New Culture Forum Documentary: “Demonization†of PM Orbà¡n Unjust, Hungary Not Autocracy
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Loading... - Maria Laine
- 31 Mar 2022
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The British New Culture Forum, under the leadership of journalist Peter Whittle, published a documentary about Hungary on their YouTube channel, covering topics such as the demonization of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, migration, and Hungarian family policies. The New Culture Forum only interviewed pro-government politicians and intellectuals close to the governing parties.
Peter Whittle, founder and director of the forum, is a British politician, author, journalist, and broadcaster who served as a Member of the London Assembly from 2016 to 2021.
An authoritarian regime – communism
“Orbán and Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, are often accused of building an authoritarian state,” says the presenter, Peter Whittle. This, however, “overstates both the extent of their political control and their ideological ambitions,” Whittle continues. He also says that “if we want to take a cursory look at western media, one would be forgiven for thinking that Viktor Orbán was head of an authoritarian regime.”
The communist regime was an authoritarian system that Fidesz did not agree with. Looking back, Zsolt Németh, economist and politician of Fidesz, says:
In 1988 when we established Fidesz, we had communism. […] At that time, it was a protest against communism.”
“I don’t think the Hungarian government, for example, has the slightest interest in whether you go to church on Sunday and if so which church you go to,” says President of the Danube Institute in Budapest, John O’Sullivan. However, during the communist period, the government “did care.” They did “constantly monitor the opinions of their subjects to make sure that they fit the prescribed communist point of view.
That’s why people here don’t like that. They remember it. It’s easier for them to connect the kind of instructions that are issued by Brussels and by modern governments in countries like France and Germany to their citizens, or easy for them to connect that with the kind of oppressive government that they had under the communists.
Because communism wasn’t simply oppression- it was oppression plus preaching and you had to affirm things that you knew to be false because they were the doctrine of the ruling party. And we’re beginning to find that in the woke revolution where people get fired from jobs because they don’t have the correct view on something.”
“Demonization”
Demonization has more to do with Viktor Orbán rather than Hungary itself,”
says journalist and Head of Literature at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Tibor Fischer. “Essentially, a lot of it is quite simply down to political spite. Orbán is a right-wing prime minister. This goes back a long way, even to the mid-1990s: the former communists started spreading the rumor, they went to people in Brussels and Washington and sort of whispered in their ears, ‘unfortunately, he’s far-right, he’s an anti-semite.’ None of this is true but unfortunately, the European left seems to love the idea of having a sort of fascist to castigate and vilify.” Read More...
