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Hungary is making a mockery of ‘EU values’. It’s time to kick it out

Man, I have so many thoughts.

I spent much of 2018-19 working in Hungary (had a consulting contract with a Daimler subsidiary, and the largest Mercedes factory in the world is in Kecskemet, Hungary - so I was following the supply chain up and down from the factory cities in the Tatras in Slovakia down to Hungary (places like Mor, Mezolak, etc) and then finally to the €2B Kecskemet facility where a new Mercedes leaves the line ever 3.5 minutes. I had spent a fair bit of time in Hungary before, but only the big cities like Gyor and Budapest. This was weeks at a time in smaller factory towns, a very different experience for sure.

I met a lot of lovely people, ate a bunch of great food, enjoyed the work, etc. I also met and saw more openly white supremacist / nazi clothes, signage and people than I have in all of the rest of my life combined, times 50. Since many of these town only had 1 real hotel, all the traveling Mercedes staff ended up after work in the same places, etc. With the Germans at night over a few beers it was a constant topic of conversation of "holy shit I cannot believe what I saw". It's one thing to read about the state that Fidesz has created, it's a whole different thing to be dropped right into the middle of it.

Last summer my niece came to visit during her summer break. She's 21, in university in the US. We figured we'd take the RailJet from Vienna to Budapest, see something different and enjoy a great European city in the summer (and if you're 21, Budapest is pretty fucking awesome). My wife has only been over the border a few times, and not in recent years - so the really nasty turn was something she hadn't experienced the same as me. Once we crossed the Austrian border and stopped in Gyor, a guy got on the train in a sleeveless shirt and a shaved head and sat down right across from us. He was wearing a T-Shirt that is from a notorious Hungarian "fashion" brand of white supremacist / nationalist clothing and had a giant grim reaper tattoo'd on one arm full length. On the other arm was a full length tattoo, in uniform, of a soldier of the 25th Waffen Grenadier Division including a totenkopf and runes. It was the "full SS", if you know what I mean.

In Austria, public display of that kind of tattoo is illegal. We were on an Austrian train, and I went to the conductor and said I had an issue with the guy sitting across from us due to his public display of nazi signage. Conductor told me there was nothing he could because we were now in Hungary and the police wouldn't enforce anything. So yeah, welcome to Europe my 21 year old niece. Nazis just out and about and proud.

Saddest thing? Slovakia is so much wealthier than Hungary. You can just feel it, the factory towns in both are world's apart. Hungary is really in a bad place right now, Fidesz is driving out the younger population and rotting the country from the inside out.

Thanks for posting your thoughts on this. I have a close relative and her family that has lived in Hungary (just outside of Budapest, can't think of the town's name) for the past decade. They love it there and are raising their kids there. Hearing stuff like this just makes me sad. Given what you said about Slovakia being much wealthier, and how the country is rotting from within, I wonder if Orban will, like so many dictators, use that to create resentment against his wealthier neighbors and act more aggressively against them. They always seem to need an outside threat.
 
thanks, vad

but I think I'll take sailor's word instead

you would certainly be well advised to do so; vad sees fascists and Nazis everywhere all the time; a good percentage of his posts testify to this; he seems to think that people who disagree with his goofy lefty politics are all Nazis or fascists and the like; he seems to have a particular problem with Hungary for some reason, probably due to the fact that he does not speak Hungarian, knows little about the country, and hates its government for not being lefty and being popular and successful; listening to vad about anything having to do with Hungary is like trying to understand the American economy by reading Pravda articles from the 1950s; lots of luck, if you want to listen to vad
 
you would certainly be well advised to do so; vad sees fascists and Nazis everywhere all the time; a good percentage of his posts testify to this; he seems to think that people who disagree with his goofy lefty politics are all Nazis or fascists and the like; he seems to have a particular problem with Hungary for some reason, probably due to the fact that he does not speak Hungarian, knows little about the country, and hates its government for not being lefty and being popular and successful; listening to vad about anything having to do with Hungary is like trying to understand the American economy by reading Pravda articles from the 1950s; lots of luck, if you want to listen to vad

OMG, we have found the only person in the outside world who supports the racist, dictator in Hungary...well, other than Trump, Miller and Gorka.
 
Thanks for posting your thoughts on this. I have a close relative and her family that has lived in Hungary (just outside of Budapest, can't think of the town's name) for the past decade. They love it there and are raising their kids there. Hearing stuff like this just makes me sad. Given what you said about Slovakia being much wealthier, and how the country is rotting from within, I wonder if Orban will, like so many dictators, use that to create resentment against his wealthier neighbors and act more aggressively against them. They always seem to need an outside threat.

Listen to your relatives and not to vad. He doesn't know much about Hungary and what he might glimpse, he distorts through his malevolent leftist ideology and obsession with seeing Nazis and fascists everywhere. (I wonder if he looks under his bed every night before going to sleep). I think that he is wrong about Slovakia being much wealthier, and Hungary is certainly not rotting from within. Orban is not a dictator but like all politicians, he needs opponents or enemies to engage. There is no evidence that either now or anytime in the near future Orban's enemies will be either Slovakia or Austria. (Quite frankly, neither of them are worth it.) When a politician runs out of enemies his political career is over. Even if you are not a politician, you should certainly be able to understand that. After all, you have spent much of the last few years raging against the person you think of as your political enemy, Donald Trump.
 
