On 9/15/15 2:00 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Since Charlie has been responding on the subject line,
> perhaps he could give us a brief note on that mysterious label.
>
> Carrol
How about this instead:
It seems that a week does not go by without some incident in Eastern
Europe involving the inhumane treatment of people who have fled Baathist
terror in Syria.
For example, in the Czech Republic, cops wrote numbers on the arms of
refugees in order to identify them, a chilling reminder of how Nazis
tattooed such numbers on the arms of Jews in the death camps.
But it is Hungary that takes the cake apparently.
It put a razor-wire fence on the border with Serbia to keep refugees out.
--It put up billboards (in Hungarian no less) warning anybody who made
it through the razor-wire fence that “If you come to Hungary, don’t take
the jobs of Hungarians!”
--A TV news photographer kicked and tripped refugees running away from
the police. The station she worked for was connected to the far-right
Jobbik party that lines up with the “axis of resistance” on Syria,
opposing “the systematic attempts of the West to find a casus belli for
an armed intervention against the Assad government.”
--At an internment camp for refugees in Hungary, cops threw bags of food
to them as if they were hungry animals.
Since the refugees are only interested in making their way to Germany or
Britain, the xenophobia is likely a strategy to mollify Hungary’s
burgeoning ultraright groups like Jobbik and their voters. Key to
success is the ability of President Viktor Orban to exploit simmering
discontent over dire economic conditions. In fact this is exactly how
German fascism succeeded. When economic disaster ruined Eastern European
Jewry, the largely working class and impoverished small proprietors fled
to Germany. Hitler then blamed “the Jews” for taking away German jobs.
It must be noted that Viktor Orban has recently joined the “axis of
resistance” after the fashion of Jobbik. All across Europe ultraright
parties with zero exceptions have showed solidarity with the Kremlin in
its ostensibly “anti-imperialist” struggle against NATO, the EU, and
Washington. This Red-Brown alliance is a revival of the National
Bolshevist tendency of the early 1920s when a faction of the German CP
advocated a united front with the incipient fascist movement.
Orban is now Putin’s closest European ally. While the bonds involve
mutual economic interests, including Hungarian access to Russian natural
gas at bargain prices and a willingness to back Putin’s pipeline project
that would bypass Ukraine, there are also ideological affinities. He has
nationalist pretensions casting himself as an enemy of neoliberalism. He
has also followed Putin in cracking down on NGO’s and pressuring
Hungarian media to follow his strong man rule.
For a fascinating account of Orban’s political evolution, I would
recommend the Intercept article by Adam LeBor titled “How Hungary’s
Prime Minister Turned From Young Liberal Into Refugee-Bashing Autocrat”.
It seems that early on he was not kindly disposed to Russian domination,
speaking at a Budapest rally in 1989 commemorating the death of Imre
Nagy, the leader of the failed 1956 revolution. In his speech he
demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Hungary.
You don’t have to understand Hungarian to know that he was lambasting
“Communist dictatorship”. Understanding which side of the bread was
buttered, Orban hooked up with George Soros just before this speech was
made. LeBor reports;
Orban was born in May 1963 in Alcsutdoboz, a small village 31 miles
from Budapest. After graduating from high school he moved to Budapest to
study law at Eötvös Loránd University. There he co-founded Századvég, a
dissident social science journal.
He graduated in 1987 and joined the Central-Eastern Europe Study Group,
which was funded by George Soros, the financier who had emigrated from
Hungary after World War II. The following year Orban became a founding
member of the Alliance of Young Democrats, known in Hungarian as Fidesz.
The outspoken radicals quickly became the darlings of the Western media.
They were young, smart and scruffily photogenic – Tamas Deutsch, another
founding member of Fidesz, was a model for Levi’s jeans. Fidesz in its
early years was a broad coalition, from near anarchists to nationalists.
They all had one aim: to get rid of the Communists. Once that was
achieved, like all revolutionary groups, the party began to fracture.
Having been born and raised in Hungary, Soros took a particular interest
in his native land. He spent millions on cultivating a following among
ambitious young politicians like Orban, paying for airfare and hotel
costs in the USA where they were afforded red carpet treatment at
Soros’s Open Society conferences. Soros was also shrewd enough to pay
for photocopying machines that anti-Communist activists found crucial in
their attempts in the late 80s to create a liberal pole of attraction
against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Michael Lewis, by no means a critic
of neoliberalism, traced Soros’s steps in a 1994 Guardian article:
IN 1984 Soros opened his first office, in Budapest, and began all
manner of subversive activities for which he is temperamentally very
well-equipped. “I started by trying to create small cracks in the
monolithic structure which goes under the name of communism, in the
belief that in a rigid structure even a small crack can have a
devastating effect,” he wrote in Opening The Soviet System. “As the
cracks grew, so did my efforts until they came to take up most of my time.”
