by Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi

Present day Hungary is a neo-Stalinist member state of NATO as well as the European Union, infected with a phantasmagorical collection of lying domestic and foreign policy narratives, which jointly will surely lead to a chain of irreversible catastrophes.  Thus, after more than thirty years of living in a self-constructed fantasy world, the wide-eyed member states of both alliances must realize that they shall throw away their nicely colored looking glasses concerning the Hungarian Alice in Wonderland, in which truth is lie and lie is truth, and finally get the unvarnished reality about Viktor Orban’s neo-Stalinist Gangsterocracy.  

To start with, the present state of affairs in Hungary are not some sort of deviation from the country’s historical behavioral patterns.  Centuries before it joined the two Western alliances, Hungary always had a tyrant.  It did not have real opposition.  Its inhabitants lacked even rudimentary political culture.  Simultaneously, they knew close to nothing about the outside world because of the language barrier and the tyrant’s monopoly over the information media.  It only had nacked oppression.  It had ubiquitous corruption.  It had paralyzing inferiority complexes and a victimhood mentality based on suspicions toward foreigners and the West at large.  The four decades of Stalinist/Khrushchevite/Brezhnevite dictatorships only reinforced these trends and led to the practice of meritless selection, in which incompetent people rose to the highest echelons of power because of their class origin.  Viktor Orban and his minions are the products of this “negative selection” process.  Adding the insult of political self-preservation to the injury of apocalyptic geostrategic cum economic failures, Orban’s neo-Stalinist Gangsterocracy has appropriated all these negative traits and declared them the essence of true Hungarian nationalism.  In this context, Viktor Orban’s Hungary is not a liberal democracy but a tyranny with Hungarian characteristics.  Accordingly, he has attempted to  immunize Hungary from the principles and values of the West, while forcing it back to its dark antediluvian political existence.

To wit, Hungary’s foreign policy ambitions after 1867, when the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy came to being, has been characterized by unlimited ambitions that have remained antithetical to the country’s overall capabilities, place and role in the region as well as across the continent.  The fleeting moments of ephemeral opportunities during World War I and World War II were squandered because of the idiotic revanchism of the Hungarian ruling cliques.  The result was the military occupation of a truncated Hungary under the barbaric Soviet Union.  

When the Red Army left and liberation came in 1990, instead of strengthening the institutions that would have prevented a new tyrant to emerge, the inability to govern, the destructive incompetence and the political culture of hatred combined to bring about the one party rule of Viktor Orban and his sycophantic neo-Stalinist FIDESZ Gangsterocracy.  Today, with fourteen years of absolute powers behind them, Viktor Orban totally controls everything – the government with its three branches that lacks checks and balances  and the rule of law that is a joke.  Pluralism, the right of the opposition, free elections, open markets, media freedoms – are all eliminated by political tyranny and pervasive corruption.  Domestically, the case in point is the absolute impunity of Viktor Orban, his extended family and his closest minions from any criminal accountability for their political deeds and their aggressively greedy enrichment.  Internationally, the counterintuitively senseless maneuvering concerning the admissions of Finland and Sweden to NATO have given rise to the charge that the Orban regime is the proverbial Trojan horse doing Russia’s and China’s bids within the organization. 

This latter suspicion is only strengthened by Viktor Orban’s and his minions ad nauseum repeated arguments that the West is in an unstoppable decline and that a new world order is in the making, in which China and Russia shall lead the rest of the world toward a more equitable and even a perfectly utopian future.  Such a free-for-all worldview also renders on the surface the regime’s ruthless stealing of other people’s businesses and properties morally more justifiable, while, in reality, it makes the Gangsterocracy more corrupt, weaker, less sophisticated and unabashedly more untrustworthy.

Yet, being devoid of successes, Victor Orban and his minions have stories to invent and aggressively propagate.  Invented stories about Hungary’s past greatness, about the revival of Hungarian greatness, about traitorously hostile forces at home and sworn enemies abroad – all attempting to hold Hungary down, are being beamed 24/7 in the government owned and controlled media. In this manner, the Orban regime is a failure in everything and, therefore, it is rapidly turning to extremism.  Extremism, in turn, is paving the way to hostile states like China and Russia to establish a firm beachhead at the center of NATO and the European Union.  Such an unfavorable development would decisively transform the status quo cum balance of powers in the European continent and beyond.

Clearly, Hungary must be freed from Viktor Orban’s neo-Stalinist Gangsterocracy.  The solution is institutionalized and systematic integration into 21th century Europe and the West in general.  Its successful integration is a precondition of making Hungary an effective member of both organizations.  The alternative is growing tribalism, hatred and eventual disintegration.  Although there are no instant solutions and results, the West must marshall the faith and the endurance to advance the well intended, honestly full integration of Hungary as well as all present cum future allied nations into the West.