Slovenian regulators are currently looking at the issue of foreign media ownership, most notably a planned takeover of the country’s main private television network by a regional telecommunications giant that is majority-owned by an American investment firm.
Homelessness to become unconstitutional in Hungary
June 12, 2018 2:10 pm·
It’s certainly not the first time that Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, moves to criminalize homelessness. But this time the Orbán government is preparing to go further than ever before, by amending the country’s Fundamental Law, to make homelessness unconstitutional. The amendment would make it illegal for anyone to “habitually” reside in public spaces.
William Murderface wrote:Homelessness to become unconstitutional in Hungary
June 12, 2018 2:10 pm·
It’s certainly not the first time that Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, moves to criminalize homelessness. But this time the Orbán government is preparing to go further than ever before, by amending the country’s Fundamental Law, to make homelessness unconstitutional. The amendment would make it illegal for anyone to “habitually” reside in public spaces.
Orban želi zabraniti crvenu petokraku
Mađarski zakon u pripremi predviđa kaznu od 6,5 miliona eura ili dvije godine zatvora za sve koji će koristiti ovaj simbol.
Mađarski premijer Viktor Orban želi da zabrani upotrebu petokrake, a njegova ekstremno desničarska stranka Fides priprema zakon kojim će da bude zaustavljeno svako komercijalno propagiranje petokrake.
Tim potezom, na udaru će se najviše naći holandski proizvođač piva Heineken, čiji je prepoznatljiv logo upravo crvena zvezda, prenose agencije.
Kako se navodi, mađarski zakon predviđa kaznu od 6,5 miliona evra ili dve godine zatvora za sve koji će koristiti petokraku.
Ideološka i ekonomska pozadina
Prema oceni stručnjaka zabrana, osim ideološke, ima i ekonomsku pozadinu.
Sukob Orbana i kompanije Heineken traje otkad je holandska pivara pobedila u postupku vođenom na rumunskom sudu.
Tada je presuđeno da rumunska pivara smeštena u Transilvaniji, području gde živi veliki broj Mađara, a koja koristi mađarsko ime Csiki, više ne sme da prodaje pivo pod tim imenom, budući da suviše podseća na Hajnekenov pivski brend "Cius" za rumunsko tržište.
Prema mađarskim vlastima, sudska presuda u korist Holanđana pokazatelj je toga da su rumunske vlasti protiv svake upotrebe mađarskih nacionalnih i tradicionalnih simbola.
http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/orban-zeli-zabraniti-crvenu-petokraku
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary’s government will stop financing gender studies university courses, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Tuesday, marking one of the first concrete steps in a cultural shift signaled last month.
Re-elected in April to a third consecutive term, right-wing nationalist Orban said in July that major cultural and intellectual changes were in the works, adding that his landslide victory was “nothing short of a mandate to build a new era”.
Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas cited low enrolment numbers, which he said would be reason enough alone to shut down the courses, but also spelled out the government’s ideological opposition at a news conference.
“The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best, but beyond this, the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area,” he said.
...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-government-education/hungary-to-stop-financing-gender-studies-courses-pm-aide-idUSKBN1KZ1M0
A proposal by the Hungarian government to ban gender studies at universities in the country has been criticised as a "dangerous precedent" for state interference.
Hungary’s ministry for human capacities said the proposed ban, which would come into effect at the start of the 2019 academic year, had been introduced because employers showed no interest in graduates from the subject.
But critics say the ban is part of a campaign by Prime Minister Viktor Orban to attack NGOs or institutions that oppose his Fidesz party's socially conservative narrative.
Andrea Peto, a gender studies professor at the Central European University, one of the two universities that could be affected, said the proposed ban violated the Hungarian constitution, which protects the freedom of scientific research and learning.
“Never before has the government sought to legislate the curriculum of universities without consultation with the appropriate university institutions, Hungarian Accreditation Committee and the Higher Educational Planning Council,” Professor Peto told The Telegraph. “It also sets a dangerous precedent for state intervention in all other university courses.”
...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/13/viktor-orban-moves-ban-gender-studies-courses-university-dangerous/
Hungary faces the loss of its European Union voting rights after MEPs triggered a punitive procedure to prevent EU countries backsliding on democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
In an unprecedented vote that exposed deep EU divisions, the European Parliament in Strasbourg backed a report calling for Hungary to be sanctioned for its crackdown on NGOs, the media and universities.
