The World According to Viktor Orbán (1/3)

In Transylvania, Mr. Orbán spoke candidly about the state of the world, the ambitions of 'the West', and the prospects of European civilisation in the 21st century

I found this on a small, ‘right-wing™’ outlet, Sezession, and I’d add that the below is my translation of a translation of Mr. Orbán’s speech into German done by one Nils Wegner.

You may find the original link here; I’m also adding the brief ‘preface’ by the editors of Sezession magazine.

I think you should know that Sezession magazine is, of course, a kind of bete noire noire among the establishment, as this brief introduction to its German Wikipedia entry shows:

Sezession is a German magazine for politics, culture and contemporary history published by Metapolitik Verlags UG (haftungsbeschränkt). The editors describe their magazine as ‘right-wing intellectual’, and political scientists categorise it as part of the New Right. Sezession is published bi-monthly.

The magazine’s editor, one Götz Kubitschek (English Wikipedia profile), is about as notorious in German political discourse (sic) as, e.g., Steve Bannon (who, to me, seems like an apt comparison). Mr. Kubitschek, whose views I don’t endorse nor avow, is of course harassed, by Antifa and the Black Bloc, virtually everywhere he appears in public.

Of course, both his above-linked English, as well as, much more extensive, his German Wikipedia profile note, very prominently, that Mr. Kubitschek is a Rechtsextremist, a ‘far-right extremist’. We note, in passing, that he has never been convicted of anything that would make this description hold up in a court of law (gerichtsfest), and, tellingly, his German Wikipedia profile adds two endnotes to this effect, both of which link to media pieces:

• ‘Aus neurechts wird rechtsextrem’, by Konrad Litschko, roughly translating into ‘From the new right to right-wing extremist’, which appeared on 26 April 2023 in the left-wing paper TAZ.

• ‘Höcke-Vertrauter Kubitschek scheitert vor Gericht’, roughly translating into ‘Höcke advisor Kubitschek suffers defeat in court’, which appeared on 31 March 2023 in the left-wing-establishmentarian Der Spiegel.

What has happened before—the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), i.e., Germany’s MI5 or FBI has re-categorised Mr. Kubitschek and his think tank as ‘assuredly right-wing extremist’. Kubitschek subsequently sued the federal gov’t over this designation and lost in court; note that virtually all German media has jumped on the band waggon of calling Mr. Kubitschek a ‘right-wing extremist’ ever since.

(If you don’t know who Mr. Höcke is: good for you, by the way; if you want to know—he’s one of the media’s bete noire among the ‘new right’ because he’s advocating a kind of ‘Germany for Germans’ approach to a variety of social policies, which, of course, makes this particular east German AfD politician anathema to everyone among the left-liberal circles who considers both advocacy for Germany’s ‘deplorables’ in the former GDR as well as national [sic] policies along the lines of German sovereignty, well, ‘bad™’.)

As a final aside before Viktor Orbán’s speech, there could be a long piece written about how Transatlanticist/pro-US/pro-war (NATO)/pro-EU circles attack, viciously and without any qualms, anyone who merely reeks like changing the system of Western domination as it exists. For me, while I consider myself many things but certainly not on ‘the Left™’, and while such a piece would be worthwhile to bring to the attention of an ‘international’ audience, the main problem is this: none of the allegedly ‘far right-wing’ and/or ‘extremist’ factions, such as the AfD in Germany or the Freedom Party in Austria, have so far made the jump from ‘EU bad (but let’s stay in because it’s a fascinating mechanism for domination)’ to ‘the EU cannot be reformed and we’d better get out before too long’.

So, without much more ado, here’s part one of Viktor Orbán’s recent speech; I’ve translated Nils Wegner’s translation into German for you, with emphases and short commentary added in squared parentheses.

For easier navigation, I have inserted section headers that are not found in the original.

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Avant-Propos by the Editors of Sezession

The 33rd summer camp organised by intellectuals from the large Hungarian minority in Romania since the 1990 revolution took place in Bálványos, Romania. AI translations are circulating on the internet, but they are not worth much.

