A Quote by Adam Michnik
We still have politicians who strive for a different type of country: Kaczynski as well as Orbán in Hungary. They want a gradual coup. If Orbán stayed in power in Hungary or if Kaczynski were to win an election in our country, it would be dangerous. Both men have an authoritarian idea of government; democracy is merely a façade.
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What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.
Trump's pronounced anti-immigrant stance is reminiscent of both Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary, although he is far from alone in taking such positions in much of today's Republican Party.
I am no historian, but Hungary is a country which has never known democracy - and by that, I mean not a democratic political system, but an organic process which has mobilised the entire country's society. In the case of Hungary, this development was blocked by the growth of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century.
The troblemakers in Hungary are the Jews... they demoralize our country and they are the leaders of the revolutionary gang that is torturing Hungary.
Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend. All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II. Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
The fact that refugees traveled through six other countries, like former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, is because they like our social benefits. They like our welfare state. They know which country to pick. They're not going to stay in Hungary or in Estonia. They come to Germany, to Holland. And people sense that those are not the real refugees. And our government has spent billions of euros on them, and the Dutch people know.
I am critical of the fact that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is pulling out of everything - the joint approach to the refugee issue, for example. He cannot disparage his colleagues in the EU either - that's not how we treat each other. We require solidarity: in refugee policies, just as in the financial architecture of the structural funds from which countries like Hungary have strongly profited from for years.
It's one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
Hungary has no raw materials and no major energy sources; we have some agricultural background. So what we produce here in Hungary is the result of our labor and minds, and then we have to sell it to the world. If we are not able to do that, if we are not innovative enough, if we are not modern and open enough, we can't do that.
The Hungarian ministry begged the king earnestly to issue orders to all troops and commanders of fortresses in Hungary, enjoining fidelity to the Constitution, and obedience to the ministers of Hungary.
I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.
A single party is ruling in Hungary, but democracy and the freedom of speech are still in place.
There's prejudice and poverty in Hungary as there is in every country.
My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.
My parents both defected from communist Hungary and were what most people would today call libertarian. I grew up with a general distaste for taxation and any policy that intruded on our lives.
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