Budapest’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto denounced the vote to trigger the “Article 7” procedure as the “petty revenge” of “pro-immigration politicians”.
He also claimed that the vote involved "massive fraud" since abstentions weren't counted into the final tally, which made it easier to reach the needed majority.
"It is a positive sign of this parliament taking responsibility and wanting action," Judith Sargentini, the Dutch Green MEP who spearheaded the vote, said.
"Viktor Orban's government has been leading the charge against European values by silencing independent media, replacing critical judges, and putting academia on a leash," she said.
Her report accused the country of corruption,a biased judiciary, as well as raising minority and migrant rights.
Hungary has long been at loggerheads with Brussels over its opposition to the EU’s mandatory migrant quotas and strongman leader Viktor Orban has allied himself with Eurosceptic leaders such as Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini.
The vote was carried despite needing a two thirds majority. There were 448 votes for to 197 against and with 48 abstentions, in a sign that MEPs were preparing to push back against what has been dubbed Europe’s populist wave.
MEPs from the European People’s Party, the largest group in the parliament, turned against Mr Orban after many years of supporting him. His Fidesz party is a member of the centre-right pan-EU faction. Its leader Manfred Weber, who hopes to become the next European Commission president, voted in favour of punishing Hungary.
British Conservative MEPs voted against, which Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman said was “absolutely shocking”. Downing Street claimed it was not consulted before the vote.
It is the first time Article 7 has been triggered by the European Parliament. Poland is already facing the procedure after it was brought by the European Commission.
Although the “nuclear button” of Article 7 has been pushed, the ultimate sanction of a loss of voting rights is a long way off. EU member states must unanimously back any further action, which appears unlikely.
Budapest has already vowed to veto any attempt to strip Warsaw of its EU voting rights in the European Council in Brussels. Poland, in turn, has warned it will block any further action against Hungary.
Earlier on Wednesday, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, called for a “stronger, more united Europe” in his annual flagship speech but criticised Hungary in veiled terms.
On Tuesday, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist strongman leader, spoke in the European Parliament.
He claimed that the verdict had “already been written”. “Hungary will be condemned because Hungarians have decided their country is not going to be a country of migrants," he told MEPs on Tuesday.
He said that European Parliament elections in May next year would be the battleground between pro-EU and nationalistic politicians where Europe’s future direction would be settled. Prominent far-right figures are floating the idea of forging a pan-European alliance ahead of next year's elections.
Mr Orban insisted that all of the criticism against his government is based on Hungary's tough anti-immigration policies, which include fences built in 2015 on Hungary's southern borders with Serbian and Croatia to divert the flow of migrants and very restrictive asylum rules. He has also expressed his desire to remain within the EPP, which he said was "deeply divided" on the issue of migration.
Beskućnicima u Mađarskoj zabranjeno spavanje na javnom mestu
U Mađarskoj u ponedeljak stupa na snagu zakon prema kojem se beskućnicima zabranjuje da spavaju noću na javnim mestima, što je mera koju su UN označile kao okrutnu.
Ustavni amandman koji je usvojio mađarski parlament 20. juna zabranjuje boravak na javnim mestima. Tim amandmanom je pooštren zakon iz 2013. godine koji predviđa moguću kaznu.
Policija će od ponedeljka moći da uklanja improvizovane smeštaje beskućnika na javnim mestima.
Zakon je namenjen da štiti interese društva u celini, izjavio je mađarski zvaničnik za socijalna pitanja Atila Fulop i dodao da beskućnici ne treba da budu na ulici noću navodeći da građani treba slobodno da se kreću bez prepreka.
Državna skloništa za beskućnike mogu da prime oko 11.000 beskućnika, mada stručnjaci procenjuju da ih ima oko 20.000.
Izvestilac UN za socijalna pitanja Lejlani Farha ocenila je da je zakon okrutan i nije usaglašen s međunarodnim normama o ljudskim pravima.
Evropski parlament u septembru je pokrenuo retku proceduru protiv Mađarske zbog podrivanja demokratskih vrednosti EU i vladavine prava. U izveštaju predstavljenom Evropskom parlamentu pre glasanja pominje se između ostalih i situacija s beskućnicima u Mađarskoj.
prepreku je lakše ukloniti nego čovekagrađani treba slobodno da se kreću bez prepreka.
Hungary’s real Indians
Native Americans have long been beloved in Hungary, where ‘Indians’ stand for what is real, endangered and exceptional. Viktor Orbán has used the trope to channel demographic anxiety and bolster his anti-migrant rhetoric, but it could also spell trouble for his politics of fear.
