The Big Lie About Hungary

Fascist dictatorship? This from the same administration & media behind 'domestic terrorists'

I’m sending out an extra newsletter today because the way the US media are portraying Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has my back up. You all know that I broadly support the Orban government. There are plenty of Hungarians who do not, of course, and if you are a liberal or a progressive, that makes perfect sense. Orban is not your guy. That said, there’s a reason that he has been elected four times in a row, in free and fair elections. And it’s not because he’s a “dictator” either, despite what Joe Biden’s campaign said yesterday:

This is no surprise coming from an administration and a lackey press corps that routinely describes Americans who dissent from the Right as “domestic terrorists”. It is remarkable, though, that a sitting US president smeared the democratically elected leader of a NATO ally and member of the European Union as a “dictator.” But Biden wasn’t the first senior US official to do so. In 2014, Sen. John McCain, who never met a war he didn’t support, denounced Orban as a “neo-fascist dictator.”

MSNBC today picked up the talking point from the White House, and magnified it:

Here in Budapest, among conservative expatriates from the US, UK, and western European countries, this kind of hysteria draws big laughs. A British friend who has been here for seven years tells me he still gets calls from his pals back home asking if he feels safe in Budapest. Unlike London, Paris, Washington, New York, Brussels, and elsewhere, street crime is very low in the Hungarian capital — and that’s not because the police are everywhere.

Think about it: just this week, the governor of New York ordered the state’s National Guard troops to patrol New York City’s subways to crack down on violent crime there. This never, ever happens in Budapest. Ever. A British friend traveling this week in New York said the scene outside his lodgings in Manhattan is appalling, with scores of African men — illegal aliens who came through Mexico — loitering on the street and urinating in public. That doesn’t happen in Budapest either, because Hungary is a country that controls its borders.

Under the so-called fascist dictatorship of Orbanistan, the prime minister and his ruling party are ripped to shreds every day in the vigorous opposition press. Meanwhile in Britain, for example, police arrest ordinary citizens routinely for the terrible crime of misgendering trans people, or speaking ill of migrants. Even J.K. Rowling, the most popular author of our time, has been reported to the police for describing a penis-haver in a frock as a “man”. I doubt the coppers are going to arrest Rowling, but if she were J.K. Jones, there’s no question that she would face legal jeopardy.

Once again: this never happens in Hungary.

You know what else never happens in Hungary? Public schools mainstreaming LGBT pornography in school libraries:

Drag queens grooming little children with story time, and showing up in legislative hearings dressed as demons to denounce attempts to ban it as “white supremacist”:

Public schools having secret training sessions to explain to teachers how to deceive parents about LGBT instruction their young children are getting:

Here’s what else doesn’t happen in Hungary:

Anti-Semitic protests and intimidation of Jews by street mobs:

Regular murders of Hungarians by illegal migrants:

Why doesn’t Hungary have these problems? Because Hungary controls its borders.

If all this is dictatorship, well, let’s have more of it. America could use this kind of dictatorship.

Of course this is not dictatorship at all. This is what is called responsible conservative government. But how many people outside of Hungary understand this? I had dinner recently with some friends from western Europe visiting Budapest. One asked me if I found it difficult to live in a country with such restricted press freedoms. I get this a lot. I asked him what he knew of the media situation in Hungary. He admitted, “Only what I read in our papers.”

Exactly. I can’t blame the man. Before I first came to Hungary doing research in 2019, I had the same prejudices. I trusted the US media to inform me accurately about Hungary. (If you want a more nuanced view of the media situation here, read this from veteran German-language journalist Boris Kalnoky.)

To be clear, Hungary is no paradise; no country is. It’s a normal country with normal problems. It is not governed by the communion of saints. Sometimes, the opposition is right to criticize the Orban government. But Hungary is very, very far from the absurd and malicious portrait routinely painted by the foreign media and governments in the US and elsewhere.

Why does this matter? Because if the American people (and others) make decisions based on incorrect or biased information, they could easily wind up in a world of trouble.

Take the Ukraine war. Viktor Orban from the beginning of the conflict said the only sane way out was through a cease-fire and negotiated peace. He said that neither Russia nor NATO-backed forces in Ukraine could hope to win, and that the cost to Ukraine would be hellish in what was turning into a war of attrition. What Orban and other Hungarians also knew is that Ukraine, like Russia, is a highly corrupt country, and very much not the sanitized nation that Western governments and media presented to their publics.

For his trouble, Orban was roundly and repeatedly denounced as a Putin lapdog. And yet, here we are, two years into this war, and what he said from the beginning has been borne out by events. The magical thinking that Washington — both Democrats and most Republicans — and the Western media had about Ukraine has mostly evaporated, except for pro-war stalwarts. Had American leaders and the American media not demonized Orban from the beginning, maybe they would have learned something about the reality on the ground of this region. Hungarians were occupied by Russians for forty years; they have no love for them. But they are pragmatic people. The 20th century for them was a catastrophe, a serious national trauma, because of war. They have something important to say to us.

Look, I love Hungary, but I don’t expect my fellow Americans to — especially liberals. But I do expect my fellow Americans to judge Hungary and its leader fairly, based on accurate information, not gutter propaganda. The media in Hungary is extremely aggressive and partisan — but as Kalnoky points out, in all the former Communist countries, the media model is not like in the West — where the press is seen as a watchdog for democracy — but is rather seen as a tool of power by all sides. As an American journalist, I prefer the Western model — but it would be nice if Western journalists practiced it, instead of behaving like Hungarian partisans, while pretending to be neutral.

We Americans are such suckers for narrative. Our government, and our media, told us two decades ago that Ahmed Chalabi was an avatar of liberal democracy in Iraq, and that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators. How did that work out? NATO backed the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya, in the name of democracy. Now Libya is a failed state controlled by competing warlords, and has become the chief transit point for waves of illegal migrants into Europe. The same establishment has been intriguing for years in Ukraine, and convinced both the Ukrainians and the American people that Russia could be whipped on the battlefield and economically, via sanctions. Now a generation of Ukrainians is dead or exiled, the country is a wreck, and Russia — which is booming economically — is pushing on to what looks like a probable victory, while NATO is running out of ammunition.

These are the same people who tell you that Hungary is a fascist dictatorship. The same people that tell you that you might be a domestic terrorist if you oppose the Biden administration. The same ones who are weaponizing the banking system against these same “domestic terrorists”.

Don’t believe the propaganda, is all I’m saying. Come to Hungary and see for yourself.