The heroic Viktor Orban

Dreher got to meet him recently.

If the only thing you know about Viktor Orban is from Western media accounts, you would think that he was nothing but some kind of mafia thug. The Viktor Orban you encounter in person is very, very different from the Viktor Orban shown to Americans by our media. In Orban — who speaks good English — was energetic, fiercely intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, realistic, and at times almost pugilistic in talking about defending Hungary and her interests. Orban is what Trump’s biggest fans wish he was (but isn’t), and what Trump’s enemies think him to be (but isn’t). If Donald Trump had the smarts and skills of Viktor Orban, the political situation in the US would be much, much different — for better or for worse, depending on your point of view.

Orban begin our session with extended remarks about Hungarian and European politics, and the role of his Fidesz Party in them. He said that when he was elected in 2010, he had one mission: to save Hungary from economic ruin. By the time Orban’s 2014 re-election bid rolled around, the economy was stable, and he described the mission of his second terms as “to say what I think.”

“I realized in 2014 that I was the only free man among the prime ministers of Europe,” he said, explaining that by “free,” he meant that he had a strong, united parliamentary majority behind him. He added, “In Western political life now, you can’t say what you think.”

When the migration crisis hit Europe in 2015, Orban famously shut Hungary’s borders to Middle Easterners. Orban said that Hungary’s was the only government in Europe to respond to the crisis in its own interests, and in the interests of Christianity in Europe. With a population of only 10 million, and as a country where Christianity, as elsewhere on the continent, is fragile, the Hungarians concluded that allowing large numbers of Muslims to take up residence here would mean the death knell of Christianity in time.

This scandalized the European political class. Orban doesn’t care. He told our group that he understands that he is dealing with elites who believe that being a post-Christian, post-national civilization is a great and glorious thing. Orban rejects this. He said the main political question in the West today is how fractious pluralities can live together peaceably. He said, “Here the most important question is how not to have the same questions as them.”

Orban pointed out that the UK and France were once colonial powers in the Middle East. He added, “But Central Europe was colonized by the Middle East. That’s a fact.” He’s talking about the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, from 1541 to 1699. Orban told our group that the room we were sitting was part of a Church building that had been turned into a mosque during the occupation.

Explaining his decision to shut the borders to Muslim refugees, Orban said what tipped the scales was consulting the Christian bishops of the Middle East. Orban: “What did they say? ‘Don’t let them in. Stop them.’”

Middle Eastern Christians, said Orban, “can tell you what is the [ultimate] end of a society you have to share with Muslims.”

Sitting at the table listening to the prime minister was Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS. Archbishop Nicodemus spoke up, thanking Orban for what Hungary has done for persecuted Christians. Nicodemus said that living with Muslims has taught Iraqi Christians that they can expect no mercy. “Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body,” he said.

“The problem is that Western countries don’t accept our experience,” the prelate continued. “Those people [Muslims] pushed us to be a minority in our own land and then refugees in our own land.”

Under the Orban government, Hungary frequently extends a helping hand to persecuted Christians.The archbishop exhorted Orban to stay the course in defense of Christians. For 16 years, he said, Iraqi Christians begged Western leaders to help them. Addressing Orban directly, Nicodemus said, “Nobody understands our pain like you.”

Philip Blond, the British political economist, suggested to the prime minister that he has a mission to re-Christianize Europe. Orban, who is 56 and part of the country’s Calvinist minority, said that his generation’s mission was to defeat Communism. Religious rebirth is a task for Millennials, he said.

According to 2017 Pew research, though 59 percent of Hungarian adults say they believe in God, only 16 percent pray daily. As Hungary-based writer Will Collins wrote in TAC earlier this year, only 12 percent of Hungarians go to church — a number that is no doubt much smaller among Hungarians under 40. In my on the record interviews and background conversations with Hungarian Christians these past few days, there is an acute sense that the Christian faith is fast fading among the young, who, like their co-generationalists across the former Soviet bloc, are far more drawn to Western materialism.

Orban spoke frankly about the post-communist religious state of his country. “It’s still not a healed society,” he said. “It’s still not in good shape.”

I asked the prime minister if he saw evidence of a “soft totalitarianism” emerging in the West today, and if so, what are the main lessons that those who resisted communism have to tell us about identifying and resisting it.

He said that the Soviets and their servants in Central Europe tried to create a new kind of man: homo Sovieticus. To do this, they had to destroy the two sources of identity here: a sense of nationhood, and the Christian religion. In order to survive, said Orban, “we have to strengthen our national identity and our Christian identity. That’s the story.”

Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not.  For Orban, re-establishing a sense of national identity and the Christian faith are the same project. It’s an attempt to reverse the damage done by Communism. The danger, obviously, is that Christianity becomes emptied of its spiritual and moral content, and is filled with nationalism. On the other hand, if a pro-Christian politician like Orban can at least keep the public square open and favorable to the ancestral religious beliefs of the nation, religious leaders can step into the space politics creates, and do their work of recovery.

