Viktor Orbán Versus the Enlightenment

May 3, 2018 1:39 AM

"A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd." [SL to Jacobin by Miklós Tamás-Gáspár]

"This does not mean that the ruling cliques are not dirty. They are. But in Hungary, this is hopelessly confused with the structural elements of Orbán’s “deep state.” Orbán’s semi-dictatorship (with its purges, blacklists, and suppression of the media), unlike its post-Stalinist predecessor, is not statist or centralizing. Its guiding principles are arbitrary, capricious rule and, above all, informality. The real centers of power in Orbán’s Hungary are formally independent institutions (state foundations, semi-private companies, purportedly private firms living on state credit) that are outside the control of normal government administration and of judicial control as well. Meanwhile, regular administration is being dismantled and well-trained civil servants are being thrown out in droves. Drafting of bills happens behind the backs of ostensibly leading politicians and bureaucrats, and rushed through parliament — usually without discussion. Capital goods are distributed to loyal retainers, which then finance various political maneuvers that will not appear as government expenditures. The frittering away of state power to the advantage and the profit of an informal group of power-holders has created a unique system where pre-capitalist forms of personal dependence are triumphantly returning while the actual policies are ultra-capitalist — a peculiar combination of neoconservatism and mercantilism.

Outside the halls of power, workers’ resistance and popular protest have been replaced by mass emigration, which has given rise to a crazy combination of high unemployment and workforce shortages while contributing to the aging of the population. The flight of doctors and nurses from the country has helped bring the health system to near-total collapse."

posted by kmt (45 comments total)

Hungary is in a terrifying condition and has been for awhile. At the point when two elderly Catholic nuns are indistinguishable from elderly Muslim ladies we have a really bad problem. Thanks for posting!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 2:29 AM on May 3, 2018

At the point when two elderly Catholic nuns are indistinguishable from elderly Muslim ladies we have a really bad problem.

Yeah, nah.
posted by hawthorne at 2:34 AM on May 3, 2018 [21 favorites]

This is bad. There's a weird irony in Orbán's anti-Soros mania in that (according to wikipedia at least), "In 1989, Orbán received a scholarship from the Soros Foundation to study political science at Pembroke College, Oxford." And now (from the FPP) "The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes."
posted by misteraitch at 2:42 AM on May 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

Sounds like fascism.
posted by eviemath at 2:52 AM on May 3, 2018 [18 favorites]

Look to Hungary if you want to know what you're fighting against.
posted by rory at 3:13 AM on May 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

The BBC did a good write-up on Viktor Orbán: The man who thinks Europe has been invaded.
posted by bouvin at 4:16 AM on May 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

At the point when two elderly Catholic nuns are indistinguishable from elderly Muslim ladies we have a really bad problem.

Hopefully that's just poorly phrased, as you seem to have misidentified the problem.
posted by macapes at 4:19 AM on May 3, 2018 [25 favorites]

There's something terribly familiar about that second paragraph, which I can't quite put my finger on…
posted by Pinback at 4:21 AM on May 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

I know this is horrible and Orban has gone into full Hitler-in-1939 mode, and the talk about "re-settlement" of the Roma makes me sick to my stomach because resettlement has never meant anything but genocide --

but I kind of want "rootless cosmopolitan Jewry" on a t-shirt.

(I'm Jewish but not a religious Zionist, and I live in a big multicultural city, and I'm definitely against nationalism/ethnocentrism, so the shirt fits, right?).
posted by jb at 5:29 AM on May 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

There's a weird irony in Orbán's anti-Soros mania

Has anybody ever seen Viktor Orbán and David Icke in the same room at the same time?

I THINK NOT
posted by flabdablet at 5:36 AM on May 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm Jewish but not a religious Zionist, and I live in a big multicultural city, and I'm definitely against nationalism/ethnocentrism, so the shirt fits, right?

I mean, you can't do worse than the current government of Israel, led by the son of a Holocaust survivor, who has endorsed and even joined in on Orban's racism and anti-Semitism and recently tried to engage in their own re-settlement of "infiltrators" (their words!) that were refugees from genocide and persecution. Which, by the way, Israeli Holocaust survivors found appallingly similar enough to their experiences to protest against the move.
posted by zombieflanders at 5:42 AM on May 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

If you're pushing around old ladies, something is wrong with you and your culture.