Says Liz Lorant, who worked with Soros from the start: “It was the
excitement of what we got away with [that is irreplaceable]. We got away
with murder. [For example] at that time Xerox machines were under lock
and key. That was the way it was. In Romania you had to register a
typewriter with the police. Well, we just flooded the whole damn country
with Xerox machines so that the rules became meaningless.” In short, by
the time the dust settled over the Berlin Wall – boom! bust! – Soros had
accumulated a highly-charged portfolio of gratitude. The Great White
Gods of Eastern Europe – Havel, Michnik, Kis, Haraszti – were all in his
debt. So were all sorts of lesser-known, highly motivated people wending
their way to high political office.
For most people on the “anti-imperialist” left, Soros is a kind of
archenemy symbolizing globalization, neoliberalism and all the rest. He
is also a convenient symbol of liberal ignominy for the far right as the
supposed puppet master behind Obama and the secret plans to transform
the USA into a European-styled socialist state. Of course that is the
paradox of George Soros. Like Fay Dunaway telling Jack Nicholson in
“Chinatown” that a woman was both her daughter and her sister, Soros is
both a neoliberal shark and someone favoring European style socialism,
which is in reality nothing but a welfare state and incapable of being
realized today.
With Soros’s record of intervening in Hungarian politics through his
well-funded NGO’s, it is easy to understand why Orban would have a free
hand in cracking down on them. Many Hungarians must have gathered that
Karl Popper’s philosophy probably had more to do with a fast buck then
it did with promoting civil society and equal opportunity.
Five years ago Soros’s firm was fined $2.5 million for illegal bank
stock transactions in Hungary (a mere slap on the wrist.) It was his
exploitation of short sales and other shenanigans from 2007 to 2010 that
prompted the billionaire and major donor to my alma mater to confess
that he was having “a very good crisis”, referring to the stock market
crash that is still impacting countries like Hungary.
Like Greece, Hungary had huge debts when the crisis broke and like
Greece has been scrambling to nurse the country back to health—a dubious
prospect given the world economic situation. In late 2008 Hungary
pleaded with the International Monetary Fund for $25 billion in
emergency financing. In 2010 unemployment reached 11.4 percent while the
economy shrank by 6.3 percent. It was such suffering that convinced
voters to back Orban’s party that promised to wave a magic wand and make
things right.
For those who think that a Grexit would solve Greece’s problems, it is
worth mentioning that Hungary’s failure to be part of the Eurozone was
no silver bullet as the NY Times reported in 2012:
Zoltan Zsoter, an 80-year-old retiree, would seem to be about as far
from the world of currency speculation as a person can get. Yet he is an
example of how the workings of the global financial system, amplified by
the policies of a single political leader, can have a devastating effect
on ordinary people.
Mr. Zsoter is one of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who took out
home loans that must be repaid in Swiss francs or other foreign
currencies like the euro. Such loans offered seductively low interest
rates when times were good. But then the Hungarian currency plunged,
causing Mr. Zsoter’s monthly payment to almost double.
“I live day to day,” Mr. Zsoter said. After defaulting on his loan, he
pays 40,000 forints, or about $163, out of his monthly pension of 51,000
forints to stay in his modest Budapest apartment as a renter. “Sometimes
I have to choose between buying either food or medicine,” he said.
Hungary serves as a cautionary tale for those who argue that Greece
could regain competitiveness by reintroducing its currency. The drachma
would plunge against the euro, the theory goes, and allow Greek products
to compete on price with countries like Turkey.
So if Viktor Orban is facing intractable economic problems, why not
scapegoat Syrian refugees or the Roma who have been the target of
persecution for a number of years now? And meanwhile, the left that
admires Putin would have all the reasons to back Orban who after all is
sticking it to the EU.
According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, our species homo
sapiens has a tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions like life
and death or good and evil. This would likely explain the eagerness for
so much of the left to divide the world between those forces aligned
with the West and those with the East. Like a plot out of a Tolkien
novel, the Evil West is always seeking ways to destroy the Good East.
Instead of elves with bows and arrow, we have people like Pablo Escobar,
Mike Whitney and Eric Draitser rallying around the “axis of resistance”
to the fire-breathing dragons of the West. And god help any decent folk
in the East who managed to get on the wrong side of an elite in their
neck of the woods. Everybody had to understand that it was their half of
the world, love it or leave it.
Ironically, Hungary was a symbol of this binary opposition way of
thinking in 1956 when the population rose up over Russian domination. In
the same way that sections of the left make all sorts of excuses for
Assad today, the CP justified the invasion of Hungary in order to
“defend socialism”.
But in fact it was Russian tanks that created the animosity in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary that made it possible for
George Soros, NATO, the CIA and the US State Department to get a
foothold. By reinforcing bureaucratic rule in the name of “socialism”,
ordinary people began to think positively of its opposite. In the most
extreme example, Ukrainians regarded Stephen Bandera as a hero for
opposing Soviet domination even if he was a fascist.
The bottom line is that the encroachment of NATO at the doorstep of
Russia is a direct outcome of the encroachment of the Red Army on
nations throughout Eastern Europe.