When he was younger, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán famously feathered his speeches with pithy and satirical references to the wisdom of the ‘Dakota Indians’: ‘If you find yourself sitting on a dead horse, get off,’ or ‘Don’t bother blowing into a balloon with holes in it.’[1] Nowadays, Orbán’s ‘Indians’ are no longer summoned to lighten the mood, but rather to darken it, building on a romantic vision of the noble few fighting a desperate, perhaps even futile battle for survival. In a speech from July 2016, during which he endorsed Donald Trump, Orbán told his audience, ‘I can even understand the Americans’ positive point of view on migration because that is how the United States came to be, but they have to be able to see that in this situation we are the Indians.’[2]
East-Central Europeans’ romance with Native Americans has a deep root in German idealism filtered through American transcendentalism. In late nineteenth-century Germany, Karl May became famous for his vivid popular novels featuring the Apache character Winnetou, although he conceived most of them without having visited North America. His works were translated and eagerly read in Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Serbian/Croatian. Two statues of Indian warriors facing off near the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago – The Bowman and The Spearman (1928) – are the work of a Croatian sculptor, Ivan Meštrović. And the mountain-sized Crazy Horse Memorial, still under construction in the Black Hills of South Dakota, was the vision of a sculptor of Polish origin, Korczak Ziółkowski.
The trope of heroic nobility these works reproduce has many echoes throughout a region where Native Americans represent the ingenuity and creativity of small peoples. In Hungary, ‘Playing Indian’ has channelled not only the demographic anxiety of a small nation that fears for its own cultural extinction, but also the frustration of political and social groups edged out by the dominant culture. ‘Indians’ stand for what is real, endangered, and exceptional. Over the last century, these features have been enacted by tens of thousands of Hungarians who wanted to be like Indians because they felt that, in some sense, they already were.
Hungarian Indians
You can learn a great deal about a country by studying its Indians. Some years ago, a Hungarian friend of mine was renovating an apartment in Budapest when he found some photographs taken during the 1930s. One shows a man in a loincloth poised to throw a spear. Another features the same man clasping a woman’s hands while an older gentleman in an elaborate feather headdress makes like he is about to scalp her. In the background we see a dugout canoe and the Danube.
The ‘Indians’ in these photographs are of a particularly 1930s Hungarian vintage. In 1931, the artist and orientalist Ervin Baktay and a few of his friends started an ‘Indian’ camp, where participants took names like Star Dancer, Shaggy Wolf and Little Hamster. For anywhere from a few weeks to three months every summer, the Hungarian Indians built teepees, wore feather headdresses and moccasins, and smoked peace pipes on an island in the Danube, which in 1933 was formally designated an ‘Indian reservation’. The Hungarian naval river fleet even moved its manoeuvers elsewhere to avoid disturbing the ‘Indians’.[3] As the group’s ‘chief,’ Baktay wrote a Hungarian newspaper essay in 1937 calling on his tribesmen to ‘fundamentally disconnect from the other, urban, civilized “I”: let us be children in spirit, let us know how to play, and delight in the beautiful … In this way the healthy physical sporting life also becomes a transformational, regenerating spiritual experience.’[4]
Baktay saw the ‘North American Indian’ as ‘the most authentic of athletes among all the peoples of the world, and that in the most noble sense of athleticism,’ like ‘the perfect gentleman and sportsman.’[5] The physical prowess of Indians was due to their proximity to nature; they were skilled hunters who hunted only what they needed, a people who had evaded ‘civilization’s faults’ until ‘the white civilization’ stole their freedom.
As Baktay was gathering his ‘tribe’, fascists from a different corner of the zeitgeist were similarly entranced with nobility and physicality – not of the hunter, but of the national warrior. ‘Fascism,’ wrote the Italian ‘superfascist’ Julius Evola, ‘appears to us as a reconstructive revolution, in that it affirms an aristocratic and spiritual concept of the nation’. The movement saw to the ‘elevation of the nation in practice to the degree of “warrior nation”’.[6]
Though some of Baktay’s ‘Indians’ may have had – or later developed – fascist sympathies, he himself was not a fascist. After studying to become a painter in Munich, he returned to Hungary, where he and his friends were so enamoured with ‘wild west’ films and novels that they set up a ‘saloon’ in a studio. In the late 1920s, Baktay spent three years in actual India studying its culture and religions. Then he became an editor for a new Hungarian journal called The Globe (A Földgömb), whose motto was ‘My reason serves to grasp the world!’ Being an ‘Indian’ was yet another way to identify with a different nation and culture or, as my friend who found the photographs put it, to ‘break away from the problems of Hungarian ethnogenesis’ by trying something else.