This is an interesting bit:

that presents Soros as the mastermind behind the mass demographic war against white Christian Europe (and against white Israel, of course: Zionism and anti-semitism are becoming perfectly reconcilable).

The combination of pro-Israel and anti-semitic: Why? Is it a case of "go be a Jew over there?" Or do "rootless cosmopolitans" become okay when they get "roots" by turning into blood-and-soil nationalists?
posted by clawsoon at 5:46 AM on May 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

The Jewish community in Hungary has expressed concern that the campaign is encouraging anti-Semitism, (from guardian link)

It's not encouraging anti-Semitism, it is explicitly anti-Semitic - and I don't mean in the "Arabs are Semites" sense but in the "Jews are conspiring to destroy our country" sense.

Netanyahu is, as always, a yahoo - but also playing with fire. I don't want him to learn the hard way after there is a pogrom against Jews in Hungary, as well as the Roma and other minorities.

I fear most for the Roma: Jews can leave for Israel, but Roma refugees from Hungary have few choices. Thousands were denied refugee status in Canada by (what I think is) a criminal disregard for the dangers they face in Hungary. That was the previous government, but I don't know if the current has changed the policy.
posted by jb at 5:55 AM on May 3, 2018 [13 favorites]

So...
Hungary is becoming as bad as the US?
posted by evilDoug at 6:10 AM on May 3, 2018

So...
Hungary is becoming as bad as the US?

Other way around: Hungary is leading the charge in this particular race. But the trends are negative in both cases, yes.
posted by eviemath at 6:20 AM on May 3, 2018 [10 favorites]

I fear most for the Roma: Jews can leave for Israel, but Roma refugees from Hungary have few choices. Thousands were denied refugee status in Canada by (what I think is) a criminal disregard for the dangers they face in Hungary. That was the previous government, but I don't know if the current has changed the policy.

More about Roma refugees in Canada. As I understand it, immigration and refugee issues for the Roma community are also tied in with the struggles of residents of the Parkdale neighborhood of Toronto to maintain affordable housing and prevent the dissolution of their neighborhood communities by forces of gentrification.
posted by eviemath at 6:31 AM on May 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

The ads that were put up by Orbán’s faction during the recent election are truly unbelievable. It's like the worst instincts of the Alex Jones crowd are governing a country.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:37 AM on May 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

The combination of pro-Israel and anti-semitic: Why? Is it a case of "go be a Jew over there?" Or do "rootless cosmopolitans" become okay when they get "roots" by turning into blood-and-soil nationalists?

So there are several strains of nationalism, some of which are compatible with ethnic and religious diversity. But the strain that dominated, since the 19th century, in Central and Eastern Europe says that each nation belongs to a particular people, who are bound together through shared ethnicity and blood. Hungary is the nation for the Hungarian people. If you live in Hungary and you're ethnically Romanian, in a perfect world you should return to Romania, which is the land that has been set aside by God for you. And maybe you can live in Hungary as a guest, but you're not Hungarian. You can't be Hungarian. Hungarianness is an inherited, ethnic identity that you can't adopt. You have to be born that way.

Jews were/are a big problem for this ideology, as were/are the Roma. We, the Jews and the Roma, couldn't go back to our ethnic nation-state, because we didn't have one. We're rootless cosmopolitans. We belong nowhere. All we could do was corrupt someone else's ethnic nation-state. And worse yet, Jews often blend in pretty well. You can meet us and think that we're perfectly good citizens, while really we're pollution, diluting the purity of the ethnic nation.

So there are two solutions to the problem. One is to kill us. They tried that, with some success. The other is to give us our own ethnic nation-state. That's Israel. (The Roma are still fucked, though.)

There is, of course, a third solution, which is to reject ethnic nationalism and say that states exist for all of their citizen, regardless of ethnicity or heritage. But that's not really Orbán's thing, so it's either genocide or Israel.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:39 AM on May 3, 2018 [27 favorites]

At the point when two elderly Catholic nuns are indistinguishable from elderly Muslim ladies we have a really bad problem.

The current fashion in hijabs was explicitly modeled after the habits of Lebanese Maronite nuns.

