Imagine the White House chief of staff stating the following at a press conference after a significant meeting about a highly controversial issue with the leading representatives of American Jewry: “the President will address all of our fellow Americans as well as our Jewish citizens next week.” It does not take a lot of imagination to envision the firestorm of criticism that would follow such a division of the American people into real Americans vs. Jewish citizens of America.
Yet, this is precisely what János Lázár, the Minister of State for the Prime Minister’s Office, said after the unsuccessful round-table meeting with leading Hungarian Jewish organizations. Of course, he was not talking about fellow Americans but rather “fellow Hungarian countrymen” and “our Jewish citizens.” Perhaps at other times, this statement would have drawn more fire from liberal Hungarians and Hungarian Jews alike. At this time, though, Hungarian Jews are, in a…
President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in separate messages felicitated the anniversary of victory of the Islamic Revolution to President Hassan Rouhani and First Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri.
In his message, President Ader underlined the efforts of both countries in expansion of bilateral cooperation in all fields, which secure interests of the two countries.
There have been additional references to Hungary in relation to other subjects, e.g., European reparations to the Jewish community, but it’s the drift into nationalism that catches play here and with it movement within the European aligned NATO state to cement relationships with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
As as happened over the course of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s tenure, drift toward fascism may draw a strong liberal response from the middle and thereby stall a conservative state movement.
Similar dynamics have also surfaced in Kiev — Ukraine protests take center-stage at EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels | News | DW.DE | 10.02.2014 – which population has found itself in The Bear Trap, i.e., aesthetically, politically, and spiritually aligned with European modernity and its social values but beholden to a state in which the “vertical of power” — the Autocrat — determines the character, position, and values of the state and states it makes its buffer.
Hungarians may express themselves, take to the streets, and throw fits, but Papa Putin with the checkbook and gas tap has sufficient clout for leaving the Ukrainian government to shrug off its liberal critics.
That particular Bear has also aligned itself with Iranian interests — the better to drum up defense and nuclear sales business — and to the extent that it also holds Hungarians in its paws by way of energy supply and sales, it may stalls Hungary’s westward inclinations and, possibly, encourage those who feel comfortable with thuggish mafia-style Putinesque Russian politics.
The effects of the axis — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — made visible by the collapse of Syria, a lingering post-Soviet artifact may be just emergent in the discussion eastern European politics.
If I had budget plus swift graphic arts I would do this with clusters, but a linear verbal illustration might suffice:
Where tanks may once have been dispatched, cash and energy may suffice — and money gets around without conscience.
Additional Reference
Hungary
Viktor Orbán in Moscow: “Putin’s new little kitten”? | Hungarian Spectrum – 2/1/2014: “Moreover, one must keep in mind that for Hungary Russia is a much more important partner than vice versa. In trade relations the Hungarian share of Russian imports is only 2%. On the other hand, Hungary because of its dependence on natural gas and oil is heavily dependent on Russian goodwill.”
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “The deal shows Putin’s ability to use Russia’s control over energy resources to extend his sway beyond the former Soviet Union. Last month, he pledged a $15 billion bailout and a cut in the price of natural gas to Ukraine and promised to lend as much as $2 billion to Belarus.”
From the above cited BBC news link: “Washington’s European envoy Victoria Nuland was heard using an expletive to disparage the EU’s handling of the crisis and revealing Washington’s determination to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian struggle.”
Obama cancels meeting with Putin amid Russia tensions – NBC News.com: “Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the White House said.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union left Soviet business and political relationships as well as Soviet style in place: at least as much would seem embodied in the post-KGB, now FSB person of Russian President Putin who has accepted the defeat of Russian communism — or the armored covering of it — but not of Russian empire and the idea of a Russian way of doing things, even if regress to a 19th Century stance with class empowerment through patronage and equal footing with despots similarly endowed becomes the price paid by Russia’s constituency for the privilege of being different, quintessentially Russian, and now as in the Romanov-then, also cut out of the money but restored in pride.
SOCHI, Russia — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.
And that’s just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to be.
“This is not a ‘business as usual’ summit,” said one EU ambassador. “It is time to take stock of where we are in relations with Russia. We will not be discussing any of the nuts-and-bolts issues.”
