Mick Hartley

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is usually somewhat circumspect about his ideas on ethnic purity. On Tuesday he gave a speech at the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce’s annual gathering which, as Eva Balogh reports, was unadulterated racism:

Orbán probably realized the risk involved in entering into a discussion of such a “delicate” subject. Thus he began this part of his speech by paying homage to the resurgence of politically incorrect speech in Hungary: “By now one can say such things. A few years ago one could be executed for such sentences, but today one can say it because life confirmed that too much mixing brings trouble.” What’s too much mixing and what’s not? I think it is pretty clear from the text that mixing within the European community is acceptable as far as Orbán is concerned, but any mixing with people coming from “different cultures” is not. He admits—he can’t do otherwise—that today’s Hungarians are ethnically extremely varied, but he looks upon the Hungarian nation as ethnically homogeneous because it is made up of European stock….

Orbán is convinced that if “we manage to uphold the [country’s] ethnic homogeneity and its cultural uniformity, then Hungary will be upgraded as a place. Hungary will be the kind of place that will be able to show other, more developed countries what they lost.”

A few weeks ago we were laughing over Orbán’s remarks about the West European refugees who will be coming to Hungary. We thought he was joking. Well, he is not joking. He truly believes that Hungary will be a European paradise which white Europeans will envy and perhaps move to.

The same theme cropped up again in a later part of the speech, when Orbán said that he doesn’t want the importation of “guest workers,” although it is becoming painfully clear that there is a serious labor shortage in Hungary. He wants a country where all jobs are filled by Hungarians, from the cleaning lady to the president of the Hungarian National Academy. In Western European countries immigrants do the menial jobs. But not in Hungary, where ethnic purity will enhance the value of the country. It will be a country that is being run from top to bottom by Hungarians….

Most commentators misunderstood the message. Some people got stuck on the ethnic diversity of Hungarians and brought up examples to prove that Orbán doesn’t know what he is talking about. For example, 24.hu gave the ethnic backgrounds of the thirteen generals who were executed after the 1848-49 revolution and war of independence and triumphantly announced that only four of them were ethnically Hungarians. But this is not what Orbán was talking about. He has nothing against white Europeans. He was talking about people whose skin is darker and who are not Christians. This was a speech with a racist message, pure and simple. Normally, Orbán couches his less than acceptable ideas in coded phrases that can easily be explained away if necessary. But he seems to be emboldened as a result of the political changes in the United States, and he no longer even pretends when it comes to the subject of race relations.

The Jewish weekly Szombat published an opinion piece which analyzed the text more deeply. The author discovered a sentence that stood apart from the passage on ethnic homogeneity. Here Orbán called “Hungary’s ethnic relations complicated.” He was undoubtedly referring to the large Roma population in the country. Thus, the commentator translated Orbán’s thinking on the subject: “We have enough problems with our own ethnic relations. We don’t need an immigrant ethnic group.” What really bothered the author, however, was the “ethnic homogeneity” phrase, which can be understood as “ethnic purity.” With this, he wrote, “we are back to the word usage of the Central European dictatorships of the 1930s.” I’m afraid I have to agree with him. This time it is impossible to explain away Viktor Orbán’s message.