What Orbán thinks is on the pages of Magyar Nemzet: what the Hungarian prime minister is waiting for
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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is hiding his alliance with Putin less and less. Thus, the most influential Hungarian newspaper, Magyar Nemzet, which is considered an informal mouthpiece of the Orban regime, published an article by Tamás Pilhály with the telling title "America's Long and Bloody Struggle " (Amerika hosszú és véres vergődése). And if one did not know that this is a Hungarian, not Russian, propaganda publication, it would be very difficult to distinguish this opus from materials disseminated by Moscow.
This is how Magyar Nemzet writes: "We cannot allow Russia to win, as the security of Europe and all of Russia's neighbors will be called into question. If Russia wins, the risk of non-compliance with the established rules of the international order will increase," French President Emmanuel Macron recently worried. Despite the crocodile tears, this is more likely to be a concern than a mere scolding. Macron is also obviously aware of this, the Russian bear does not want to fight NATO, he is only clearing his own historical lands from the management of the Ukrainian puppet government controlled by the Americans."
It is surprising that the press in Hungary, a country that itself suffered greatly from the Russian invasion, writes in such a tone as if it were not a member of the European Union and NATO, but had long been a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, created to meet Moscow's hegemonic needs.
And when such revelations are not spread by Kremlin trolls on the forums of leading Western publications, but by the once reputable Magyar Nemzet, it becomes clear that Hungary is on the side of Russia on the information front. By spreading Russian propaganda, this newspaper creates a completely distorted reality for its readers.
And given the very nature of the accumulation of public information, such lies can become unshakable myths, the creators of which use Manichean methods to explain history. To win the hearts and minds of ordinary Hungarians, the political servants of the Orban regime are ready to do anything. Who is there to check the facts for reality, trying to distinguish fiction from truth?
Then Tamás Pilhály clearly uses Moscow's themes again: "Then, in the so-called 'rules-based world order,' everyone should act as one against such people - those who shoot their citizens, and those who overthrow a legitimate government through a coup d'état, those who restrict the use of their native language by national minorities, and ban opposition parties and television. But in the case of Ukraine, we see that the horrific crimes of 2014-2022 were committed with the consent and support of those who preach rules and world order."
Everything is presented in the usual Kremlin press tone - Ukraine attacked itself, the "legitimate government" of the traitor Yanukovych (who, however, was already half a step away from handing over Ukrainians to slavery in Russia), fictional "horrible crimes" that the author obviously learned about from his colleagues in Moscow, and similar distorted information in the same vein. Thousands of hours of Orbán's disinformation are constantly pounding into the heads of Hungarians. Proving to Orban's potential electorate that his chosen anti-Ukrainian, anti-European and anti-democratic rhetoric is nothing more than their own choice.
The article goes on to conflate the tragic events in Kosovo with elements of Hungarian history, without mentioning that the Americans and NATO intervened only after the troops of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic began forcibly expelling Kosovars from their homes and driving them toward the Albanian border.
The author categorically emphasizes: "Where was sovereignty and territorial integrity then? A referendum was not even needed to establish new borders. America wanted it, and it got it, period. Just as the victors did not allow a referendum (with one exception) in Trianon, otherwise their evil plan would have failed, and Hungary would have remained in at least two-thirds of our historic country, if not more. The West, on the other hand, needed artificial buffer states loyal to it, and using the formula "Divide and conquer!" sowed the seeds of eternal discord in Central Europe. It worked".
While preparing his revanchist cocktail, Tamás Pilhal continues to make no secret of the fact that the current Hungarian government still considers all the territories inhabited by Hungarian minorities to be its own. And he, as one of its information mouthpieces, sees the "historical lands" of Hungary as at least twice as large. This directly correlates with Russia's "historical lands" on the territory of Ukraine, which he writes about at the beginning of his article.
And in general, there is no "eternal disagreement in Central Europe". Aside from Hungary, no European country has territorial claims to its neighbors. But the task of such information propagandists from Magyar Nemzet is to sow confrontation between Hungarians and their neighboring peoples. By glorifying the Russian Federation's insidious attack on the territory of Ukraine, they want to encourage ordinary Hungarians to believe that they too can regain the "lost lands" that are now "illegally" part of other states.