Kiev may represent the edge of Putin’s reinvigorating of the Russian state as an entity made larger than itself with a ring of buffering client states.
At 5:19 in the above clip, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt notes, “We have European values, we have European principles, we have European rights, that we must uphold in each and every European country.”
President Putin’s sumo wrestling on behalf of the future of resurgent Russian empire runs into numerous modern issues, starting with the neglect of the Russians themselves outside of the circles of immediate cooperation, influence, and power, which, of course, is part of what makes an autocracy what it is. In earlier days — the good old days! — tanks may have handily quelled the rioting in Kiev; today, those tanks may turn against the imposition of a new Ukrainian-Russian cooperative in the absence of a genuinely transformed Moscow.
However, as one friend has reminded me several times this winter, Russia (Putin) owns the cash and gas supplies and has used them for political leverage. Kiev’s own heavy-handed laws (who taught them how to be so tough and stupid?) have mightily encouraged the hard line in the state’s opposition:
“Everyone here’s looking at a 10-year jail sentence — the laws are in place,” said Vladimir, a 53-year-old entrepreneur from Kiev who’s been at the camp from the start and declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal. “We’ll be here until we win, otherwise our fate is sealed. There’s no third option.”
The conversion of Ukraine’s discomfort into stark black-and-white terms devolves directly to the government, which by imposing draconian measures eliminated the Ukrainian people’s post-Soviet customary sense of freedom of speech.
The new law, which bans all forms of protests, was published in the official Golos Ukrainy, or Voice of Ukraine, newspaper, raising fears that the government would use excessive force to quell dissent.
The opposition and the West have condemned the bill, demanding that it be reversed, but the Interior Ministry said at least 32 protesters had been arrested in the most recent round of demonstrations.
As he has with Syria, Putin has handily kept himself out of the spotlight. Of course, RT’s in no position to pursue this line of analysis, and then too . . . what’s he done but helped Ukraine with money and kept the gas supply moving?
In an open letter to President Obama, the two featured in the video, Fiona Hill and Steven Pifer, stated the following:
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine look to the United States, not just the European Union, for support. A joint U.S.-EU stance has the greatest prospect of countering Russian actions. We recommend that you instruct the State Department to coordinate policy steps with the European Union and key members, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, to bolster the “targeted” states and assist them as Russia increases its economic and political pressures.
Batkivshchyna – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The party wants to prosecute “Law enforcement involved in political repression”[79] and to impeach current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his “anti-people regime” to “return Ukraine to the path of European integration”.
There’s a mighty page ahead of the statement quoted.
My impression is that the Soviet Era really is just ending and it has brought Ukraine — as it has Syria — to a crossroads. Ukraine’s position is much easier than Syria’s, of course, but The Bear isn’t going away either although by way of Putin the leadership has taken a detour (the big one step backwards) into the 19th Century, God bless him, and that leaves Russia’s future — the two steps forward! — quite open as regards its becoming a responsible state genuinely devoted to internal pan-Slavic interests.
According to party leader Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda is not an ‘extremist’ party; he said that “depicting nationalism as extremism is a cliché rooted in Soviet and modern globalist propaganda”.[46] He also stated that “countries like” Japan and Israel are fully nationalistic states, “but nobody accuses the Japanese of being extremists”.[46] According to Tyahnybok, the party’s view of nationalism “shouldn’t be mixed with chauvinism or fascism, which means superiority of one nation over another”, and that its platform is called “Our Own Authorities, Our Own Property, Our Own Dignity, on Our Own God-Given Land”.
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When I sat down post on BackChannels this morning, I thought I would wrap up global turmoil in a page, starting with Ukraine but moving swiftly to Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on, and one might do that from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, which is the World Wide Web, but in depth and expanse, even the smallest conflict in the world turns out incredibly rich, and what the reader-writer is going to get is a snapshot, a glimpse along the surface of political reality.