Listen to your relatives and not to vad. He doesn't know much about Hungary and what he might glimpse, he distorts through his malevolent leftist ideology and obsession with seeing Nazis and fascists everywhere. (I wonder if he looks under his bed every night before going to sleep). I think that he is wrong about Slovakia being much wealthier, and Hungary is certainly not rotting from within. Orban is not a dictator but like all politicians, he needs opponents or enemies to engage. There is no evidence that either now or anytime in the near future Orban's enemies will be either Slovakia or Austria. (Quite frankly, neither of them are worth it.) When a politician runs out of enemies his political career is over. Even if you are not a politician, you should certainly be able to understand that. After all, you have spent much of the last few years raging against the person you think of as your political enemy, Donald Trump.

And some politicians come up with new enemies to scapegoat, or just start killing the ones that they have. Given that Trump has made his political living by ginning up the resentments of his base at the more well-off coastal elites, he doesn't seem to be running out of enemies (or just critics) to attack. But thanks for your input, sailor.
 
you would certainly be well advised to do so; vad sees fascists and Nazis everywhere all the time; a good percentage of his posts testify to this; he seems to think that people who disagree with his goofy lefty politics are all Nazis or fascists and the like; he seems to have a particular problem with Hungary for some reason, probably due to the fact that he does not speak Hungarian, knows little about the country, and hates its government for not being lefty and being popular and successful; listening to vad about anything having to do with Hungary is like trying to understand the American economy by reading Pravda articles from the 1950s; lots of luck, if you want to listen to vad

That is either a gigantic run-on sentence, or you don't know the difference between periods and semicolons. The current Hungarian government is "successful'-wow.
 
Aren't semi-colons another name for colostomy bags?
 
I think that he is wrong about Slovakia being much wealthier, and Hungary is certainly not rotting from within

Slovakia GDP Per Capita: $19,344
Hungary GDP Per Capita: $16,484 (~17% lower than Slovakia)

But that doesn't even tell the whole story - Buda & Pest combined are 50% of the total GDP of Hungary but only 18% of the population, it's a very wealthy city propping up a collapsing rural economy that not even all the auto manufacturing in the world (and Hungary is the car capital of Europe now with the German automakers taking advantage of the dirt low labor costs and huge tax incentives to build new factories there) can prop up. Spend 3 days in Trencin and 3 days in Zalaegerszeg and it's a huge gap (in part because the Euro gives Slovakian consumers much more purchasing power than the Forint does for imported goods).

As for the emigration problem - Hungary's isn't as bad as Romania's (which is devastating, Romania has lost an entire generation to emigration basically) ... but it's not far behind. Hungary is projected to lose 15% of it's population by 2050, largely due to emigration. And Fidesz is not unaware of this - they've been holding events for years in the UK, Germany and Austria (the 3 largest destinations for Hungarian emigrants) offering free flights home, 100,000 forint montly allowances, etc - just to get young Hungarians to move back.

As for the nationalist, nazi, etc symbolism and outright public displays - I guarantee I've spent more time in rural & industrial regions of Hungary than you have. Months and months over the past couple of years. That stuff is real, and shocking coming from a country where it's outright illegal. The Jobbik crowd in particular is fucking frightening. But hey, I'm just seeing boogeymen and nobody else has noticed (here, or here, or here, or here, or here)

I mean, this photo was from February 2020 in Budapest! The "Day of Honour" parade commemorating the SS which is held yearly and all the fucking neo-nazi trash from around the region show up !

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And look, Hungarian nationalism has a rich vein to draw from. There's probably no country which lost more from the partitions after WW1 & the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire (some 5 million ethnic Hungarians were cut out of the new state via the Treaty of Trianon and live in modern day Slovakia, Romania, etc).

They were both culprits and victims of the second world war and that's pretty easy to manipulate into any story you want it to be. Then the communist era saw the worst of the Soviet atrocities in central Europe served on Budapest and then the entire country.

And now the boom after the end of communism which saw Hungary be the richest country from the former Warsaw Pact has fizzled and they have steadily fallen behind their neighbors, and young people are leaving the country in a steady stream that will likely never return.

It's a rich environment for right wing populists, neo-nazis, and god only knows what else.
 
sailor is a Nazi sympathizer? Who could’ve seen that coming?
 
Seems familiar.
 
Heritage, not hate.

Never fails to amaze me at just how many people not only want to live in and celebrate the past, but the worst parts of it. It's not like the Old, antebellum South was a worker's paradise, even for most whites (it's hard to compete for better pay and rights against free slave labor.) Yet people like these in Hungary seem to exist in every Western nation to some extent right now. If only we could go back to the good old days, except that the good old days were really a nightmare.
 
Poor members of majority groups are easily manipulated by the wealthy to they point that they’ll romanticize their ancestors’ suffering.

What brought it home for me was learning that the word “pioneer” has root as the word “peon.”


https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1193564517302775808
 
People like sailor, and other trumpers, love not to know shit while pretending they are experts.
 
Never fails to amaze me at just how many people not only want to live in and celebrate the past, but the worst parts of it. It's not like the Old, antebellum South was a worker's paradise, even for most whites (it's hard to compete for better pay and rights against free slave labor.) Yet people like these in Hungary seem to exist in every Western nation to some extent right now. If only we could go back to the good old days, except that the good old days were really a nightmare.

Poor members of majority groups are easily manipulated by the wealthy to they point that they’ll romanticize their ancestors’ suffering.

What brought it home for me was learning that the word “pioneer” has root as the word “peon.”


https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1193564517302775808

Like whites thinking whites in the old south all lived in mansions and made blacks to do the work.
 
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