Although Baktay stopped running the camp in 1955, it hung on in some form until 1963. By then another Hungarian personality, the popular singer Tamás Cseh, had already started his own Indian camp elsewhere in the country. In 1961, he and a few friends fled to the hills to play Indian while on vacation in Bakony, stripping life down to a survivalist minimum. Over the years the group sought to make their camp less campy and more authentic. Soon they were singing Native American folk songs in their original languages, with dance steps to match. But the sixties were different from the 1930s. The political backdrop was a stagnating state socialism, rather than a rising fascism. In the words of a Hungarian journalist who probed the camp’s history, the ‘freedom, the simplicity of life stood in contrast to the communist Hungarian oppressive, centralized, state-stupefied world’.[7]
Indian Hungarians
While Baktay and Cseh’s ‘Indians’ delighted in the cultural and ethnic difference of Indians, others sought to uncover a hidden ethnic link between Indians and Hungarians. In 1965, a Hungarian goldmine explorer going by the name of Juan (János) Móricz claimed to have discovered Amazon Indians in Ecuador who spoke Hungarian. He developed an elaborate theory of how proto-Hungarian explorers had arrived by boat from the West after leaving their mark on dozens of place names in Indonesia and Hawaii. Móricz argued that sinister forces, among them the Habsburgs and the Spanish, had long conspired to prevent the Hungarians from becoming aware of ‘their ancestors’ glorious past’ by silencing or stigmatizing those who wrote about the connection.[8]
In 2013, Tünde László wrote an article on ‘The Ancient Hungarian Traces in the Land of the North American Indians.’ László is the editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Woman Magazine, an online repository of Hungarian pronatalist, nationalist, new-age mysticism. In the article she asserted that ‘the number of very suspicious similarities or total overlap between the cultures of the Hungarians and the North American Indians I have studied is so great that the only way to possibly explain them is a common origin.’[9] Part of this presumed common ancestry, she concluded, also offers the key to the future of the Hungarians. In the ‘Dakota’ language, László writes, the word for ‘foetus’ is ‘mysterious one-of-us’. ‘What unspeakable wisdom and philosophy refined through the millennia addresses us with this nomenclature!’ she swoons. If only we fully grasped the meaning of that phrase, ‘the area wreathed by the Carpathian (Mountains) would once again resound with the laughter of children, and Hungary would be saved from all the threatening demographic predictions!’
An article on the website of the Hungarian television network ATV from 2015 declared that if demographic trends continue at the present rate, the Hungarian nation would die out within five hundred years. Although Viktor Orbán does not expect much from the electorate besides their votes, he has three prescriptive refrains: stop migration, stop smoking and have more children. He wants there to be more Hungarians and for them to live longer. In 2013, he received a prize from the WHO for his efforts to curb smoking, and state support for families with children has increased significantly under his government.[10] ‘It is cause for celebration that the birth rate is now the highest it has been since 2010, that the number of marriages is increasing, and the decline in population hasn’t been so slow in years,’ Orbán said recently. ‘But the decline, even if it is slowing, is still a decline. It is the most personal decision of every person how many children to bear. Yet even though it is personal, it is also the most important one for the sake of our community.’[11]
When Orbán asserted in 2016 that ‘we are the Indians,’[12] the comparison was meant to suggest that the survival of the Hungarian nation was at stake. Yet behind the rhetoric of national survival, Orbán’s primary interest seems to be his own political survival. He has radically altered the constitution – to cripple the independent judiciary and media – thereby making an opposition electoral victory nearly impossible, while handing out contract favours to a new elite of friendly oligarchs, as well as to his own village and relatives. The most recent scandal involves his son-in-law’s lighting company, which benefitted from large contracts drawn from EU funds (an EU fraud investigation has found ‘serious irregularities’ with the contracts and has sought to recoup 40 million euros).[13] It can come as no surprise that Orbán noted in a recent speech that ‘we are threatened today with danger from the West. This danger has been brought to us by the politicians in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris.’[14]
In a defence of Indian culture from 1921, Baktay observed that the ‘slogan of the West’ was the ‘struggle for survival’. But it was not really for survival that the West struggled. ‘The white race is moved by nothing else but self-interest, property, material advantages, and to reign.’[15] Perhaps Orbán is more of ‘the West’ than he presents himself, and the real Hungarian Indians are to be found elsewhere.