In schematic, to say Putin –> Ukraine : Ukraine <–> Europe might prove out and be all one needs, but oh the devils in the details! Nonetheless, I believe it has fallen to Vladimir Putin to return Russia to Russian glory in a Russian manner — and we’re going to see that extraordinary effort and expense in some Bond movie glamour at Winter Olympics in Sochi very soon (not “hot off the press” these days, but one-hour cool on the web: Welcome to Sochi, the security Games – CNN.com – 1/27/2014) — and to question the democratic socialist values of the west with an assertion about feudal power and aristocracy.
“Hungarian state institutions at the time [shared responsibility] for the Holocaust. This apology today by the Hungarian state must become part of national memory and identity,” he added.
He added: cowardly attempt to keep the attention of diverting the Horthy regime of Judaism destruction played a role, and confuse the Holocaust of Hungarian people with the “suffering” caused by the German occupation, while the latter historical facts prove that instead of resistance rather general received applause – wrote in the letter. wrote I understand that “due to various political and economic reasons, the Holocaust Memorial Center operating managers do not want or can not speak out against this impudent forger course of history.”
Serious efforts are being made by Fidesz-Jobbik supporters to recreate the old Soviet/Russian friendship from which twenty-three years ago Hungarians were happy to escape.
Hungarian Ambassador Casba Körösi would seem to understand that the Jobbik Party, its affections, whatever the basis, for Iran, Russia, and Putin’s own nationalist “vertical of power”, and its disaffection with Jews and the open democracies of the west have put Hungary on a collision course with a 1933 all its own.
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In admitting Hungary’s guilt he said institutions in the the Hungarian state of the 1940s were responsible for the Holocaust as they had been complicit in accepting incidents led to the genocide of Hungarian Jews.
Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s controversial leader during World War II, oversaw the deportation of some 18,000 Jews to the German-occupied Soviet Union in 1941 — more than 10,000 of whom were murdered — and is seen by many as complicit in the mass deportations to Nazi death camps in 1944 which resulted in the deaths of around 450,000 Hungarian Jews.
“We know we are responsible for the Holocaust and we also know that Hungarian state institutions were responsible for the Holocaust,” Navracsics said in parliament. “Hungarians were the perpetrators and Hungarians were those who suffered. Hungarians did the shooting and Hungarians died.”
The statements may be subtle. That above by Hungary’s standing Minister of Justice recognizes what happened and yet equates the suffering as general: for sure, Hungarians did the shooting, but where the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing are concerned, it was Hungarian Jews who were made to die, and while not alone in that for ethnic persecution — more on that in a moment — certainly the numbers overwhelm.
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Some Gypsies were sterilized as early as 1933, though no Jews yet were; beginning in the same year, camps were being established by the Nazis to contain Gypsies at Vennhausen, Dieseistrasse, Mahrzan and Dachau, although at so early a date Jewish victims were not being sent en masse to any camps. It is a matter of singular disgrace that in 1936 the anti-Gypsy campaign became globalized, through the establishment of the international Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace by Interpol in Vienna. Again, this did not happen for the Jews. In effect, the Nazi Party sought, and was given, the cooperation of other Euopean governments in its campaign to locate and identify Gypsies throughout Europe for its later plans for extermination.
“Jew Hate” is never confined to the Jews, but perhaps ever since Abraham’s failure to speak for Isaac when asked to make a sacrifice of him, Jews have been “speaking truth to power” for thousands of years and are a vocal people, so it is good today to learn of power in the person of an Hungarian ambassador speaking truth to the Jobbik Party and Prime Minister Viktor Mihály Orbán’s government.
Hungarians know what Hungarians have done. Clear acknowledgment might cleanse a national conscience, that as opposed to covering it up, glossing it over, in successive acts of patronizing cant and shameful cowardice.
Addendum
Dear György és Szabolcs:
I am writing to request that you remove my name from the Téka és Információs Központ at the Holocaust at the Holokauszt Emlékközpont. I reached this decision with a heavy heart, having followed the recent developments in Hungary with great concern. The history-cleansing campaign of the past few years calculated to whitewash the historical record of the Horthy era, including the changes in the constitution that “legalized” the sinister measures that were subsequently taken to absolve Hungary from the active role it had played in the destruction of close to 600,000 of its citizens of the Jewish faith, have left me, and I assume many others, stunned.