Confusing nuns and Muslim ladies is normal. What happens next, however..
posted by ocschwar at 6:43 AM on May 3, 2018 [8 favorites]

So...
Hungary is becoming as bad as the US?
Short answer: no.

There's a lot going on with Orbán and Hungary. This article does a good job of hitting some key themes:
-a reboot of 20th century anticommunism
-the very effective demonization of Soros (this has led to some fierce politics around academia, too)
-hitting Atlantic PC/gender politics (some of this in Russia, too)
-neoliberalism, Russian style
-appealing to Christian religious bigotry (which isn't just a Hungarian thing)
-Romania-bashing
-a good deal of media control

The opposition parties' failures are crucial here, too.

The collapse of liberalism: I'm reminded of Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which argued for the importance of creating a political constituency for liberal democracy.

I would like to know to what extent the regime benefits from troll armies.
posted by doctornemo at 6:50 AM on May 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I fear most for the Roma: Jews can leave for Israel, but Roma refugees from Hungary have few choices.

Is there, or has there ever been, a Roma equivalent of Zionism? Has anybody proposed a Roma homeland anywhere?
posted by acb at 7:06 AM on May 3, 2018

w/r/t the specific confluence of anti-semitism and pro-Zionism: it's a useful rhetorical device to go on about shadowy Jewish conspiracies to islamicize Europe or whatever, but when the push comes to shove, why wouldn't he support a brutal anti-Muslim apartheid state?
posted by The Horse You Rode In On at 7:11 AM on May 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

w/r/t the specific confluence of anti-semitism and pro-Zionism: it's a useful rhetorical device to go on about shadowy Jewish conspiracies to islamicize Europe or whatever, but when the push comes to shove, why wouldn't he support a brutal anti-Muslim apartheid state?

You get that antisemitism isn't an afterthought for these people, right? Hatred of Jews has been a central part of their culture for centuries. Hatred of Jews has been a central part of their ideology since its inception. Hatred of Jews is not just a "useful rhetorical device."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:22 AM on May 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

So there are two solutions to the problem. One is to kill us. They tried that, with some success. The other is to give us our own ethnic nation-state. That's Israel. (The Roma are still fucked, though.)

There is, of course, a third solution, which is to reject ethnic nationalism and say that states exist for all of their citizen, regardless of ethnicity or heritage. But that's not really Orbán's thing, so it's either genocide or Israel.

I've always gone for the second, for selfish reasons: I'm a 10+ generation North American, but I'm not indigenous. This land has most definitely NOT been set aside for me by God, and any claim I might have rests on the morally-bankrupt justification of colonialism and conquest - but I also (until I became Jewish) had no claim on any other land by right of blood or ethnicity.

Sometimes Jewish people will talk about ourselves as the only people without a land before Israel, but I'm always aware of many, many peoples without an ethnic-state, many of whom has faced expulsion or genocide with nowhere to go: the Roma, the Rohingya, the Yazidis. And there are the many, many peoples who share states, intertwined in ways that they can never be disentangled, and attempts to create ethnic-nation-states - or even religious states - just result in horrific violence and suffering on all sides: the partition of India and Pakistan, the Yugoslavian wars. And then there are all the indigenous peoples of the New World: would European nationalists propose that all of us settlers should give back their land and come home to "our land" to stay? (Actually, that's not such a bad idea ... )

There has never been a healthy, actually single-ethnicity nation-state; it's a myth. The British state is often falsely cited as one (which is a laugh, considering they don't even count themselves as the same country), or France (conveniently eliding all of the linguistic and ethnic minorities). There have been attempts to create them, and they have all ended in either massive abuse of minorities or ethnic cleansing. I think nationalism, the very idea that one land is for one ethnicity, is an inherently corrosive idea.
posted by jb at 7:33 AM on May 3, 2018 [21 favorites]

On the other hand, nationalism is a great way of keeping the petty poors occupied with each other. I just wish more people looked at situations where rich people are saying "hey, all you poor people, look at all those other poor people who are trying to take away your land/money/heritage/whatever" and saw it for the distraction that it is. And then made the appropriate response.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:37 AM on May 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Another part of the problem is the opposition's inability to pull up its socks and work together. Letting former PM Gyurcsany pose as some kind of spokesperson is also not a good look.

