Highland Deac
Well-known member
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2012
- Messages
- 6,827
- Reaction score
- 723
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.