When is a wall not a wall?

If you have not lived under a rock for the last year or so, you are very aware of Hungary's wall. In fact this is something so deplorable, the country should be ejected from the EU. (Let's ignore all the other walls coming up before Hungary's.)

And now, Austria, a country that likened the country to Nazis (literally), is building its own wall -the second one. The first one was between Austria and Slovenia (two Schengen countries); this one is going to be between Austria and Hungary.

The contrast between the two walls is incredible. (Well, between any wall and Hungary's.) If you look at what politicians say about these walls (next to nothing), and what journalists say about these walls (poor, overran countries trying to cope) and what they say about Hungary's (OH MY GOD, THEY ARE WORSE THAN THE NAZIS AND THE COMMUNISTS, THOSE BARBARIANS, AAAAAAAGH), you come to a conclusion: there is something rotten in Denmark.

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. 

Conflicting ideologies on the Left

You could ask me (not that anyone bothers :) ) why I focus on the Left so much.

Well, the answer is simple: I expect more of them than the usual tribalism, and ideology-driven thinking I kind of taken granted from the Right. (In which I myself display my own set of biases and bigotry.)

Anyhow. The import of "Taharrush gamea" (the mass sexual assaults on women by young men) into Europe with the recent migrant crisis points to a very interesting contradiction on the Left.

I associate the Left with human rights, women's rights, equality, feminism. Usually left-wing thinkers campaign for these things, and usually people on the left fought for them. Most feminist writers I know identify as someone being on the left. And yet, when it comes to these sexual assaults, both the political establishment, and the media is strangely silent; it's mostly the right-center right that is vocal about them. It seems like things flip upside down when it comes to migrants and sexual assaults: the Left is content blaming the victim ("keep them at arm's length" as the mayor of Cologne suggested; blaming drinking culture, as some people in Sweden suggested), while the Right wants to defend women against these men from a very different culture.

It is mind-boggling. Jessica Valenti is silent on the matter, even though she was quite vocal during even the Shirt Gate crisis. No prominent feminist writer in left-wing papers talk about these issues. It seems like the different ideologies (multiculturalism, Wilcommenculture, feminism, human rights) have this rock-paper-scissors dynamics. Apparently multiculturalism beats feminism when it comes to migrants. And this is sad, because it points to one thing: not even the Left has a coherent world-philosophy. (Well, very few on the Left does, let's just put it like this. Chomsky would probably have no problems processing these issues.) It shows that the Left is merely a collection of activists with very little intellectual power (or just simply too lazy). People who cannot or will not comprehend that things don't have to be mutually exclusive, so when one ideology (feminism) clashes with another (open borders, multiculturalism), one will lose out. I just had a conversation with someone who said the whole issue was blown out of proportion due to "some improper touching in Cologne that happened once". The mind blows. Suddenly I have a leftie who blames women, and trivialises sexual assault -something that is usually thought to be the privilege of the Right.

This leads to this weird reversal of roles between the Left and Right. I never thought one day I'd see Farage to be more of a feminist than Merkel.

Little Maurice and the realities of the EU

I almost spit out my coffee last week when I heard on the radio that Juncker has a black book, which he named Little Maurice. He has been in the possession of this book for thirty years now, and uses it to diligently record the names of the people who "betrayed him".

Let this sink in for a second. The most powerful person in Europe is a petty, egocentric person with serious psychological problems. If the sole existence shows an incredible amount of vindictiveness it should automatically bar him from any position of power or responsibility... We are controlled by people who are more childish than the contestants in the Real World. This puts everything into a new perspective, doesn't it? Apparently there is a good chance that our great leaders are unable to objectively and dispassionately decide on important issues; instead they behave like a bunch of teenage highschoolers tearing each other's hair out. This interpretation suddenly explains the stupidity of what the EU has done to Greece, for example, much better than any other explanation I've read so far.

We are governed by the Mean girls. If this does not scare the crap out of you, nothing will.

Austrian election fraud

It seems like nobody's bothered that there was an election fraud happening in Austria in 2016. Not 1939; we're talking 21st century here. In the middle of Europe. People celebrated it as "far right thwarted", but really? In a delicious twist of fate the Washington Post declared that the results were clean - on the same day the Constitutional Court decided to annul the results...

If the electorate votes for someone you don't like or approve, then democracy is not as sacred as you would have thought. Isn't it a dangerous path to take? Don't take me wrong, I'm not defending the far right; it's the principle that matters - democracy. You can't just cheat if you don't like the result; you'll cause more damage on the long run if you go down this slippery slope.

Yes, there are new elections to be held, and no more "sloppiness", but for Christ's sake... 77 000 votes manipulated is not sloppiness. Sloppiness is not washing your hand after peeing, or not locking your door; manipulating 77 000 votes is fraud. You can't do that by accident. If it does not work for cheating wives (oh, I slipped and fell on his dick), it sure as hell should not work for elections.

What would happen if the far right was found manipulating the results? Why isn't Austria ostracised as a country where democracy is in danger? Why isn't there an international outcry?

I guess we know why, but it's still galling; the conspiratorial silence is deafening.

What difference a year makes...

So the Daily Mail (a delightful paper aimed at well-informed, affluent readers  disgusting tabloid) has published a cartoon last year.