It's all such a shame.
posted by orrnyereg at 8:02 AM on May 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

What's happening in Hungary and to a lesser extent all over the world is a failure of leadership, full stop. While Soviet-style communism was demonstrably evil, there was this naive sense that democracy and capitalism would flourish together naturally and without much effort just as elites all over the world were falling all over themselves to see who could implement neoliberal policies the fastest.

If you're a citizen of a former Communist country who had communism replaced with neoliberal capitalism, is it any wonder that they would be disillusioned by "democracy"?
posted by Automocar at 8:48 AM on May 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a mistake.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:12 AM on May 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

Automocar , I've long thought the failure of the West to understand the need for some sort of Marshall-like Plan has had dire consequences. And there is another Jacobinmag piece that goes along those lines (albeit in ways I don't like).

What I dislike about this piece is the typical trotty thing that it's all about how the left can feel cool without ever feeling responsible for taking any position:

Rulers in Europe, especially since 1914, have renounced the Enlightenment and have been using ethnicity against class and ethnic supremacy against equality. Against this, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács, and Korsch all saw internationalism as the specific trait of socialism. Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and federalism are not identical with this, but there is a link. Fighting for this link is a rearguard action, certainly (we aren’t likely to see another Joseph II soon or perhaps ever), but the case of Hungary proves that even decrepit old Enlightenment is better for the Left than the relativistic, postmodern worship of every ethnic superstition in the name of a faux egalitarianism — which is nothing more than romantic exoticism and Orientalism.
posted by hawthorne at 9:15 AM on May 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, too many people confuse capitalism with democracy, which is a pretty common misconception. Fascists know this, and use it to their advantage all the time.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:20 AM on May 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

You get that antisemitism isn't an afterthought for these people, right?

Right, but they clearly see Muslims as a more pressing threat--this whole wave of European neofascism is fueled by scaremongering over immigrants and refugees from the ME--and the oppression of Muslims as a more immediate goal. This makes the calculus pretty simple: they see an anti-Muslim apartheid state, they support it.

Plus you've got to remeber that the shadowy Jewish conspiracy shit is for the rubes; the *actual* shadowy elite conspirators know its bullshit.
posted by The Horse You Rode In On at 9:40 AM on May 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

I agree with most of what Tamas Gaspar Miklos has to say, but as a writer and speaker he is guilty of that most Hungarian of communicative weaknesses: overstatement and never letting the facts get in the way of making your point! As far as I know, no nuns have been attacked as migrants - I read the Hungarian opposition press daily and that one was entirely new to me. Orban's propaganda machine has been extremely successful outside of Budapest, and in some villages hysterical villagers have attacked refugees and even foreign aid workers helping at an orphans home, but a google search in Hungarian didn't turn anything up about nuns being attacked.

Regarding Roma, things for them have been relatively quiet since Orban's party, FIDESZ, lucked upon the theme of "migrants" as the Great Enemy to Our Nation. They don't need to use the Roma as scapegoats when unseen "migrants" do the job so well. Jobbik, the most rabid racist anti Roma party is in opposition to FIDESZ, and with the exception of their anti Roma rhetoric, FIDESZ had successfully positioned itself to the right of Jobbik during the spring electoral campaign (The anti Soros Posters and the refugess took up the slack.) Most Hungarian Roma live in the countryside and depend on radio and TV for info, and they have bought into the anti-migrant hysteria as well. Also, in government backed media - which is most of what people in the countryside have access to - the term "menekult" (refugee) is banned, and the term "migrans" (migrant) is used in 90% of the media by order of the Big Man Himself.

I live in Budapest. Yesterday I was talking with an old buddy who is a journalist who used to be on the right of center and even he felt that the atmosphere in this country has become very dark and scary. I have even had people spit the word "migrans" at me while riding my bike around Budapest... how did they know?
posted by zaelic at 9:45 AM on May 3, 2018 [16 favorites]

The Economist has been doing good reporting on Hungary's slide into authoritarianism. Most recently they've been making the case that the European Union should be doing more, specifically to stop funding Hungary so much if it continues to behave so anti-democratically. Poland's moving along right along-side Hungary in this trend. It's troubling.
posted by Nelson at 10:29 AM on May 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Ach, zaelic, you got me. Actually, it's the friendly reminder in "New Post" that's at fault: I planned to use the second paragraph as a pullquote, but I got this message, complaining that perhaps that text is a bit too long for the front page. So I went all clickbait and used the most catchy paragraph. And went fact checking only after hitting "Post". I apologzie.