Orbán’s speech is excellent, and of course he didn’t give it in Bálványos, which is on Lake Balaton, as the taped-together translations claim, but in the Romanian city of the same name—otherwise the first paragraph would be unintelligible: why should Bucharest have protested last year against a summer university that would have taken place at Lake Balaton in Hungary?

Bucharest protested because Transylvania has only belonged to Romania since 1918 and, after renewed Hungarian rule (1941-1944), still belongs to Romania today, while Hungary had to cede a huge amount of its territory not only to Romania but also to other neighbouring states under the Treaty of Trianon and is now making intensive efforts to restore Hungarian nationalism [orig. Magyarentum] in these countries.

Orbán’s appearance at the foreign academy in Bálványos would be like Olaf Scholz giving a lecture in Upper Silesia to the German minority there, which is under great pressure and needs intensive support from the motherland. But Germany is miles away from such a gesture. Hungary is not, and there Orbán’s participation is even more, much more, than just a gesture.

We are publishing Orbán’s speech in three parts. It was translated by Nils Wegner. [This is part one, and once Sezession publishes the other two parts, I’ll continue this series here.]

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‘War is our red pill’, Viktor Orbán Claims, as He Outlines the World as He Sees It

Good morning!

The first piece of good news is that my visit this year was not accompanied by such an uproar as last year’s: this year we—at least I—did not receive a protest note from Bucharest; instead, I received an invitation to a meeting with the Prime Minister, which took place yesterday.

When I had the opportunity to meet the Romanian Prime Minister last year, I said after the meeting that it was ‘the beginning of a beautiful friendship’; at the end of this year’s meeting, I was able to say: ‘We are making progress.’

If we look at the figures, we are setting new records in economic and trade relations between our two countries. Romania is now Hungary’s third most important economic partner. We also spoke with the Prime Minister about a high-speed train—a kind of TGV—that would connect Budapest with Bucharest, as well as about Romania’s accession to the Schengen area. I promised to put this topic on the agenda of the October meeting and, if necessary, the December meeting of the EU Justice and Home Affairs Council and to push it forward, if possible.

We have not received a protest note from Bucharest—but just so we don’t get bored, we have received one from Brussels: they have condemned the Hungarian peace efforts. I tried—unsuccessfully—to explain that there is such a thing as a Christian duty. This means that if you see something bad in the world—especially: something very bad—and are given an opportunity to put it right, then it is a Christian duty to act without unnecessary thought or hesitation.

The Hungarian peace mission is about this duty. I would like to remind us all that the EU has a founding treaty which states that the aim of the Union is peace [well, a prime example of ‘how it started’ vs. ‘how it’s going’, if there ever was one]. Brussels is also outraged that we characterise what is being done there as a pro-war policy [Orwell is having a field day]. We are told that they support war in the interests of peace. For Central Europeans like us, this immediately reminds us of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the rise of communism, the state dies, but at the same time becomes even stronger.

Brussels also creates peace by constantly supporting war. Just as we did not understand Lenin’s thesis in our university lectures on the history of the labour movement, I do not understand the Brussels people in the meetings of the European Council. Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that, in ‘newspeak’, peace means war and war means peace [see, I’m not the one who brings in Orwell on my own].

Despite all the criticism, we should remember that since the start of our peace mission, the US and Russian war ministers have spoken to each other, the Swiss and Russian foreign ministers have held talks, President Zelensky has finally spoken to President Trump on the phone, and the Ukrainian foreign minister has visited Beijing. So things have started to ferment and we are slowly but surely moving from a European pro-war policy to a pro-peace policy [good].

This is inevitable, because time is on the side of peace policy. The Ukrainians have gradually realised the reality and now it is up to the Europeans to come to their senses before it is too late: Trump ante portas. If Europe has not switched to a peace policy by then, it will have to do so after Trump’s victory and will also have to admit its defeat in shame and take sole responsibility for its policies [here’s a question to ponder: will ‘Europe’—that is, the EU—survive in another four years of Trump in the White House in its current form? I doubt it, and if Mr. Trump wins, I suspect we’ll see a renewed push for a new EU ‘treaty’].