Orban said that he wants Westerners and others who share these values to come to the Hungarian capital, where they will be free to speak their minds, and establish a base. “I’m trying to create a free place in Budapest,” he said. “Please consider Budapest as a kind of intellectual home.”

Last week, Orban’s government played host to a demography summit here. Reporting on it, the Guardian, as usual, called Orban a politician of the “far right.” Orban is certainly nationalist and populist (and popular here), but smearing him as some kind of right-wing extremist only demonstrates how cut off the liberal Western media are from common sense. One can certainly take issue with Orban’s illiberal methods of pursuing his policy goals — and the prime minister does not deny that he is an illiberal democrat — but the man understands his small country to be in a fight for national survival against globalist, anti-Christian multiculturalism coming from Brussels and other Western capitals. How, exactly, is he wrong?

Put in terms of contemporary American conservative politics, it seems to me that Viktor Orban’s party and movement is what you would see if Sohrab Ahmari’s side of the Ahmari-French debate actually won a mandate to govern. Ahmari’s integralism — as distinct from French’s classical liberalism — is a very hard sell in the United States, which is a truly pluralistic nation. Hungary, however, is far more culturally and ethnically homogeneous. As Orban told us, one of his goals is to make sure that the kinds of questions that are breaking multicultural Western polities never arise here. Again: is he wrong to want to protect Hungary from the disintegration that comes with Western-style liberal identity politics? Hungary has a million problems, but Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology are not among them.

Hungary isn’t without problems, but they have a leader who clearly gets it, and is doing his level best to meet the challenges head on, with a strategy…

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Here’s what the Danes are doing

As per what Hecht said: the NYT laments this, of course:
 

COPENHAGEN — When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”

 

Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

 

Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

 

For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.

 

[…]

 

One measure under consideration would allow courts to double the punishment for certain crimes if they are committed in one of the 25 neighborhoods classified as ghettos, based on residents’ income, employment status, education levels, number of criminal convictions and “non-Western background.” Another would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin — described here as “re-education trips” —in that way damaging their “schooling, language and well-being.” Another would allow local authorities to increase their monitoring and surveillance of “ghetto” families.

 

[…]

 

At this summer’s Folkemodet, an annual political gathering on the island of Bornholm, the justice minister, Soren Pape Poulsen, shrugged off the rights-based objection.

 

“Some will wail and say, ‘We’re not equal before the law in this country,’ and ‘Certain groups are punished harder,’ but that’s nonsense,” he said, adding that the increased penalties would affect only people who break the law.

 

To those claiming the measures single out Muslims, he said: “That’s nonsense and rubbish. To me this is about, no matter who lives in these areas and who they believe in, they have to profess to the values required to have a good life in Denmark.”

 

[…]

 

For their part, many residents of Danish “ghettos” say they would move if they could afford to live elsewhere. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Naassan was sitting with her four sisters in Mjolnerparken, a four-story, red brick housing complex that is, by the numbers, one of Denmark’s worst ghettos: forty-three percent of its residents are unemployed, 82 percent come from “non-Western backgrounds,” 53 percent have scant education and 51 percent have relatively low earnings.

 

The Naassan sisters wondered aloud why they were subject to these new measures. The children of Lebanese refugees, they speak Danish without an accent and converse with their children in Danish; their children, they complain, speak so little Arabic that they can barely communicate with their grandparents. Years ago, growing up in Jutland, in Denmark’s west, they rarely encountered any anti-Muslim feeling, said Sara, 32.

 

“Maybe this is what they always thought, and now it’s out in the open,” she said. “Danish politics is just about Muslims now. They want us to get more assimilated or get out. I don’t know when they will be satisfied with us.”

 

Rokhaia, her due date fast approaching, flared with anger at the mandatory preschool program approved by the government last month: Already, she said, her daughter was being taught so much about Christmas in kindergarten that she came home begging for presents from Santa Claus.

 

“Nobody should tell me whether or how my daughter should go to preschool. Or when,” she said. “I’d rather lose my benefits than submit to force.”

 

Barwaqo Jama Hussein, 18, a Somali refugee, noted that many immigrant families, including her own, had been settled in “ghetto” neighborhoods by the government. She moved to Denmark when she was 5 and has lived in the Tingbjerg ghetto area since she was 13. She said the politicians’ description of “parallel societies” simply did not fit her, or Tingbjerg.

 

“It hurts that they don’t see us as equal people,” she said. “We actually live in Danish society. We follow the rules, we go to school. The only thing we don’t do is eat pork.”

 

About 12 miles south of the city, in the middle-class suburb of Greve, though, voters gushed with approval over the new laws.

 

“They spend too much Danish money,” said Dorthe Pedersen, a hairdresser, daubing chestnut dye on a client’s hairline. “We pay their rent, their clothing, their food, and then they come in broken Danish and say, ‘We can’t work because we’ve got a pain.’”

 

Her client, Anni Larsen, told a story about being invited by a Turkish immigrant to their child’s wedding and being scandalized to discover that the guests were separated by gender and seated in different rooms. “I think there were only 10 people from Denmark,” she said, appalled. “If you ask me, I think they shouldn’t have invited us.”