Tamás Pilhal convinces his readers: "World politics is governed by selfish interests, brute force, violence and rudeness. On the other hand, I am constantly surprised that some people can call all this, and even genocide, a 'rule-based world order'... The Lord of the Earth does not need to defend himself or his territory, because no one has ever threatened him. But he needs world domination. Thanks to his aircraft carriers, he has earned the privilege of moving goods around the world as he pleases. But recently, that came to an end. His world domination has been shaken and is crumbling. The only question is whether it will try to delay its inevitable demise by local wars or a great global fire."
Here, the Orban expert, without saying a word about the genocide that Putin has organized against the Ukrainian people, begins to fight against America, which is an ally of Europe. The question naturally arises: if Hungary so openly dreams of the end of the United States' leading role in world politics and its "inevitable demise," is this the personal position of Prime Minister Viktor Orban? After all, today Magyar Nemzet plays the same role in supporting the Hungarian dictator as Pravda, the organ of the CPSU Central Committee, did in the Soviet Union.
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Magyar Nemzet, which has actually turned into an organ of the ruling Fidesz party in Hungary, constantly supports Russia and calls for a mythical "peace," that is, the surrender of our state and the abandonment of all occupied Ukrainian lands to the Russian Federation. As if it was not Russia that attacked Ukraine, but vice versa - Ukraine attacked the Russian Federation.
This whole package of false narratives is so smooth that after reading such articles, many people in Hungary will start thinking that being in the European Union was a mistake, that Hungarians do not need NATO at all, and that their ally is not Europe and America, but Putin's Russia. Zombie technologies are so powerful that they encourage many people to turn off their thinking and not think about what they are being fed under the guise of "objective information."
In one article, the author managed to squeeze in all the postulates of Orbán's propaganda, which a large part of Hungarian society is constantly being led to believe. These are the tentacles of officials from Brussels who "love and respect the rule-based world order as much as their masters do. They set their laws from the stratosphere. If necessary, they will accept Sargentini's indictment and launch a seven-article procedure against Hungary in such a way that, in violation of their own procedural rules, abstention does not count as a vote. The management of education or migration is an internal affair of member states, and no association agreement or EU founding document gives Brussels the power to interfere in them. But they are blackmailing us, threatening to deprive us of our voting and veto rights, and withholding money due to us."
Back in September 2018, the European Parliament rapporteur Judith Sargentini brought charges against the Hungarian authorities for refusing to follow European migration policy, violating the rights of minorities in the country, and restricting freedom of speech. Sargentini was followed by representatives of other European Parliament committees on budgetary control, constitutional affairs, women's rights, and gender equality. All called for the launch of a procedure under Article 7 of the EU Treaty.
In this list of accusations against Brussels, Magyar Nemzet highlights at the end of the paragraph "threatening to deprive us of our voting rights and veto rights, and withholding money due to us." And this should be taken into account. After all, these "voting rights and veto rights" have allowed Viktor Orban to constantly blackmail the European Union for many years, block any initiatives to help Ukraine, and slow down Ukraine's progress towards the European Union and NATO.
Orbán has become a blackmail virtuoso, and so far, strangely enough, he has been successful. Now that the EU has begun to realize that the constantly subsidized Hungary has established its own special rules for staying in the EU and does not want to put up with it any longer, Budapest is most worried that "they will not give us our money." This is because the stability of the Orban government directly depends on its funding from Brussels.
At the end of the article, Tamás Pilhal summarizes all the "shortcomings" he sees in Brussels: "The rule-based world order is similar to previous ruling orders in history: the rule of thumb is the rule. There is only one rule: be quiet! What is different from the previous one is the camouflage. They expect you to feel proud that they are taking away your freedom, democracy, and humanism, even if it is in the form of napalm. But their collapse is inevitable. Their culmination will be long and bloody."
Viktor Orbán, along with Putin, is waiting for the collapse of the world order, which seems to allow him to revive the "Great Hungary". Here, the "political vinaigrette" mixes revisionist geopolitical desires, hatred of Brussels, on whose subsidies Orban built his political stability, attraction to Moscow, which feeds the prime minister with gas and oil handouts, and hatred of Ukraine, which does not want to surrender to the Russian invaders.
The European Parliament should organize constant monitoring of what Magyar Nemzet writes and publish an English-language digest of the most odious articles to better understand what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants. After all, it is obvious that what Orban has in his mind is on the pages of Magyar Nemzet.