War and Peace in the 21st Century

But, ladies and gentlemen, the topic of today’s speech is not peace. Please consider what I have said so far as a digression. In fact, for those who are thinking about the future of the world and the Hungarians in it, there are three major issues today.

The first is war—or, more precisely, an unexpected side effect of war. This is the fact that war reveals the reality in which we live. This reality was not visible before and could not be described, but it has been illuminated by the dazzling light of the missiles fired in this war.

The second big question is what will happen after the war. Will a new world emerge, or will the old one continue to exist?

And if a new world comes—this is our third major issue—how should Hungary [insert any other (small) country here] prepare for this new world? The fact is that I have to talk about all three, and I have to talk about them here—firstly because these are the big issues that are best discussed in the context of a ‘free university’ like this one. Secondly, we need a pan-Hungarian approach, because dealing with these issues from the perspective of a ‘Little Hungary’ alone would be too limited; therefore it is justified to talk about them in front of Hungarians outside our borders [remember: this year, the Romanian gov’t didn’t balk at that].

These are big issues with multiple interrelationships, and of course I cannot expect this esteemed audience to know all the important basic information either, so I will have to digress from time to time.

This is a difficult task: we have three topics, one morning, and a relentless moderator. I have chosen the following approach: to talk at length about the real situation of power in Europe as revealed by the war, then to give some insights into the new world that is emerging, and finally to talk about the Hungarian plans in this regard—more in the form of a list, without explanation or argumentation. The advantage of this method is that it also sets the theme for next year’s event.

The endeavour is ambitious, even heroic: we have to ask ourselves whether we can do it at all or whether it is beyond our capabilities. I think it is a realistic endeavour, because over the past year—or two or three years—some excellent studies and books have been published in Hungary and abroad, and in the latter case, translators have also made them available to the Hungarian public.

On the other hand, we must humbly remind ourselves that we have the longest-serving government in Europe. I myself am the longest-serving European head of government—and may I point out discreetly that I am also the head of government who has spent the longest time in opposition. So I have seen for myself everything I am about to talk about. I am talking about things that I have experienced and am still experiencing. Whether I have understood them is another question; we will find out at the end of this speech.

Let us come to the reality that war has revealed. Dear friends, war is our red pill. Think of the Matrix films. The hero is faced with a decision. He has two pills to choose from: if he swallows the blue pill, he can stay in the world of superficial appearances; if he swallows the red pill, he can look into reality and immerse himself in it.

‘We have to talk about reality’

War is our red pill: it is what we have been given, it is what we have to swallow. And now, armed with new experiences, we have to talk about reality. It is a cliché that war is the continuation of politics by other means. It is important to add that war is the continuation of politics from a different perspective. So war, in its relentlessness, gives us a new perspective, a high vantage point. And from there it gives us a completely different—previously unknown—view. We find ourselves in a new environment and in a new, refined field of forces [I doubt that; if war is the continuation of politics by other means as Clausewitz postulated, then politics is war].

In this pure reality, ideologies lose their power, statistical sleight of hand loses its power, the distortions of the media and the tactical distortions of politicians lose their power. Widespread delusions—or even conspiracy theories—lose their significance. What remains is the stark, brutal reality. It is a pity that our friend Gyula Tellér is no longer with us, because now we could hear some surprising things from him. But since he is no longer with us, you will have to make do with me.

Mr. Orbán’s 9 Truths

But I don’t think there will be too few shocks. For the sake of clarity, I have summarised everything we have seen since we swallowed the red pill—since the outbreak of war in February 2022—in bullet points.

1. There have been brutal casualties in this war, numbering in the hundreds of thousands—on both sides. I have recently met the leaders of both sides and can say with certainty that they do not want to agree. Why is that.
   
   There are two reasons. The first is that each side believes it can win and wants to fight to victory. The second is that both are driven by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians believe that this is a Russian invasion, a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty, and that they are actually waging a war of self-defence for their independence. The Russians believe that there have been serious NATO military projects in Ukraine, that Ukraine has been promised NATO membership, and they do not want to see NATO troops or weapons on the Russian-Ukrainian border. They therefore say that Russia has the right to self-defence and that this war was in fact provoked.