The reason this incident is so catchy is the "protecting the nuns from the Christian crowd" part. Unfortunately there are many many similar incidents without the ironic angle, that are in fact happening as you correctly point out. As a hungarian I'm really ashamed for all this, I'm really trying to help wherever I can, and trying to raise awareness what's going on.

But am not taking the simplistic route either, it's not something inherent in hungarian (or central european) culture, this is the product of a historical situation. As upthread people mentioned, these anti-democratic processes are partly the results of the shock therapy of Jeffrey Sachs - but also the relative weakness of previous institutions (due to 20th century, world wars, communism, cold war, all that jazz), the isolation of the intellectual elites and many other factors. (The younger, better travelled and better read population have a very fitting term for the old guard of "intellectuals" whichever stripes (left,right,conservative,liberal) they wear: féltudású elit, meaning half-knowledgable.)

Basically, people all around the country are losing their livelihoods, are subjects to the whims of local oligarchs and observing that all the educated are leaving the country. This is why the full-blown propaganda of the government works so well. The same is happening in Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, all around the region, to varying degrees. Unfortunately the topic is so depressing (and has less english sources) that I always give up on posting a big FPP on the region.

As for pogroms, luckily nothing organized is happening here in Hungary, contrary to Ukraine right now, but I'm afraid that in a couple of years if we keep going in the direction of the even fuller cleptocracy we may very well end up with those. And I really want to avoid that.
posted by kmt at 11:19 AM on May 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Sometimes Jewish people will talk about ourselves as the only people without a land before Israel, but I'm always aware of many, many peoples without an ethnic-state, many of whom has faced expulsion or genocide with nowhere to go: the Roma, the Rohingya, the Yazidis.

The correlation between having secured an ethnostate and not being utterly fucked any more is the perfect argument for turning Jews into fanatical Zionists.
posted by ocschwar at 11:22 AM on May 3, 2018

The correlation between having secured an ethnostate and not being utterly fucked any more is the perfect argument for turning Jews into fanatical Zionists.

That's a good point - but it doesn't deal with the fact that we will never have enough ethno-states for every ethnicity, and there will always be groups left out of the ethno-state system (and new groups created through fractioning - even in a "homogenous" society, people from Hill A start differentiating themselves from Hill B). Whereas I aspire to a world a system whereby the idea of basing rights on ethnicity is anathema, because everyone deserves equal rights in the place where they dwell.
posted by jb at 11:42 AM on May 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

kmt: You wrote "As a hungarian I'm really ashamed for all this, I'm really trying to help wherever I can, and trying to raise awareness what's going on." The problem is that Orban knows that and his shadow companies own the TV stations, the radio stations and 97% of the print media. They are paid to drown out voices like your (our) own. FIDESZ doesn't really care what foreigners think of Hungary as long as the EU keeps funding FIDESZ' family businesses. And the EU has finally started making some noise about that.... (NYT link)

The leadership of the European People’s Party has done little to restrain Mr. Orban since 2010, but increasing numbers of its lawmakers in the European Parliament have had enough.
Should Mr. Orban fail to win them over on Wednesday, some of those lawmakers could vote to enforce disciplinary measures against Hungary in September, in a process known as the Article 7 procedure.

posted by zaelic at 12:15 PM on May 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah, if the EU turned off the money pipeline Orban wouldn't be in a position to keep his flunkies fat and happy. Then they'd all start singing a different tune.
posted by orrnyereg at 1:08 PM on May 3, 2018

but I kind of want "rootless cosmopolitan Jewry" on a t-shirt.

(I'm Jewish but not a religious Zionist, and I live in a big multicultural city, and I'm definitely against nationalism/ethnocentrism, so the shirt fits, right?).

The funny/terrible/sickening thing (but funny cause we're Jews) is that the Jewish side of my family actually are rootless cosmopolitans. We live or have lived in: New York, Boston (Florida in the winter, of course), Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg. And you know why? Because progroms chased us out of Poland and then the Nazis chased us out of Berlin. So it wasn't exactly a choice, but we've embraced it. Which is kind of the essence of the Jewish Experience if you ask me.
posted by lunasol at 1:49 PM on May 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

Whereas I aspire to a world a system whereby the idea of basing rights on ethnicity is anathema, because everyone deserves equal rights in the place where they dwell.