There was one Communist who was able to see through the lies. The Daily
Worker, the British CP newspaper with the same name as the American
paper, sent Peter Fryer to Hungary in 1956 fully expecting him to write
articles that echoed the party line that Russia needed to quell a
CIA-inspired plot. In other words, he was expected to write the same
kind of crap that Max Ajl, Patrick Higgins and Adam Johnson are writing
about Syria today. But Fryer obeyed his conscience rather than party
bosses and filed reports that any radical journalist would be proud of.
You can read Peter Fryer’s “Hungarian Tragedy” here. This excerpt shows
that it doesn’t take much effort to see the similarities between Hungary
in 1956 and the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011, no matter how it has been
slandered in places like Jacobin, WSWS.org, MRZine and elsewhere:
But the crowds spoke also to me of their lives in this small industrial
town, of the long years of grinding poverty, without hope of
improvement, of their hatred and fear of the AVH [Hungarian secret
police]. ‘I get 700 forints a month,’ said one. ‘I only get 600.’ said
another. [1] They were ill-dressed, the women and girls doing their
pathetic best to achieve some faint echo of elegance. They spoke to me
about the AVH men. ‘They were beasts, brutes, animals who had sold
themselves to the Russians.’ ‘They called themselves Hungarians and they
mowed our people down without hesitation!’ ‘We shan’t leave a single one
of those swine alive – you’ll see.’ They asked me what the West was
doing to help, and some asked outright for arms. I for one do not regard
these as counterrevolutionaries. If after eleven years the working
people, goaded beyond bearing, look to the West for succour, whose fault
is that? If the Americans are guilty of seeking to foster
counter-revolution with the Mutual Security Act, surely the Rákosis and
the Gerös are a hundred times more guilty for providing the soil in
which seeds sown by the Americans could grow.
There was a general movement in the direction of the hospital, where an
immense crowd had gathered, clamouring more and more insistently with
every minute that passed for Stefko to be brought out to them. The
German journalist and I were admitted into the hospital, where we met
the director’s wife and a French-speaking woman who had volunteered to
help with the nursing. It was here that I got for the first time
reasonably accurate figures of the number of wounded. There had been
about 80 wounded brought here, of whom eleven had died, and about 80 had
been taken to the hospital at Györ. The need for plasma and other
medicaments was desperate if lives were to be saved and so was the need,
said the director’s wife, to end the tumult outside. A deputation from
the revolutionary committee was interviewing her husband to demand that
Stefko be handed to the people.
A few minutes later the director was forced to give in, and we saw a
stretcher carried by four men appear out of a hut in the hospital
grounds. On it lay Stefko, wearing a blue shirt. His legs were covered
by a blanket. His head was bandaged. He was carried close enough to me
for me to have touched him. He was fully conscious, and he knew quite
well what was going to happen to him. His head turned wildly from side
to side and there was spittle round his mouth. As the crowd saw the
stretcher approaching they sent up a howl of derision and anger and
hatred. They climbed the wire fence and spat at him and shouted
‘murderer’. They pushed with all their might at the double gates, burst
them open and surged in. The stretcher was flung to the ground, and the
crowd was upon Stefko, kicking and trampling. Relations of those he had
murdered were, they told me, foremost in this lynching. It was soon
over. They took the body and hanged it by the ankles for a short time
from one of the trees in the Lenin Street. Ten minutes afterwards only a
few people were left outside the hospital.
I wrote later in my first, unpublished, dispatch:
After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the
brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and
mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led
to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists
and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which
rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship
dressed up as a Socialist society – a police dictatorship backed up by
Soviet armed might.
I am the first Communist journalist from abroad to visit Hungary since
the revolution started. And I have no hesitation in placing the blame
for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the
Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years – up to and including Ernö
Gerö They turned what could have been the outstanding example of
people’s democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism. They
reared and trained a secret police which tortured all – Communists as
well as nonCommunists – who dared to open their mouths against
injustices. It was a secret police which in these last few dreadful days
turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be.
I wrote this under the immediate impact of a most disturbing and
shattering experience, but I do not withdraw one word of it. Much of the
rest of the dispatch was never received in London because the call was
cut off after twenty minutes, and the first ten had been taken up by
three different people giving me contradictory instructions as to the
‘line’ I should take. Mick Bennett insisted on reading me a long extract
from a resolution of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’
Party. I had had enough of resolutions. I had seen where eleven years of
terror and stupidity had led Hungary, and I wanted to tell the readers
of the Daily Worker the plain unvarnished truth, however painful it
might be. But the readers of the Daily Worker were not to be told the
truth. The day after I had sent this dispatch they were reading only
about ‘gangs of reactionaries’ who were ‘beating Communists to death in
the streets’ of Budapest. The paper admitted in passing that ‘some
reports claimed that only identified representatives of the former
security police were being killed’. Next day Hungary disappeared
altogether from the Daily Worker’s front page.
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