   
   So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not stop waging war. This is a path that leads straight to escalation; if it depends on these two parties, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought from outside [problem is, there’s no ‘honest broker’ left].
   

2. In recent years we had become accustomed to the United States declaring China as its primary challenger or adversary, but now we see it waging a proxy war against Russia. And China is constantly accused of secretly supporting Russia. If this is so, then we must answer the question of why it would make sense to group two such large countries together in a hostile camp. This question has not yet been answered in any meaningful way [pointing out the obvious].
   

3. Thirdly, the strength and resilience of Ukraine has exceeded all expectations. After all, eleven million people have left the country since 1991, it was ruled by oligarchs, corruption was rampant, and the state had basically ceased to function. And yet we are now experiencing an unprecedentedly successful resistance from it.

   
   Despite the conditions mentioned, Ukraine is indeed a strong country. The question is what the source of this strength is. Apart from its warlike past and the personal heroism of individuals, there is something important to understand here:

   
   Ukraine has found a higher purpose, it has discovered a new sense of existence. For Ukraine had previously regarded itself as a buffer zone. Being a buffer zone is psychologically paralysing: it creates a feeling of helplessness, a feeling that one is not in control of one’s own destiny. This is a consequence of such a doubly exposed position.

   
   Now, however, there is the promising prospect of belonging to the West. Ukraine’s new, self-imposed task is to be the eastern military border region of the West. The significance and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has put it in a state of activity and action that we non-Ukrainians perceive as aggressive stubbornness—and there is no denying that it is quite aggressive and stubborn. In fact, it is the Ukrainians’ desire for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that enables them to put up unprecedented resistance [if this is so, well, then there’s no way out given the two ‘realities’ outlined under (1); this entire charade won’t end well because, in the final analysis, the right to self-determination would be accorded to both the people in the Donbas and elsewhere, with the former likely voting to become Russians and the latter voting to join the EU, NATO, etc.—nothing can be solved by this because the Russian leadership denies the right to self-determination to Ukraine; if this is, in fact, true, then it also follows that Ukraine must be re-relegated to the status of a buffer zone, thereby re-setting the clock of this entire crisis…rinse and repeat]
   

4. Russia is not what we have seen it to be, and Russia is not what we have been led to believe it to be. The country’s economic viability is outstanding. I remember meetings of the European Council—the summits of the prime ministers—at which the major European heads of state and government rather presumptuously claimed, with all kinds of gestures, that the sanctions against the country and its exclusion from the so-called SWIFT system, the international foreign payment system, would bring Russia to its knees. They would bring the Russian economy to its knees, and in this way also the Russian political elite.

   
   As I watch events unfold, I am reminded of the wisdom of Mike Tyson, who once said: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Because the reality is that the Russians have learnt from the sanctions imposed after their invasion of Crimea in 2014—and they have not only learned lessons from them, they have also put them into practice.

   
   They have made the necessary IT and banking system improvements. So the Russian financial system has not collapsed.

   
   They have developed the ability to adapt, and after 2014 we fell victim to this because we used to export a significant proportion of Hungarian food products to Russia. Because of the sanctions we could no longer do that, the Russians have modernised their agriculture and today we are talking about one of the largest food exporters in the world; this is a country that once relied on imports.

   
   So the way Russia is described to us—as a rigid, neo-Stalinist autocracy—is wrong. In fact, we are talking about a country that shows technical and economic resilience—and perhaps social resilience as well, but we’ll see about that.
   

5. The fifth important new lesson from reality is that the European way of doing politics has collapsed. Europe has given up on defending its own interests: all Europe does today is follow the US Democrats’ foreign policy line unconditionally—even at the cost of its own self-destruction [this is factually true].

   
   The sanctions we have imposed harm fundamental European interests: they drive up energy prices and ensure that the European economy is no longer competitive. We have accepted the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline without objection; Germany itself has accepted an act of terrorism against its own state property—which was obviously carried out under American instruction—without objection, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clear it up, we do not want to address it in a legal context [because it would bring down NATO? And the EU?].

   
   In the same way, we failed to do the right thing in the case of the telephone surveillance of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the support of Denmark.

