words just don't mean anything; not really, not any more. Judging by the comment sections your average reader of even the Independent and Guardian will just think that people called racist merely did something that displeased the establishment.


If you ignore what people think don't be surprised if they vote for someone who they think does not ignore them; I think this is the take-home message.


In some respect it is beautifully democratic.


Let's just hope this time France does not elect a Far Right party, and let's hope the "mainstream" political elite gets their shit together before the next general election. We have had enough Trumps and Brexits already.

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.

How the narrative changed about Muslims on the Left in Hungary

Let's do some reading, shall we? Literature-time!

“Europe will soon go under because of its previous liberalism which has proven childish and suicidal. Europe produced Hitler, and after Hitler there stands a continent with no arguments: the doors are wide open for Islam; no longer does anyone dare talk about race and religion, while at the same time Islam only knows the language of hatred against all foreign races and religions,”

“I should say a few words about politics too… Then I would talk about how Muslims are flooding, occupying, in no uncertain terms, destroying Europe; about how Europe relates to this, about the suicidal liberalism and the stupid democracy… It always ends the same way: civilization reaches a stage of maturation where it is not only unable to defend itself, but where it in a seemingly incomprehensible manner worships its own enemy.”

So who wrote these lines? Farage? Le Penn? Some Swedish right winger?

Well the answer is: Imre Kertesz, the Nobel price winning Holocaust survivor (The Last Refuge).

It's kind of shocking, to be honest. Put "Jew" instead of Islam, and you get a Neo Nazi Manifesto.

Let's look for some more. When Israel did a little of the usual picnic and target shooting in the Gaza strip a couple of years ago, a prominent Hungarian thinker (as Leftist as they come), TGM, wrote a condemning article about it in the Hungarian (and leftist) version of The Economist, the HVG.

For this he got a tremendous amount of flak from his fellow left-wing writers (and even more horrible ones on the comment page). He got called an Anti-Semite, he was told to go and live with his terrorist buddies, and so on and so forth. The commenters were pretty brutal on Islam and Arabs, too - they were not shy calling the religion a fascist one, and its followers (all 1.5 billion of them, apparently) terrorist sympathisers. The answers too, which were published in both the HVG and other outlets were full of anti-Muslim sentiments: Israel stands as the last bastion against the Muslim menace, the Muslim culture is the culture of intolerance, terrorism, and so on and so forth. Reading this from the USA at the time I was quite shocked that this can be published in Hungary. (This is a very much living trend in Hungary when it comes to Israel. Israel can do no wrong, the Palestinians are always guilty -well, there are no Palestinians, as we know-, and any criticism of Israel amounts to Antisemitism. I was quite shocked when I started to read books about the Nakba in the library of the American university I went to. Things that you can write about in the New York Times or The Economist would land you in hot water in Hungary. I don't even dare to think what they would say if you translated The Holocaust Industry into Hungarian, either...)

Anyhow.

Fast forward to 2015. The Orban government does a quite disgusting, and idiotic poster campaign against the migrants who are flooding the country from the Balkans. Suddenly, the very same writers -Tota W Arpad, for example- forgot all their reservations against Muslims. The whole of the political and intellectual Left broke out in condemnation of the intolerance of the Government, and defended the poor Muslims against any unjust and xenophobic accusations. Surely if Islam really is that scary as you have described it back then, you should be giving a standing ovation to Orban, The Protector of Christian Values?

It's strange, really. Only two years before they said the Muslims had an intolerant, xenophobic culture, a culture that has the very idea of terrorism embedded in it. Now these intellectuals were the white knights of human rights and the protectors of the poor Muslim migrants, meanwhile condemning the Hungarian population for their stupidity, provincialism and Islamophobia. The very Islamophobia they had no problem with when it was about Israel's action in the Gaza Strip. The very Islamophobia they themselves expressed. This is really astonishing. Apparently people have even worse memories than I suspected; we trail behind goldfish when it comes to retaining information. 

Peter Griffiths and the weird twist of events in the UK

So this respectable gentleman said the following in the '60s:  "if you want a nigger for your neighbor, vote labour".

The whole campaign for Brexit is essentially hinging on the hatred and suspicion against immigrants (or expats as I like to call us, as the British living in Spain are called).

This got me thinking: we got to the stage where I, as a white male from Central Europe, became the "nigger".

I feel strangely accomplished.