A NYT opinion by Hungarian born reporter Kati Marton (not paywalled):
Why I’m Not Giving Up on American Democracy
For a time [after 1989], Mr. Orban, no longer bearded or skinny, head of the youth party Fidesz, befriended Richard and me. He invited us to dinner and the opera, and we hosted him in our New York apartment at a return dinner. (As it happens, the financier and philanthropist George Soros — whom Mr. Orban has aggressively attacked in recent years — was also present on that occasion.)
Orban in 1989
But in 2002, defeated at the polls after a single term as prime minister, Mr. Orban made sure that he would not be defeated again. Re-elected in 2010, he proceeded to weaken much of Hungary’s nascent civil society — its independent judiciary and its independent media. In this way, he began turning the country into a one-party state.
By some views, Mr. Orban’s Hungary is a soft autocracy, since dissidents and reporters aren’t jailed; they are merely driven out of business and — in the case of thousands — out of the country. Mr. Trump has evidently been impressed by Mr. Orban’s skill at eroding democratic norms and ridding himself of pesky political opponents. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” Mr. Trump has gushed.Neither individuals nor nations escape history for long, and with Mr. Trump’s election, history threatens to barge into our American democratic sanctuary with a vengeance.No American child has yet had to open her front door, as I did in 1955, to face three secret policemen, disguised in workers’ overalls, declaring, “Your mother called about the meter. Go get her.” I called out, “Mama!” returned to my room and my playmate, and did not see my mother for a year. There was no one to report my parents’ arrest to the world, since they were the last independent journalists, and now they were silent inmates.
A chapter of my parents’ past opened in 2005, when, after their death, I got access to the files that the secret police had kept on my family during the years of Soviet domination (even the drawings I made as a 6-year-old merited a place in the Marton dossier). .... I found a document stating that under brutal interrogation my parents “did not compromise a single Hungarian citizen.” In his “confession,” which I also found in the files, my father had written how 10 years earlier, under the Nazis and their Hungarian allies, “we lost pretty much everything we owned, and I have absolutely no hope that in my lifetime I can rebuild again.” .... Even though they were victims of the two worst experiments on humankind, Nazism and Communism, my parents did rebuild again, here in the New World.
As much as I miss my parents, these days I am almost relieved that they are not alive to see the current version of the country they considered the greatest on earth, the United States. They would now barely recognize it.Today, I do not contemplate leaving the New World, which allowed us to restart our lives several decades ago. As my parents’ daughter, I will not flee into the silence of internal exile, but hold tight to my first glimpse of America: an offering of oranges for a little girl temporarily orphaned by an indecent state. (emphases added)
Yes indeed, history threatens to barge into our American democratic sanctuary with a vengeance. But most Americans cannot see it. This is the sort of authoritarianism I fully expect DJT, MAGA elites and GOP politicians to try very hard to establish by 11/1/26, just before the next mid-term elections.
Q: Will people like Germaine and sites like Dissident Politics face the kind of self-righteous discipline inflicted by MAGA that Orban and his thugs inflict on Hungarians who oppose him?
Bonus stuff for the hard core politics enthusiasts:
And, for those who forgot this 5 minute interview with Kim Scheppele I posted here in Aug. 2022, here it is again:
Orbann argues democracy is failing and power like his is rising to replace it. He just might be right.
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