   
   So this is nothing other than an act of submission. There is a complicated context here, but I will try to present it in an inevitably simplified but comprehensive form. European politics has also collapsed since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War because the core of the European power system was the Paris-Berlin axis, which was once unavoidable: it was the linchpin.

   
   Since the outbreak of the war, a different centre and a different axis of power have been established. The Berlin-Paris axis no longer exists—and if it does, it has become insignificant and can be easily circumvented. The new centre of power and the new axis consist of London, Warsaw, Kiev, the Baltic states, and the Scandinavians [we’ve seen a variation of this in the late 1930s, and it didn’t end very well for either the UK or, especially, its camp followers in East-Central Europe].

   
   When the German Chancellor announces, to the astonishment of the Hungarians, that he is only sending helmets to war, and then a week later announces that he is actually going to send weapons, don’t think that the man has lost his mind. If the same German Chancellor then announces that there may be sanctions, but that these should not extend to energy, and then two weeks later is himself at the head of the sanctions policy, then you do not believe that the man has lost his mind.

   
   On the contrary, he is very much in his right mind. He knows very well that the Americans and the liberal opinion-forming institutions influenced by them—universities, think tanks, research institutes, the media—are using [read: weaponising] public opinion to penalise Franco-German policies that are not in line with American interests. This is why the phenomenon I have just mentioned exists and why the German Chancellor’s strange missteps occur [this is perhaps the single most important aspect for the European peoples].

   
   Shifting the centre of power in Europe and bypassing the Franco-German axis is not a new idea, it was only made possible by the war. The idea existed before, it is actually an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a large German and a large Russian state by making Poland the most important American base in Europe [as I mentioned before, the autocratic-militaristic polish gov’t of the 1930s did the same, and today’s iteration of Polish leaders is re-imagining Pilsudski’s Intermarium strategy, aided and abetted by the US neocons who consider the Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians their useful, if expendable, idiots] I could describe it as inviting the Americans to sit between the Germans and the Russians.

   
   Five per cent of Polish GDP is now spent on military expenditure, and the Polish army is the second largest in Europe after the French—we are talking about hundreds of thousands of soldiers. This is an old plan to weaken Russia and overtake Germany.

   
   At first glance, overtaking the Germans seems like a crazy idea. But if you look at the dynamics of the development of Germany and Central Europe, Poland, it no longer seems so impossible—especially when Germany is dismantling its own world-class industry in the meantime.

   
   This strategy led Poland to abandon cooperation with the Visegrád Group. The Visegrád Group stood for something else: it means that we recognise that there are a strong Germany and a strong Russia, and that we—in cooperation with the Central European states—are creating a third entity between the two. The Poles have withdrawn from this and, instead of the Visegrád strategy of accepting the Franco-German axis, have adopted the alternative strategy of eliminating the Franco-German axis.

   
   Speaking of our Polish brothers and sisters, let us mention them here in passing. Now that they have kicked our butts, perhaps we can allow ourselves to tell a few uncomfortable truths about them in an honest and fraternal manner. Well, the Poles pursue the most hypocritical and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe [cue Winston Churchill’s quip about Poland whom he likened to ‘the hyenas of Europe’ after they carved up a part of Czechoslovakia after the Munich agreement]. They lecture us on morality, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they themselves are happily doing business with the Russians, buying their oil—albeit in a roundabout way—and thus running the Polish economy.

   
   The French are even better: only last month they overtook us in terms of gas purchases from Russia—but at least they don’t lecture us on morality. The Poles do business and lecture us too. I have not seen such a disgustingly hypocritical policy in Europe in the last ten years.

   
   The extent of this change—the bypassing of the Franco-German axis—can only really be grasped by older people if they think back perhaps twenty years, when the Americans attacked Iraq and called on the European countries to join in. We, for example, went along as a NATO member. The then German Chancellor Schröder and the then French President Chirac, together with the Russian President Putin, spoke at a joint press conference against the Iraq war. At that time, there was still an independent Franco-German logic when it came to European interests [this is true, but it’s also absurd once one considers that the fall from grace, so to speak, of European interests was the joining of military forces with the US to wage a war of aggression, for the first time in Europe since 1945, to change international borders, which occurred in 1999 over the Yugoslav province of Kosovo].

