Tuesday, 17 November 2015

The Hungarian government and the war on refugees and migrants

I have spent the last few months back at home in good old Hungary. Most Hungarians I know think that this country is the center of the universe and they are blatantly ignorant of world politics, economics, the history and culture of Hungary itself, and in general about sociological facts. In fact, most people don't give a damn about Hungary. Which is fair enough: it is insignificant on the global stage.

But this time around it was all different: for a few brief weeks the attention of the other EU countries was actually directed at Hungary, mainly due to Viktor Orban's and his governments' actions taken to discourage and to prevent refugees and migrants from entering Hungary.
Hungary is just like any other country: our politicians say different things on the international stage and during high profile visits to foreign high ranking officials from what they say at home. The same is true of how they handle the refugee-'crisis'. While in Hungary the government launched a billboard campaign against refugees already early this Spring, when PM Orban gave an interview to German newspaper Bild he talked about how sorry he feels for refugees and how he is looking for constructive solutions.
Well, he obviously hasn't found any because at the moment not a single refugee, asylum seeker, or migrant is allowed into the country through any legal channel. (This is of course technically not true: people can apply for asylum seeker status but the procedure is ridiculously slow and the results so far have been uniformly negative. Refugees might as well put their hopes on a lottery ticket rather than apply to Hungary for shelter.)
Currently the government is running a campaign to collect signatures from civilians to show that people oppose the EU's policy of distributing refugees amongst the member states. Of course a lot of Hungarians - who are either deceived, or stupid, or xenophobic, or lazy to get enough info, etc. - support this and quite a few signatures have already been collected. Furthermore, as PM Orban told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "we" don't want a multicultural society, and "we" feel very well about being patriotic (which he thinks is contrary to being liberal). I guess the PM must have been talking about himself in the royal plural, or about his family and circle of close friends. Me, many friends, and a good number of other Hungarians surely don't feel very excited about not being a multicultural country nor about being very patriotic (if that means not-being liberal).
The current new trend in the rhetoric of our primy and his aids is to suggest connections between the recent attacks in Paris and the influx of refugees and migrants. Whereas the facts are that the attacks were organized by members of a number of loosely connected and internationally established radical Islamist organizations. Organizing them must have taken time. The attackers required guns, explosives, careful planning, etc. What does our primy and his best minds come up with? That letting refugees who are fleeing from wars, and letting migrants fleeing poverty, into our country, and in the EU at all,  should be banned. Why? Because they will become terrorists and shoot more people. Not the most brilliant thinking. But we are used to that by now.
At times like this I really wish that the government should be more accountable, similarly to the way people can be held accountable within a company. If members of the government are speaking such utter rubbish why can't we fire these guys?

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