The World According to Viktor Orbán (2+3)
Plus a few choice notes--discoveries, or findings, none of which are surprising--about 'right-wing intellectuality' (don't worry, it's neither a word nor does it, apparently, exist)
Courtesy of long-time reader by the name
, I was made aware of the official transcripts of Viktor Orbán’s speeches at the summer university in Transylvania in late July. This is important for many reasons, not so much because I can now avoid the awkward notion of translating Mr. Orbán’s speech from a translation—but, as I mentioned, I can take cheap, if justified potshots at the self-identifying ‘right-wing intellectual’ magazine Sezession where I found, and first read, the German-language version of Mr. Orbán’s speech.Moreover, Witzbold’s posting made it possible to double-check the basis for my posting yesterday, and after comparing a few paragraphs (of my English translation from the German translation) offered by Sezession’s Nils Wegner, it somehow dawned on me: they read remarkably identical to the official transcript Witzpold linked to.
About Sezession and its ‘Translator’
What I didn’t do yesterday, mainly because the first speech was quite long and it took me some time to do this, was a brief background check on Sezession’s alleged ‘translator’, one Nils Wegner.
I know now that I should have done so (for a variety of reasons, I didn’t, and I offer my unreserved apologies), but I though the long-ish avant-propos containing my many reservations about Sezession and its editor, Jörg Kubitschek, would be ‘sufficient’. I was wrong to assume so.
You see, my sudden ‘problems’ aren’t that Mr. Kubitschek’s views are, frankly, not mine or that he’s not welcome tom harbour them; it used to be free country, for crying out loud (which, by now, is resembling Animal Farm more and more).
My misgivings arose because of the ‘translator’, Nils Wegner. He has a staff profile at Sezession, which, together with his personal website (tellingly entitled ‘AltWriteWegener’, reveal a few choice biographical markers, such as his Abitur (2007), military service, and some information on his tertiary education and work life.
Mr. Wegner, apparently, also studied History (sigh), eventually graduating in 2014 with a master’s degree, but he also lists work experiences with several museums, publishers, and the like. What he doesn’t state are—language skills. And then there’s nothing that indicates Mr. Wegner knows any Hungarian (which I don’t), hence I told you I’ve translated yesterday’s posting from his (?) German ‘translation’.
Now, with Witzbold linking to the official transcript (which I didn’t, silly me), and with my comparisons at-hand, I now suspect that Mr. Wegner—whose biographical and other information, let’s not forget, nowhere indicates he knows Hungarian (which he may, but he doesn’t tell)—has ‘translated’ Mr. Orbán’s speech from the English transcript. Otherwise it’s quite impossible to come up with the many similarities in my ‘translation’ and the official version.
Beware of Any Forms of ‘Intellectuality’
Be that as it may, I offer my thanks to Witzbold—and apologies to everyone, but this hilarious situation actually indicates why I’m so loath about certain outlets and their pretensions: they’re mostly fake and often skin-deep.
When I first find something interesting, I don’t care about the outlet, person, or context; once I’ve read it, I’m enquiring about these things (which is why there was this long-ish introduction to Sezession magazine in yesterday’s posting), and now that I’ve done so, well, what else is there to say about ‘right-wing intellectuality’?
So, long story short, yes, the treatment Mr. Kubitschek, AfD’s Björn Höcke, and many other ‘right-wingers’ receive from legacy media, the far-left goons, and Big Gov’t is deplorable and it shouldn’t be done, if only because most of their stupid ideas or ‘originality’ of their content is quickly revealed under appropriate amounts of sunshine for what it is: fake, plagiarised, or both.
Bold claims require evidence, so here goes.
Two Anecdotes about ‘Experts™’
While I was researching my Ph.D., I wondered if I could make it in academia (I know, I’m not the only one), so I worked for a year in the Austrian Foreign Ministry (July 2008-June 2009).