   
   Ladies and gentlemen, the peace mission is not only about seeking peace, but also about urging Europe to finally pursue an independent policy.
   

6. Red pill number six: the spiritual loneliness of the West. Up to now, the West has thought and behaved as if it saw itself as a point of reference, as a kind of world standard. It has delivered the values that the world has had to accept—liberal democracy or the ‘energy transition’, for example.

   
   But most of the world has realised this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turnaround. Once again, the West has announced its expectation, its instruction that the world should take a moral stand against Russia and in favour of the West. Instead, everyone has gradually taken Russia’s side [with lots of complimentary ‘butt-hurt’ among the EU’s and NATO’s faithful servants].

   
   That China and North Korea are doing this is perhaps no surprise. That Iran is doing the same is somewhat surprising, given the country’s history and its relationship with Russia. But the fact that India, labelled by the Western world as the most populous democracy, is also siding with the Russians is astounding. The fact that Turkey refuses to accept the morally based demands of the West, even though it is a NATO member, is really surprising. And the fact that the Muslim world sees Russia not as an enemy but as a partner is completely unexpected [well, not really, kinda, after sustained Western ‘moralising™’ support for Israel…mind you, I’m not saying that there’s no geopolitical reason behind doing so, but that’s not the argument advanced by Western leaders].
   

7. The war has revealed the fact that the biggest problem facing the world today is the weakness and disintegration of the West. Of course, this is not what the Western media say: the West claims that the greatest danger and the greatest problem for the world is Russia and the threat it poses.

   
   That is wrong! Russia is too big for its population and it is run hyper-rationally—it is indeed a country with a leadership. There is nothing mysterious about its behaviour: its actions follow logically from its interests and are therefore understandable and predictable.

   
   The behaviour of the West, on the other hand—as should be clear from what I have said so far—is not understandable and not predictable. The West is not led, its behaviour is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation I described in my lecture here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky. This rise of China and Asia is the challenge to the West. We should be able to deal with it, but we are not [might it be because the ‘truer’ rulers of ‘the West™’ are in disagreement about what kind of policies to pursue?].
   

8. The real challenge for us is to try once again to understand the West in the light of the war. Because we Central Europeans regard the West as irrational.

   
   But, dear friends, what if the West behaves logically, but we do not understand its logic? [here, Mr. Orbán speculates about precisely tis notion, too] If it is logical in its thoughts and actions, then we must ask why we do not understand it. And if we could find the answer to this question, we would also understand why Hungary regularly comes into conflict with the Western countries of the European Union on geopolitical and foreign policy issues.

   
   My answer is the following. Let us imagine that the world view of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. The West, on the other hand, thinks that there are no more nation states; for us this is unimaginable, but it still thinks this way. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant.

   
   According to our conception, the world consists of nation states that exercise an internal monopoly on the use of force and thereby create a state of general peace. In its relations with other states, the nation state is sovereign—in other words, it is able to determine its foreign and domestic policy independently.

   
   In our view, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a common canon of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And this results in moral imperatives that are shared by all and based on a general consensus.

   
   That is what we imagine the nation state to be. Furthermore, we do not see it as a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century: we believe that nation states have a biblical basis because they are part of the order of creation. For we read in the Holy Scriptures that at the end of time judgement will be passed not only on people but also on nations. Consequently, according to our conception, nations are not provisional entities.

   
   Westerners, on the contrary, believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny the existence of a shared culture and a common morality based on it. They have no common morality; if you have seen the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, then you have seen that. That’s why they think differently about migration. For them, migration is not a threat or a problem, but rather an opportunity to escape the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. That is the essence of the progressive, liberal, internationalist concept of space.

   
   That is why they are not aware of the absurdity—or they do not see it as absurd—that we are letting in hundreds of thousands of people from foreign civilisations in the west of Europe, while hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing each other in the eastern half of Europe. From our Central European point of view, this is the epitome of absurdity. This thought does not even occur to the West.