 

Anette Jacobsen, 64, a retired pharmacist’s assistant, said she so treasured Denmark’s welfare system, which had provided her four children with free education and health care, that she felt a surge of gratitude every time she paid her taxes, more than 50 percent of her yearly income. As for immigrants using the system, she said, “There is always a cat door for someone to sneak in.”

 

“Morally, they should be grateful to be allowed into our system, which was built over generations,” she said.

 

Her husband, Jesper, a former merchant sailor whose ship once docked in Lebanon, said he had watched laborers there being shot for laziness and replaced by truckloads of new workers gathered in the countryside.

 

“I think they are 300 to 400 years behind us,” Jesper said.

 

“Their culture doesn’t fit here,” Anette said.

 

The new hard-edge push to force Muslims to integrate struck both of them as positive. “The young people will see what it is to be Danish and they will not be like their parents,” Jesper said.

 

“The grandmothers will die sometime,” Anette said. “They are the ones resisting change.”

 

By focusing heavily on the collective cost of supporting refugee and immigrant families, the Danish People’s Party has won many voters away from the center-left Social Democrats, who had long been seen as the defenders of the welfare state. With a general election approaching next year, the Social Democrat party has shifted to the right on immigration, saying tougher measures are necessary to protect the welfare state.

 

Nearly 87 percent of Denmark’s 5.7 million people are of Danish descent, with immigrants and their descendants accounting for the rest. Two-thirds of the immigrants are from non-Western backgrounds, a group that swelled with the waves of Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian refugees crossing Europe.

 

Critics would say “the state cannot force children away from their parents in the daytime, that’s disproportionate use of force,” said Rune Lykkeberg, the editor in chief of Dagbladet Information, a left-liberal daily newspaper. “But the Social Democrats say, ‘We give people money, and we want something for this money.’ This is a system of rights and obligations.”

 

Danes have a high level of trust in the state, including as a central shaper of children’s ideology and beliefs, he said. “The Anglo-Saxon conception is that man is free in nature, and then comes the state” constraining that freedom, he said. “Our conception of freedom is the opposite, that man is only free in society.”

 

“You could say, of course, parents have the right to bring up their own kids,” he added. “We would say they do not have the right to destroy the future freedom of their children.”

 

 
Bravo for the Danes! They’re doing the best they can. 

Whether it’s enough, or whether they meet such resistance that they’re forced to go further, time will tell…

 

Commie Yang refuses to say Americans won’t be forced to drive electric cars

Hey, black-pilled YangGangers, here’s your boy:

Andrew Yang refuses to say that Americans won't be forced to drive electric vehicles

Yang mentions a possible confiscation of gas vehicles, says the best option is a buy-back program pic.twitter.com/EXfjWsgteI

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 4, 2019

Sure he’s not a PRC agent? 😉

 

Viktor Orban shows how to do it

Shriek, progs, shriek:

Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, has other ideas. In the place of such strife, he and his colleagues in Fidesz, the governing party, have over the past nine years sought to align the executive, legislative and judicial powers of the state. Those branches now buttress each other and Fidesz—sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes blatantly. Mr Orban refers to the result of these efforts as the “system of national co-operation”. He used to speak more openly of an “illiberal democracy”.

Hey, it’s either Orban’s Fidesz or Jobbik…

And he’s really only doing what progs have done throughout the West since WWII, whenever they’ve had power, what with their ‘long march through the institutions’; he’s just doing it a bit faster now… 😉

The ends really do justify the means when national survival itself truly is at stake.

As is the case throughout the West, now.

 

The most attactive McDonald’s locations in America

The American Conservative is a strange magazine; apart from Rod Dreher and a few other “crunchy cons” like himself, for some reason they now mostly publish much more mainstream Conservatarian Inc. authors like the one of this article, who go against the traditional AmConMag ethos.

He decries regulations forcing McDonald’s to conform to local building codes, criticizing the results as ‘weird’. Yet his accompanying pictures all, as virtually every commenter agrees, contra the author’s snarkiness, demonstrate the value of regulations; every one of the depicted McDonald’s is more attractive than the usual bog-standard crappy modernist usual architecture of McDonald’s, and blend in well with their environments.

Hey, idiot: thank you for highlighting your own knee-jerk libertarian stupidity and tastelessness and inadvertently making the case for intelligent government regulations, you moron.

 

Another historic first

The first crime committed from outer space was by a vengeful lesbian! https://t.co/cJv1sBZAyp

— Chadwick Moore (@Chadwick_Moore) August 24, 2019

NASA astronaut accused of stealing identity, accessing bank account of estranged wife while in space: reporthttps://t.co/i9Rdmt3uhg

— 🇺🇸CovfefeGun🇺🇸⚓ (@CovfefeGun) August 24, 2019

 

Vichycons and Mass Shootings

Excellent essay.

I only wish sensible moderates would read it…