While officially it was a paid entry-level internship (orig. Verwaltungspraktikum), every year’s intake of young people is placed into ‘regular’ positions. For a variety of reasons, my younger self ended up working in national security issues as well as covered virtually everything pertaining to the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
In practice, it meant a secluded, ‘secure’ work place that no ordinary staffer or diplomat could access plus background checks. My day-to-day tasks were mainly related to what is, for all intents and purposes, the EU’s equivalent of the US National Security Council, a little-known Brussels-based institution by the name of the Political and Security Committee (PSC). According to the EU’s own website, this is what this committee does:
The role and composition of the Political and Security Committee (PSC) is explained in article 38 of the Treaty on European Union…
The Political and Security Committee is responsible for the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)…
The PSC is composed of member states’ ambassadors based in Brussels and is chaired by the representatives from the European External Action Service. It meets twice a week, and more often if necessary.
Turns out, funny enough, that I learned so (too) much about ‘how the [diplomatic] sausage is made’ that I turned away in disgust: there are not one but two ambassador-level plenipotentiaries per member-state in Brussels: the ‘official’ one—and a plenipotentiary whose job it is to sit in the PSC.
I worked on the meeting notes etc., during the period outline above, which included the Georgian-Russian conflict in summer 2008, Austria’s stint as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council (from autumn 2008 onwards), and a bunch of other such ‘niceties’.
Yes, me, the then-intern wrote these policy notes, contributed to speeches on certain topics, and the like. And if you thought that, wait a second, your Ph.D. thesis is about a sixteenth-century city in present-day Croatia, what the hell did you know about anything?
Well, I didn’t, and that’s the point here.
By the way, I ran into a former high school classmate whose CV was much, much more impressive than mine: a master’s degree in law obtained after 3, not 4 years, an internship with the EU Commission, and a postgraduate degree in ‘international relations’ from Sciences Po. She ended up in the PR department of the Austrian MFA, sending out curated links every couple of hours.
Oh, lest I forget, she later joined the diplomatic corps and, last time I checked, moved ‘up’ and is currently working for the EU Commission as a bureaucrat in Brussels, Strasbourg, or wherever. In school, she always had straight As, learned everything by rote, and understood nothing, let alone, in Goethe’s memorable words (from Dr. Faustus), ‘whatever binds the world’s innermost core together, see all its workings, and its seeds’.
These are the kinds of people running Western Civ.
I promised a second anecdote, and here goes.
After my stint in the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a year, at some point in my life I was invited to a named visiting professorship at a fancy-name place in the US: I served as the István Deák Visiting Professor in autumn 2018 (mainly due to my second big academic project, which resulted in me obtaining the Habilitation in 2018). No, I didn’t get a corner office (apologies for the inside baseball here, but if you’re in the know, well, you know), and having been at Columbia University due to both academic achievements plus ‘relevant expertise’—my stint in the MFA was well noticed—I could bore you with many ‘funny’ stories.
Problem is, though, that ‘our’ bureaucrats, politicos, etc. are really very ignorant. The overwhelming majority of them are, at least, blind careerists, and while I don’t doubt the sincerity of many of them, these apparatchiks are typically not better educated, or more interested, in any of the things they do professionally.
Case in point: on one occasion with a former OECD ‘High Commissioner’ serving, among other places, in Ukraine, under so-called ‘Chatham House rules’ (don’t quote VIPs), I enquired about some particularities (visa-free travel from the Western Balkans after 1995/99).
And said former OECD commissioner didn’t know anything about it. So, he looked at his three (!) aides who came along to this informal ‘breakfast meet’n’greet’ (!!), and in the end his aides (sic) answered by reading from….Wikipedia.
In case you are marvelling why I was there, well, I was at my desk early, administration had bought too many pastries, and I was ‘asked’ if I would mind siting in (‘there’s free coffee and free croissants’) lest the OECD ‘High Commissioner’ might be ‘offended’ by ‘only’ a few students showing up.
I’ll stop here, although I could go on for hours about these shenanigans.
The World According to Viktor Orbán (parts 2 and 3)
Please read Viktor Orbán’s other two speeches, which you can find here.
Choice excerpts from his second speech to get you interested:
We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation. In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; The British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans. But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades—or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years—the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. They have already created their forms, their platforms, there is this BRICS formation in which they are already present. And there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which these countries are building the new world economy. I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have—or perhaps already has—the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges. It will have—or already has—the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science. In addition, we in the West—even the Russians—have been well shepherded into this new entity that is taking shape. The question is whether or not the process is reversible—and if not, when it became irreversible. I think it happened in 2001, when we in the West decided to invite China to join the World Trade Organisation—better known as the WTO. Since then this process has been almost unstoppable and irreversible.