   
   (I note in parentheses that the European states lost a total of about 57 million ancestral Europeans in the First and Second World Wars. If they, their children and grandchildren had lived, Europe would have no demographic problems today).

   
   The European Union does not just think the way I describe, it also explains itself in this way. If you read the EU documents carefully, it becomes clear that the aim is to replace the nation. It is true that they have a strange way of writing and saying this, declaring that the nation states must be replaced while leaving a small trace of them. But in the end the point is that power and sovereignty should be transferred from the nation states to Brussels.

   
   That is the logic behind every major measure. For them, the nation is a historical or transitional creation that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries—and just as it came, it can disappear again. For them, the western half of Europe is already post-national.

   
   This is not only a politically different situation, but I mean to say that it is a new way of thinking. When you no longer look at the world from the perspective of nation states, a completely different reality opens up. Therein lies the problem, the reason why the countries of the western and eastern halves of Europe do not understand each other, the reason why we cannot pull together [and, by extension, non-Western countries, nations, civilisations; Orbán is postulating that Central Europeans have much more in common with Russia than with, say Washington or London].

   
   If we transfer all this to the United States, this is the real battle that is taking place there. What should the United States be? Should it become a nation-state again, or should it continue its march toward becoming a post-national state? President Donald Trump’s explicit goal is to take the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to elevate them back to the nation-state.

   
   This is why there is so much at stake in the US elections. That’s why we’re seeing things we've never seen before. That’s why they want to stop Donald Trump from running in the election. That’s why they want to put him in jail. That’s why they want to take away his assets. And if that doesn’t work, that’s why they want to kill him. And you can be sure that what has happened may not be the last attack in this election campaign.

   
   By the way: I spoke to the President [Trump] yesterday and he asked me how I was doing. I told him I was fine because I was here in a geographical area called Transylvania. It’s not that easy to explain, especially not in English, and especially not to President Trump. But I said that I was here in Transylvania at a free university where I was going to give a lecture on the state of the world. And he said that I should give his personal, warm greetings to the participants.

   
   If we now try to understand how this Western thinking—which for the sake of simplicity we should call ‘post-national’ thinking and existence—came about, then we have to look back to the great illusion of the 1960s.

   
   The great illusion of the 1960s took two forms: the first was the sexual revolution, and the second was the student revolt. In fact, it was an expression of the belief that the individual would be freer and grander if liberated from any kind of collective. More than 60 years later, it has become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and within a community, that alone he can never be free, but is always lonely and doomed to atrophy.

   
   In the West, the ties have been severed one after the other: the metaphysical ties represented by God, the national ties represented by the homeland, and the family ties—the dissolution of the family. I refer again to the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris. Now that they have managed to get rid of all that, in the expectation that the individual will become greater, they realise that they feel a sense of emptiness. They have not become great, but small. Because in the West they no longer strive for great ideals or great, inspiring common goals.

   
   Here we need to talk about the secret of greatness. What is the secret of greatness? The secret of greatness is to be able to serve something greater than yourself. To do this, you must first recognise that there is something or some things in the world that are greater than you, and then you must give yourself to the service of these greater things.

   
   There are not many of them. You have your God, your country and your family. But if you don't do that, if you focus on your own greatness, if you think you’re smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you spend your energy communicating all that to others, then what you get out of it is not greatness, it’s megalomania. And that is the reason why today, whenever we are in conversation with Western Europeans, we feel megalomania instead of grandeur in every gesture. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluousness that goes with it leads to aggression. This is how the new human type of the ‘aggressive midget’ has emerged.

   
   To summarise, I would like to tell you that we are not talking about differences of opinion when we talk about Central Europe and Western Europe, but about two different world views, two ways of thinking, two instincts, and therefore two different arguments. We have a nation state that forces us to be strategically realistic. They have post-nationalist dreams that are indifferent to national sovereignty, do not recognise national greatness, and have no common national goals. This is the reality we have to face.

9. And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national condition that we see in the West has a serious—and I would say a dramatic—political consequences that is shaking democracy. Because within societies there is a growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this gives rise to the political problem of the elite vs. the people—of elitism and populism.

