1,337 words

If there’s one fascinating thing about the progressives, it’s that they never really pause on the road to progress. And even when the discovery of their new advances leads us to believe that their model is not sustainable, so devoid of common sense does their madness seem that, paradoxically, this permanent progress tends to prove them right: Progress ostensibly knows no limits.

But despite being an ontologically modern and materialistic paradigm, progressivism is not so much revealed in the physical world — where the odious crypto-fascist conservatism of the laws of physics and biology complicates the lives of our friends — as in morality, so decried, denounced, and deconstructed by the latter when it does not correspond to their ideas, and a sacred cow as soon as it is theirs.

Of course, we can all be a little hypocritical from time to time, usually out of politeness, so as not to offend the ego of a child — or a trans-child. In other words, an egotistical and immature Westerner who is capricious and aggressive, and cannot stand contradiction or frustration. And of course, politics is par excellence the playground of hypocrites. But there’s a big difference between our everyday hypocrisy and that displayed by our progressive friends.

In my naïveté I thought I had seen it all in France, with the deniers of the Great Replacement putting their children in elite private schools to spare them the consequences of mass immigration and deconstructionist teaching, in recent weeks I have been struck by the level of hypocrisy and bad faith of the Hungarian progressives.

Before continuing with this story and our reflections, we need to clarify who we are talking about, because a Hungarian progressive is not a Westerner like any other. A French, German, or American reader must understand that we’re not talking about white people from a declining bourgeoisie, spoiled and raised on institutional anti-racism, gay pride, and hatred of their country. No, the Hungarian progressive comes in two distinct varieties. This is an empirical description, of course, not the result of a sociological analysis — for that they would need to have the ability to be critical of themselves, because of course they monopolize sociology here as well. The influencers, politicians, and organizers of demonstrations are the children of the apparatchiks or cadres of the late Hungarian Communist Party, or else are the “brats” of the nouveau riche who made their money during the dark years of unbridled privatization immediately following. The bulk of the foot soldiers, on the other hand, are a very specific section of society that does not exist in the West: the post-Soviet proletarians — those dispossessed by the regime change who were acculturated by the state socialism which was then devoured by the vultures of globalism.

This fifth column has its officers and troops. It is made up of ordinary people who aren’t really Hungarian any more: They eat only fast food, watch only American films and television shows, dress like Californians, listen only to English-language popular songs, and — above all — have as their moral basis a vague wokeness shaped by decades of sentimentalist and globalist cultural hegemony. These ideology-free progressives are merely conformists in their new, artificial, imported, and mind-numbing culture. Reeducated to react to the emotional stimuli fed to them by the media as part of more or less well-designed operations, they react with Pavlovian reflexes and are doomed to indignation. If we say that they are no longer truly Hungarian, they will never be fully-fledged Westerners, either — which they know, deep down. They naturally turn this sense of permanent frustration into anger against “the system” and the “regime” — in other words, the horrible dictator Viktor Orbán, who is responsible for all their ills.

And their guardians — those we referred to above as the officers of this fifth column — ensure that this state of mind remains as inflamed as possible by continually feeding the troops with new resentments and hatreds. There are no limits to what they can do; where there’s discomfort, there’s no pleasure. But we’ll come back to that later. These executives, the sheepdogs of the local herd, are the comprador elites, those wannabe winners of a country of losers who hope to become part of the globalist happy few by bringing the entire globalist agenda to Hungary — sometimes without even believing in it. In short, they are nothing more than pathetic capos. I’ll remember for the rest of my life those anti-Orbán journalists who confessed to me that they voted for him only at the last minute, not trusting the champions of the opposition in times of turmoil such as these.

During the 13 years that they have now been in opposition, our beloved Hungarian progressive elites have become professionals at electoral defeat and selective indignation. We’ll have the pleasure of seeing their excellence in defeat again on future occasions — no opposition in Europe has suffered so many calamitous defeats since 1945 — and this time we’re going to focus on the exceptional selective indignation that is the subject of this essay.

The prize undoubtedly goes to the extreme centrists of the Momentum party, not only because they are unrestrained in their following of Europeanist “centrism,” but also because they live extremely close to the Budapest city center. Our dear Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) Katalin Cseh and Anna Donáth can really only please their followers with their faces. Beneath their masks of dashing young Hungarians lies the cynicism of seasoned politicians.

Allied with Emmanuel Macron’s party in France, Momentum has no qualms about complaining about police violence and the end of the rule of law — again, hasn’t he already died 58 times since 2010? — to the European Union’s institutions at a time when in France, Macron and his Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, were busy suppressing a huge non-partisan social movement against pension reform . . . that had been called for by the same European Union.

A 17-year-old girl lost her eye, and another demonstrator lost several fingers. 30 people were seriously injured and 300 were arrested. These were the figures for May 1 alone in France. Remember that 93% of the French population is opposed to this reform that was imposed by the government by decree via a parliament that was also opposed to it. In four months of industrial action, the list of abuses is endless. A Spanish journalist was beaten and lost a testicle. Two other men suffered the same fate. A trade unionist lost an eye as a result of a grenade thrown into a peaceful demonstration. There were countless attacks on journalists, including blows to the head. And this is not all. The pressure on the press is enormous. A freelance journalist had his skull split open and his hand fractured by a police baton. All in all, dozens of journalists were subjected to unwarranted arrests, damage to their equipment, and beatings by the police. But none of that matters: This is democracy, and this is the French police.

But still, we must worry about what’s happening in Hungary, where democracy is in danger and the police are on the rampage, as our dear progressive MEPs are telling us. So what has happened in Hungary that warrants drawing our attention away from the authoritarian and freedom-destroying excesses of the regime in Paris, you ask? Our progressive friends organized demonstrations of several hundred or several thousand people, and tried to attack Prime Minister Orbán’s office, in particular by knocking down the nearby construction barriers, and then threw themselves on the ground or else hurled bottles at the police. And then, for a moment, the horror of Eastern despotism was expressed in all its violence: The Hungarian police used tear gas on the demonstrators. I’m sorry to describe such a horror, but the world needs to know about the violence perpetrated by the Budapest regime in repressing the democratic opposition.

Dear readers, as you will have gathered, I require sarcasm to withstand certain infamies. Please forgive me. But, above all, let us pray for the strength to forgive the cynical hypocrites of progressivism, who clearly know no bounds.

The above essay was reprinted from Deliberatio.

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