Wednesday, August 10, 2016

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.


Thursday, July 21, 2016

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.




Friday, July 15, 2016

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.

Friday, July 1, 2016

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. 

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Football, Stadiums and Orban

Looking at the recent success of the Hungarian football team I developed a theory. Perhaps Orban and Co. are not a bunch of corrupt crooks, but misunderstood geniuses. Perhaps there was another reason behind building all those stadiums.

Maybe, just maybe football is like a nuclear chain reaction: once you reach the critical stadium/capita ratio, your team performance exponentially improves. Only time will tell.


Thursday, June 23, 2016

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.

Friday, April 8, 2016

King Leopold the Third, and historical amnesia

Recently I’ve been to Belgium on a meeting. The place looked nice and affluent, and in general, a pleasant country overall. Except for one thing. I’ve seen King Leopold III’s photos in my hotel and in a restaurant I've visited framed.
This got me thinking (after I calmed down). Here we are, in the 21stcentury, and we can see a mass murderer’s picture displayed openly. This person was responsible for the death of about ten million people in the Belgian Congo. This makes him one of the worst mass murderer you have never heard of. While we know about Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and other monsters (although Saddam’s worst acts were committed under US protection in the ‘80s, and they have only become publicized in the media when he became a “bad” dictator after ’91), somehow the less-than-savoury acts of Western politicians are less advertised. We don’t read much about the engineered famine in India, which killed about 3 million under Churchill. We hear about the approximately 60 thousand US causalities of Vietnam, but not the 1-4 million (nobody knows for sure exactly how many) Vietnamese dead; we don’t read much about the Latin American death squads, the School of Americas, the genocide in East Timor... It seems like history really is written by the victors. And it makes the constant finger-waggling, and moral superiority of the Western powers sound a little hypocritical. You’d expect people who demand constant historical retrospection a little bit more eager to follow their own advice.

The curious case of Ilaria Salist

  It has been quite astonishing to follow this case. The background: there is an admittedly far-right demonstration commemorating the break-...