KIEV, Ukraine — The European Union on Sunday broke off talks with Ukraine on the far-reaching trade deal that protesters here have been demanding for weeks, and a top official issued a stinging, angry statement all but accusing Ukraine’s president of dissembling.
“Words & deeds of President [Viktor Yanukovych] & government regarding the Association Agreement are further & further apart. Their arguments have no grounds in reality,” he twitted on Sunday.
While the European Union insists that the door is still open for Ukraine to join the EU, President Viktor Yanukovych is walking the tightrope between appeasing the wishes of his people and keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin happy.
Mr Yanukovych had already sent his skullcrackers in once to Independence Square in Kiev, centre of the protests that erupted in November after he rejected an association agreement with the European Union, in favour of an opaque economic deal with Russia. That needless brutality brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.
All of the conflicts BackChannels has been watching have to do with the despotic versus the democratic.
In some instances, the despotic force is sufficient to repress and silence the latent organizations and personalities arrayed against it; in others, there’s yet opportunity to assert a popular will on behalf of human dignity and human rights against mafia-style state-based machinations and privilege.
Ukrainians, of course, have just found The Bear once again climbing aboard their own back.
The “new nobility” not only have their hands in the gushing revenue stream associated with Russia’s energy industry, but they may have also their hands on the spigot, and with winter yet to begin — hard to believe this year that ice and snow have arrived so early everywhere in the northern latitudes — the same could give them the cold treatment.
A glance at the reading tells me Ukrainians owe Moscow some money too for energy already consumed. That will give Moscow some whining room in the coming negotiations.
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Joseph Stalin’s decision in 1928 to seize privately held agricultural land and transform it into collective farms caused massive hardship for all Soviet peasants. When authorities expropriated peasant grain stocks and farm animals, hunger broke out in much of the USSR. In Ukraine, where close to a million peasants actively rebelled against collectivization, such expropriations were especially severe, leading to widespread starvation that the state both refused to alleviate and purposely aggravated until millions had died and a massive crackdown on Ukrainian political, cultural, and religious elites had been completed. At the height of the Holodomor, 25,000 Ukrainians starved per day; cannibalism was rampant.
Ukrainians know well the Soviet part of the post-Soviet Russian story, and one would think it doubtful the same should now entertain a return to all of that, especially absent the cover of socialist concern that accompanied the theft.
Related: Oleh Tyahnybok – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “[You are the ones] that the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine fears most”[11] / and / “They were not afraid and we should not be afraid. They took their automatic guns on their necks and went into the woods, and fought against the Moskali, Germans, Kikes and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.”[10]
Next Ukrainian headache: resurgent anti-Semitic eastern European nationalism.
How is it that the potentially despotic engaging the established despotic cannot recognize in themselves the same idiotic malignant ambitions?
Yanukovych backed off the agreement on the grounds that the EU was not providing adequate compensation to his economically struggling nation for potential trades losses with Russia. Russia, which for centuries controlled or exerted heavy influence on Ukraine, wants the country to join a customs union, analogous to the EU, which also includes Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The opposition says that union would effectively reconstitute the Soviet Union and remain suspicious that Yanukovych might agree to it when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz said it agreed with Russian gas giant Gazprom to defer payments for winter gas supplies until early 2014. With Ukraine embroiled in protests, and Europe making headway on energy diversification strategies, the move signals a tilt by Kiev back to its former Kremlin patrons.
I propose a new approach, a simple extension of an existing mechanism: the infringement action. The Commission could signal systematic complaints against a Member State by bundling a group of individual infringement actions together under the banner of Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) which guarantees:
the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men prevail.
A systematic infringement action would share with ordinary infringement actions specific complaints against the national law or consistent practices of a Member State for violating particular provisions of EU law.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and University Center for Human Values, as well as Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University.
The paper would seem to address a slew of issues sensitive now in central and eastern European states slipping along with resurgent medieval to Nazi-era nationalist movements. Certainly, returns to anti-Roma and anti-Semitic incitement would obviate the “rights of persons belonging to minorities.”
In the post-WWII generations, one would have hoped that so much bigotry, license, and hate had been consigned to historic memory and the coffin lid on that pounded sufficiently to keep it closed forever.
The realpolitik, as Hungary’s Jobbik might exemplify, would seem not quite so.
