Strudel Poodle

 

Not much information, perhaps, but plenty of kürtőskalács. Via Taste Atlas.

I don't know if Roy, Left Blogistan's preeminent Rod Dreher scholar, has seen this testimony of what Dreher did on his three-month Hungarian junket, so I want to make sure it gets posted somewhere:

Dreher, who we caught in  early August complaining about how the Western press smears Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as a fascist when they don't bother to learn the first thing about what Orbán has actually done—

this write-by-numbers Atlantic piece on how the 2022 election might be the last time to stop Hungary from turning into an Orban autocracy. It’s typical of the coverage you see in the Western media: no interest at all in trying to understand the nuances of the issues in play. It’s all Magyar Man Bad. As I have said repeatedly, if you come to Hungary with an open mind, and spend any time, you may not come away thinking pro-Orban thoughts, but you will come away realizing that the situation here is far, far different from the picture you see in the Western media.

—hasn't bothered to learn the first thing about what Orbán has actually done.

I mean literally: Rodsplaining Hungarian freedom of expression to Hungary's only remaining independent media outlet:

Narratology: If You Have a Hungarian For a Friend...

Tucker and Viktor on Monday, photo by the Office of the Hungarian Prime Minister, via The New York Times.

Not how the old saying goes, but if you have a Hungarian for a friend, you might want to know who his other friends are.

I don't know to what extent readers are following the adventures of the wingnut brethren in Hungary, where Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has been serving as a visiting fellow of the Danube Institute since spring (his substack says he went 17 April, and was about to return to the US when he last posted on 4 August, but he's also traveled around a bit in France, Spain, Romania, and Poland, I think), exuding enthusiasm for the illiberalism of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party, one of the politicians who emerged from the velvet revolutions of 1989, a more or less conventional, pro-Western though very conservative, leader in his first premiership from 1998 to 2002 and an increasingly authoritarian one in his second, beginning 2010, during which he has battled immigrants (especially Muslim ones), LBGTQ+ Hungarians (that's important to Rod, of course), press freedom, and George Soros and his Open Society Institute (the Soros Foundation gave him a scholarship to Oxford in 1989, but he returned to Hungary to run for Parliament less than a year after starting).

On the press freedom, Rod rodsplains, in a post datelined Ljubljana (note how, for evidence, he cites himself, talking to an anonymous Slovene, reporting the authority of some anonymous Magyars without explaining what makes them authorities):

I mentioned to a conservative writer here that a couple of Hungarians told me that if Orban had not engineered the takeover of a number of Hungarian press titles by his friends and allies, there would be no conservative media presence at all in Hungary — this, even though conservative voters are a majority. Whenever you hear people on the Left demanding government intervention to guarantee “equity” — meaning equal outcomes [if I ever hear it, but I haven't so far, though I've heard talk about reviving the FCC Fairness Doctrine of 1949-87 requiring individual broadcasters to represent a range of views] — remind them that that is pretty much what Viktor Orban did with the Hungarian media landscape. I should say that I have serious misgivings [sure, Rod, that's why you're defending it] about the media operation Orban pulled off, but the de facto monopoly the Left has on the media, especially in a small country like Hungary, tempers my criticism. Orban is far more realistic about the world people on the Right actually live in, I think.

West of Eden, and hopefully on the way north

Aylan Kurdi alive, apparently threatening the cultural integrity of Mr. Orbán's continent, though I don't quite see that. Photo via The Independent.

I've heard of governments hating foreign refugees so much they'd seal the border with a razor-wire fence, or a Great Wall as the case may be, so they can't get in, but I've never heard of one like the Hungarian Fidesz regime that won't let them out either.

Why are there 500 Syrians stuck on a train in the town of Bicske, and thousands more haunting the central station in Budapest? When crypto-fascist* prime minister Viktor Orbán says,

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” he said. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

Not because the migrants want to be the guests of such a narrow-minded and unwelcoming government. They're just passing through on their way to Germany, which has agreed to take on 800,000 refugees. Hungary is holding them under the theory that they are legally required to herd them into camps.