[1] Frédi és Béni, ‘Négy dakota közmondás, melyeket ma már nem vállalna be Orbán Viktor,’ online at: http://szeka.blog.hu/2015/03/28/negy_dakota_kozmondas_melyeket_ma_mar_nem_vallalna_be_orban_viktor
[2] ‘Viktor Orbán endorses Donald Trump at Băile Tușnad,’ Budapest Beacon, July 25, 2106, online at: http://budapestbeacon.com/featured-articles/viktor-orban-endorses-donald-trump-at-baile-tusnad/36683
[3] Béla Kelényi, szerk., Az indológus indián: Baktay Ervin emlékezete (Budapest: Hopp Ferenc Kelet-ázsiai Művészeti Múzeum, 2014), p. 277.
[4] Ibid., p. 276.
[5] Ibid., pp. 274–275.
[6] Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory and Death in the World of Tradition ([UK]: Arktos, 2011), p. 27.
[7] András Földes, ‘Fakéssel ölnek a bakonyi indiánok,’ index, Aug. 30, 2013, online at: http://index.hu/kultur/2013/08/30/indian/
[8]‘Magyarul beszélő indiántörzs 1. rész,’ Magyar nő magazin, Dec. 7, 2012, online at: http://magyarno.com/magyarul-beszelo-indiantorzs-1-resz/; ‘Magyarul beszélő indiántörzs 2. rész,’ Magyar nő magazin, Dec. 8, 2012, online at: http://magyarno.com/magyarul-beszelo-indiantorzs-2-resz/
[9] ‘Amerikai turániak – Ősi magyar nyomok észak-amerikai indián földön,’ Magyar nő magazin, Jan. 17, 2013, online at: http://magyarno.com/amerikai-turaniak-osi-magyar-nyomok-eszak-amerikai-indian-foldon/.
[10] MTI, ‘Orbán Viktor átvette a WHO kitüntetését,’ Magyar Nemzet, Oct. 8, 2013, online at: https://mno.hu/belfold/orban-viktor-atvette-a-who-kitunteteset-1188878.
[11] ‘Orbán Viktor 19. évértékelő beszéde,’ Magyarország Kormánya, Miniszterelnöki Kabinetiroda, Feb. 13, 2017, online at: http://www.kormany.hu/hu/a-miniszterelnok/beszedek-publikaciok-interjuk/orban-viktor-19-evertekelo-beszede
[12] ‘Viktor Orbán endorses Donald Trump at Băile Tușnad,’ Budapest Beacon.
[13] ‘Kiverte a biztosítékot az angol nyelvű sajtóban is az Elios-botrány,’ Magyar Nemzet, Feb. 12, 2018, online at: https://mno.hu/kulfold/kiverte-a-biztositekot-az-angol-nyelvu-sajtoban-is-az-elios-botrany-2446774 ; Buckley, N., & Byrne, A. (2017, Dec 22). Neil Buckley and Andrew Byrne, ‘Viktor Orban’s oligarchs: a new elite emerges in Hungary,’ Financial Times, Dec. 21, 2017, online at: https://www.ft.com/content/ecf6fb4e-d900-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482
[14] ‘Orbán Viktor évértékelő beszéde,’ Magyarország Kormánya, Miniszterelnöki Kabinetiroda, Feb. 18, 2018, online at: http://www.kormany.hu/hu/a-miniszterelnok/beszedek-publikaciok-interjuk/orban-viktor-evertekelo-beszede20180218
[15] Kelényi, szerk., Az indológus indián, p. 273.
Academics at the Faculty of Social Sciences at ELTE (Budapest) are calling for a solidarity and information strike on Wed 14 Nov to protest the banning of the Gender Studies MA program, the restriction of the University’s autonomy, and the academic freedom of its researchers.
— Katalin Straner (@KatiStraner) November 9, 2018
"You know, I'm a streetfighter, basically".
— euronews (@euronews) November 29, 2018
Hollywood star Chuck Norris meets Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán.https://t.co/3fr5nvk2qK pic.twitter.com/5aQaVEpPpM
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by Erős Pista Fri Jun 08, 2018 6:55 pm
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