President Trump is working on finding the American response to this situation. In fact, Donald Trump’s attempt is probably the last chance for the US to retain its world supremacy [and, by extension, the West as we once knew it]. We could say that four years is not enough, but if you look at who he has chosen as Vice President, a young and very strong man, if Donald Trump wins now, in four years his Vice President will run. He can serve two terms, and that will total twelve years. And in twelve years a national strategy can be implemented. I am convinced that many people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. This means not only the US, but also Canada and Mexico, because together they form an economic area. And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: ‘America First, everything here, everything will come home!’ This is why the capacity to raise capital from everywhere is being developed. We are already suffering as a result: the big European companies are not investing in Europe, but are investing in America, because the ability to attract capital seems to be on the horizon. They [the US] are going to squeeze the price of everything out of everyone. I do not know whether you have read what the President said. For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They [the US] will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.
What is the European response to global system change? We have two options. The first is what we call “the open-air museum”. This is what we have now. We are moving towards it. Europe, absorbed by the US, will be left in an underdeveloped role. It will be a continent that the world marvels at, but one which no longer has within it the dynamic for development. The second option, announced by President Macron, is strategic autonomy. In other words, we must enter the competition of global system change. After all, this is what the USA does, according to its own logic. And we are indeed talking about 400 million people. It is possible to recreate Europe’s capacity to attract capital, and it is possible to bring capital back from America [only by abandoning the thoroughly undermined EU/NATO dyad]. It is possible to make major infrastructure developments, especially in Central Europe—the Budapest–Bucharest TGV and the Warsaw–Budapest TGV, to mention what we are involved in. We need a European military alliance with a strong European defence industry, research and innovation. We need European energy self-sufficiency, which will not be possible without nuclear energy. And after the war we need a new reconciliation with Russia [this is why Mr. Orbán is ‘bad™’, because he’s a realist]. This means that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project, the Union must strengthen itself as an economic project, and the Union must create itself as a defence project [what a bold vision: all the ‘poor’ bureaucrats in Brussels would become useless over night, so, imagine, if you will, why the EU won’t change—it can’t]. In both cases—the open-air museum or if we join the competition—what will happen is that we must be prepared for the fact that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO or the European Union, because we Europeans do not have enough money for that. Ukraine will return to the position of a buffer state. If it is lucky, this will come with international security guarantees, which will be enshrined in a US–Russia agreement, in which we Europeans may be able to participate. The Polish experiment will fail, because they do not have the resources: they will have to return to Central Europe and the V4 [Viségrad group].
That’s it for his second speech, and there’s a lot of food for thought. I’ll skip the third speech, because it’s mostly about Hungary and you can read that on the website of the Hungarian gov’t.
Bottom Lines
Not since the days of De Gaulle has a European leader declared his positions that strongly. Viktor Orbán is De Gaulle’s true heir, and, of course, this is why he’s loathed with a vengeance by those lickspittles who favour being the EU’s, and by extension, NATO’s and the globalists’, lapdogs.
The latter are everywhere; they dominate our institutions, academia, and legacy media. Most of these people aren’t necessarily ‘bad’ or ‘evil’. They simply work under certain conditions where this or that ‘choice’ will further their career in ways other ‘choices’ won’t.
There’s no ‘secretive plan’, least of all among the WEF cabal whose declared model is—‘Communist’ China. Lest we forget, ‘Communism’ in China is a particular thing, it’s a kind of ‘socialism in one country’—i.e., a kind of ‘national socialism’—approach that is way better than the more ‘pure’ forms pioneered by the likes of Lenin, Mao, and their ilk. It’s also highly corrosive, because the CCP’s errand boys, such as Klaus Schwab and his ‘global young leaders’, are doing China’s bidding and are rapidly transforming ‘the West’ from what, for all intents and purposes, warts and all, was once ‘our civilisation’ into an appendix of deranged one-world wet dreamers.
Mr. Orbán clearly sees this, and he’s at least saying something.
The West needs more people like him.