Just to be clear: the cartoon does NOT say the refugees are rats. It says that rats -terrorists- enter with refugees undetected. Yes, the Daily Mail is not a very respectable newspaper. No, even they can have a valid point now and then.

That did not stop the outrage machine starting up. From the Huffington Post to the Guardian people were up in arms comparing this to the Nazi cartoons depicting Jewish people as rats. The comparison is very much flawed (as I said: the refugees are not depicted as rats; the ISIS terrorists are, which, frankly, is not very nice to the rodents.) Some people were claiming it was racist because "Syrians don't dress like that", but that really is scraping the bottom of the barrel... it's a cartoon about migrants from the Middle East. It has to make a point in one frame.

Orban got a lot of flak for linking terrorism to uncontrolled migration; he has been called a xenophobe and worse by the Hungarian opposition, and by the foreign press.

Fast forward 2016. In July Merkel said the following: 

  
terrorists entered into Europe last year with the migrants.  

She did not draw a picture, true.
So... saying it in 2015 made you a Nazi (when you could have done something about it), saying it today (when it's too late) is fine. I have not read anything about Merkel being a Nazi. Why do you have to jump off a cliff first, and then say it was a bad idea, to be politically correct? Why are people who say it is a bad idea to jump off to begin with are labelled Nazis? I'd think they'd be called smart to foresee problems -with uncontrolled migration in this case. The people who warned about the dangers were proven right in every single issue so far- even with the rapes... which frankly I thought was just demagogic populism appealing for the xenophobes. It turns out I was wrong. Apparently a lot of the newcomers have issues with not assaulting women sexually.

But no, the Huffington -and Der Spiegel, the NYT, and all the rest (Mama Merkel included)- were huffing and puffing about Nazis and xenophobes when people asked these questions, or warned about this. Now, a year later it's all forgotten, and the very same people who huffed and puffed are talking about the same things for which they labelled others Nazis. Orban and others -who, let's make it clear, who are corrupt cleptocrats and populist asswipes- in this case actually had a point: before you let in millions upon millions from a different culture, let's take a look at how similar groups fared in Europe (Paris, Belgium, even the UK). For this they -and the entirety of their countries- were labelled xenophobes. (Instead of asking them about untold millions of EUROs disappearing... it seems like corruption is encouraged.) For once, Orban actually had Europe's best interest in mind, and papers derisively quoted "experts" saying that he was trying to present himself as visionary. Guess what. He WAS one. And not because he is so smart. These things were clear for anyone with an iota of brains. He was a visionary, because all the others were blinded by dogma.

Today all that's forgotten. Today those enlightened Western countries are talking about strengthening border controls, talking about terrorists sneaking in, and all the rest; as if they had no memories from last year. (One thing you do have to give them: they still insist on letting millions more in as a solution to a problem that can only be solved where it comes from.)

Incredible.

Brexit and the media treatment

Well, things are changing all over the world (well, “world” defined as the US and Europe, so I think I’m being a bit arrogant here); since we can’t do anything about it, get the popcorn out and enjoy the show.

It seems like there are fundamental changes in our societies. The traditional left is sinking into insignificance, and the center-right parties are breaking up as their fringe is getting stronger. We see a general shift to the right, nationalism is on the rise, and people seem to be really, really angry at the established “elite”, so they are voting to hurt them (regardless of they themselves getting hurt in the process, too). So we have the Tea Party, OWS, Trump, Sanders, Boris and Farage, EU scepticism all over Europe (even the Austrians??), xenophobia and racism everywhere - and now we have something unthinkable: Brexit. Globalization did not work out very well for most people it seems. As more and more people got into the losers’ side in this game, as more and more people realized the cards were stacked against them, and as the winners overplayed their hand redistributing the wealth even more unevenly as before, anger rose to the surface. Even mainstream newspapers are full of analyses of this sort now, although even two years ago it would have been only a few voices on the “far” left (Chomsky, Greenwald and their kind) who were raising these issues.

That’s all good and well. Only one thing infuriates me. The Guardian and other papers are discussing this, they are talking about the worrying trends in racism and xenophobia embedded into the British society but their tone is very understanding, very constructive… contrast this to the tone they discussed the very same trends in Hungary last year, and the years before. The tone was very much reprimanding and ostracising. Those hairy barbarians, they have no place in civilized Europe, they said over and over again. They were thundering maledictions and painting the entire nation racist and worse… and now here we are. The UKIP’s popularity is explained as the rebellion of the poor and dispossessed (ignoring the seriously troubling racist and xenophobic narrative of the party). In contrast, the popularity of Jobbik, the Hungarian version of the far right, was explained with that Hungarians just simply hate Jews. This makes a good headline but ignores the fact that the trends are the same in both countries. People hate the establishment and anything promising a change (and also a national reawakening, apparently) will draw people in. Last week the United Kingdom has shown itself to be even more provincial, even more nationalist than Hungary –the country the British media (and others) were accusing of being the narrow sighted, regressive nation, a nation, which does not have a place in the EU. Apparently Britain is the one that does not have a place; at least this is how people voted here. What makes this double standard especially appalling is that never once in Hungary were violent and non-violent hate crimes on such levels as in the UK and in Germany, for that matter; never where the far right’s rhetoric as toxic as in these countries, yet the country was (and still is) depicted as the pariah of Europe.