As the direct memory of such monsters fade with the dying of the “Greatest Generation”, it has been left to the children and grandchildren to detect the same poisonous blood in contemporary bodies politic and keep it from seeping back to the surface and — as it may do so, however slowly — drowning again another generation to come.
Scheppele’s proposal goes on to deal more directly with Hungary’s “democratic backsliding” toward fascism, as with this example:
The structural weakness of the individual infringement action was illustrated by the creative, bold, important, and successful case that the Commission brought with regard to the decapitation of the leadership of the judiciary that the Hungarian government accomplished through the sudden, forced early retirement of senior judges. By lowering the retirement age from 70 to 62 with immediate effect, the Hungarian government forced the departure of the most senior 10% of the judiciary, including fully one quarter of the Supreme Court justices and half of the appeals court presidents. The government then replaced these senior judges with judges of its own choosing, using a new legal procedure that put the choice of such judges into the hands of the president of a new political institution, the National Judicial Office, taking that power away from the judiciary itself. (pp.3-4).
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Szaniszló’s harangue begins with a rehash of the Kennedy assassination, a topic he talked about earlier. Here the story serves as an introduction to the main theme. Kennedy was assassinated by “financial powers that conquered the United States.” According to Szaniszló, Kennedy was not the first victim of this financial power group because “there were earlier presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries” who were killed by these people. I myself couldn’t come up with any president whose assassination was in any way connected to the financial world. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Southerner; James Garfield’s assassin was mentally unbalanced; and William McKinley was killed by an anarchist. As for vice presidents, no vice president of the United States has ever been assassinated. And as for secretaries, there was an assassination attempt on the life of William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, at the same time as the president’s assassination, but he survived.
Soon enough Szaniszló moves to more dangerous grounds. With a quick turn we are at 9/11, which is according to him “the biggest lie of world history” because it was a “willful self-provocation, one of many.”
Ferenc Szaniszló hosts a twice-weekly news show in Hungary on “Echo TV”. Says Wikipedia (as viewed 12/2/2013) about him: “One of Echo TV’s better known broadcasters is Ferenc Szaniszló, known for his racist and anti-Semitic statements.[9][10][11][12][13][5] In 2011, Hungary’s media regulator fined Echo 500,000 Forints after Szaniszló compared Roma people to “monkeys”.[14]
Nice guy.
Such as Szanisló may represent should have a country, preferably one where they may be left by themselves. Until that day, other more genuinely democratic and open societies may need in their region-wide transnational law some astute, defensive, and enforceable legal guidance and law.
According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the waters around Gibraltar are indisputably British territorial waters.
But Spain disputes UK sovereignty over Gibraltar, a limestone outcrop known as the Rock near the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, which has been ruled by Britain since 1713.
In my best British vexed: how can the west expect Islam to get a grip on its small wars, whether spun into reality by criminal egotism and greed or rightful fear of dissolution associated with access to and control of money, natural resources, and trade, when it entangles itself in a spat over a long-held British property?
The causes are small but significant: cigarette smuggling; alleged environmental impact of a small artificial reef — intended to promote biodiversity and littoral marine health — on a Spanish fishery.
Stop the tobacco smugglers on the British side (equalize the pricing, perhaps; govern the volume of shipping received, perhaps; if criminally received, put the behavior in the international crime — and narcotics — category, or treat as if it was).
Compensate the fisherman, if necessary, or produce a positive economic adjustment program.
Whatever the casuistry, stop it, put the guns down and get the disputes settled by attending to the issues together.
I have been wondering for some time when it is that the media “experts” in the Prime Minister’s Office decide to publish his speeches in full on his own website and when they are satisfied with only a summary. Lately I’m coming to the conclusion that they opt for a summary when the exact words that were uttered are not really suitable for a wider audience. Or perhaps when the prime minister’s speech was delivered at a conference where others also had a chance to talk and might have voiced opinions that are not in line with those of Hungary’s prime minister.
I suspect the latter may have been the case with the speech delivered by Orbán at the conference (“On the Road to a Stronger Europe”) of the Christian Democratic International held in Budapest on October 11. At the core of the speech was Orbán’s belief that “the denial of…
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