Do you expect the citizens of any existing ethnostate to let go of it before you've successfully delivered on this aspiration? Not going to happen. Not with Israelis, who thanks to intra-Jewish inter-communal marriage, are increasingly descended from "Arab Jewish" immigrants with rather a jaundiced view of nearby states that promised that to theor minorities. Nor, circling back, would Hungarians, so long as the Hungarian minority in Romania is mistreated.
posted by ocschwar at 1:54 PM on May 3, 2018

Do you expect the citizens of any existing ethnostate to let go of it before you've successfully delivered on this aspiration?

No, but I chose to live in a state which is explicitly not an ethnostate, I don't vote for people promoting ethnostates, and I do vote for people who support equal rights for all people within a state regardless of ethnicity or religion (i.e. not the PQ). This is how I fight nationalism.

Not being an ethnostate doesn't mean you can't accept refugees fleeing nationalist violence - whether they share ethnic characteristics with you or not. But how does ethnically cleansing Hungary help Hungarians in Romania at all? 'If you treat our people badly, we'll treat your people badly' - you just end up with more people in both countries suffering. I understand the anger but perpetuating the injustice is just pointless.
posted by jb at 2:11 PM on May 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

I also vote for politicians who support the emigration of all people to my country, but especially those fleeing nationalist violence (like the Roma, the Rohingya, and the Yazidis).
posted by jb at 2:12 PM on May 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Ah, and of course I misspelled "pogroms" like I always do. Don't tell my ancestors.
posted by lunasol at 2:30 PM on May 3, 2018

Orban uses the language of protecting "Christian Europe" and "Hungary for Hungarians" but his anti-refugee and anti NGO / Soros obsessions are simply strategic political tools. Hungary is already 95% ethnically Hungarian - a virtual ethnostate - one of the reasons a "migrant" problem is so useful. Hungarians can tire of governments attacking Jews, Roma, Pirez, and other folks they already know. Imaginary enemies are always more effective than real ones.

In 2015 the Syrian and other refugees who swarmed into Europe wanted to tranzit through Hungary, not remain here. They wanted to get to Germany or other places where wages are far better than Hungary. Orban claimed he was just enforcing EU refugee processing rules... a rare case of Orban worrying about rules made in Brussels. In fact he was grandstanding for the domestic political press, drawing attention away from a scandal involving Hungarian government involvement in the Quaestor Bank pyramid banking scheme that broke in late 2014 and could have turned public sympathy against FIDESZ. The refugee crisis in the summer of 2015 saved Orban: it worked like a charm for FIDESZ.
posted by zaelic at 2:45 PM on May 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

The combination of pro-Israel and anti-semitic: Why? Is it a case of "go be a Jew over there?" Or do "rootless cosmopolitans" become okay when they get "roots" by turning into blood-and-soil nationalists?

Racism is fundamentally incoherent, but "go be a Jew over there" is at least part of the answer. There's a really interesting account by Erik K Ward of the SPLC, Skin in the Game where Ward describes his experience at a right-wing convention while posing as a Black Separatist:

At the expo that year, a guy warily asked me about myself. I told him that I had come on behalf of a few brothers in the city. We needed to resist the federal government and we were there to get educated. I said I hoped he wouldn’t take it personally, but I didn’t shake hands with White people. He smiled; he totally understood. “Brother McLamb,” he concurred, “says we have to start building broad coalitions.”

It was a coalition of Whites with “the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Orientals” against Jews that he had in mind, because people with a separate identity are less threatening than people who are thought to comprise an internal enemy.

The flip side of that is, that racists are also scared of retaliation from their self-declared enemies, so they don't actually want them to be genuinely independent. South Africa, for instance, tried to have it both ways by creating Black "homelands" that were deliberately weak and divided. Before that, the Nazis (before the Holocaust) toyed with the idea of "sending the Jews to Palestine" while simultaneously provoking anti-Jewish sentiment there. So this paradox between antisemitism and seeming friendliness towards Israel/Zionism is nothing new; they both come from the same source.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:37 PM on May 3, 2018 [7 favorites]