   
   This is the defining phenomenon of Western politics today. If you read the texts, you don’t need to understand them, and they don’t always make sense anyway; but if you read the words, you will find the following expressions most common. They indicate that the elites are condemning the people for drifting to the right. People’s feelings and thoughts are labelled as xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism.

   
   In response, people accuse the elites of not caring about what is important to them, but of sinking into a kind of deranged globalism. As a result, the elites and the people cannot agree to work together. I could name many countries. But if the people and the elites cannot agree to work together, how is that supposed to result in a representative democracy? Because we have an elite that does not want to represent the people and is proud of not wanting to represent them, and we have the people who are not represented.

   
   In fact, in the Western world we are confronted with a situation where people with university degrees no longer make up less than 10% of the population, but 30-40%. And because of their views, these people do not respect those who are less educated—who are normal working people, people who live from the labour of their hands.

   
   For the elites, only the values of academics are acceptable, only they are legitimate. The results of the European Parliament elections should be understood from this perspective. The European People’s Party collected the votes of the ‘plebeians’ on the right who wanted change, then went to the left with these votes and came to an agreement with the left-wing elites who have an interest in maintaining the status quo [and re-appointed Ursula von der Leyen].

   
   This has consequences for the European Union. The consequence is that Brussels remains occupied by a liberal oligarchy. This oligarchy has the EU in its grip. This left-liberal elite is actually organising a transatlantic elite: not European, but global, not nation-state, but federal, and not democratic, but oligarchic.

   
   This also has consequences for us, because in Brussels the ‘three Gs’ [of Covid ‘management’ vintage] apply again: ‘banned, authorised, and promoted’. We belong to the ‘banned’ category. The Patriots for Europe have therefore not been given any posts. We live in the world of the authorised political community. Meanwhile, our domestic opponents—especially the newcomers to the European People’s Party—belong to the ‘strongly supported’ category.
   

10. And perhaps there is a final, tenth point. This concerns Western values and how they—which were the essence of so-called soft power—have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are being demonstratively rejected as unacceptable in more and more countries around the world [they are also underwriting the UN, but that’s a bridge too far, apparently, for Mr. Orbán].

    
    It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western—for China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are also modernising. And they are by no means modernising on the basis of Western values. In the meantime, Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because the key to spreading Western values is now LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this belongs in the category of ‘backward’ according to the Western world.

    
    I don’t know if you’ve been following it, but I think it’s remarkable that in the last six months countries like Ukraine, Taiwan, and Japan have passed pro-LGBTQ laws. But the world doesn’t agree. So Putin’s strongest tactical weapon today is Western LGBTQ coercion and resistance, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; so what was once Western soft power has now turned into Russian soft power—like a boomerang.

All in all, ladies and gentlemen, I can say that the war has helped us to understand the true balance of power in the world. It is a sign that the West has shot itself in the foot on its mission and that it is therefore accelerating the changes that are reshaping the world.

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Bottom Lines

This is an extra-long read already, hence I’ll add but two aspects:

There are plenty of ‘reasons’ why Viktor Orbán is persona non grata, but the most important issue appears to be—the US elections. There’s too much at stake, and if Donald Trump should prevail, and if he manages to move the US towards a nation-state (as opposed to the enforcer of globalist aspirations), the repercussions are manifold.

The main problem for the small(er) nations of esp. East-Central Europe is that this will require their subservience to another set of external powers, or structures, that will, in all likelihood, involve some form of arrangement between Paris and Berlin on the one side and Russia (as well as, possible, Türkiye) on the other sides.

The main question is: are there still leaders in France and Germany that are capable of doing so? After all, both—as well as most of Western Europe—have been indoctrinated and thoroughly vassalised by globalist interests since 1945.

Remember, what eventually became ‘the EU™’ has its origins in the realisation, after the Second World War, that the losers of 1940 (France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) would have to team up with the losers of 1943 (Italy), and 1945 (W Germany) if they aspired to any kind of self-respecting existence.

These aspirations have, arguably, been perverted to a degree that is virtually incomprehensible to understand. But here we are.