no MMA!

A great sense of alarm is spreading among ordinary Europeans today, especially in the south and east of the continent.  Now even the elitist media are giving us the worst international news since the Cold War.

Americans do not want to hear this, either.

Well, you may not be interested in evil, but evil may be interested in you.

Listen up. This could be important.

The Washington Post just told us that a dictatorial strongman has risen to power in Hungary, a man named Viktor Orban.  In a two-hour parliamentary session, Orban forced radical changes in the Hungarian constitution to favor his own party.  Orban caught the European media and political elites by complete surprise.

In Germany, Der Spiegel is finally reporting on Beppe Grillo, calling him “the most dangerous man in Europe.”  Grillo is the failed Italian comedian who used the web to recruit 9 million voters in the recent election, barely one percent short of Mussolini’s first vote in 1922, giving him a plurality in parliament.

American thinker

Hungary has failed to resolve concerns about media freedom as the government has implemented “only a fraction” of the recommendations to deal with the issue, according to European Union Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

“Issues of media freedom are not yet solved; only a fraction of the Council of Europe recommendations have been implemented,” Kroes said of Hungary in the text of a speech to be delivered today in Dublin. The award of a frequency to opposition radio Klubradio this month after a series of lawsuits was “welcome,” Kroes said.

The EU needs to increase its focus on protecting “fundamental freedoms” such as media pluralism in the bloc, said Kroes, who is in charge of the digital agenda at the EU executive. The EU wants to strengthen the independence of media regulators from government influence, she said.

bloomberg

I wrote about some of the people who received high awards from the Orbán government on March 15, one of the official national holidays in Hungary. They were either racist, antisemitic neo-Nazis or representatives of unscientific, bogus “scholarship” whose numbers have been growing in Hungary in the last twenty years or so. The greatest attention was showered on Ferenc Szaniszló, who received the Táncsics Prize from Zoltán Balog.

I left the story at the point that Zoltán Balog claimed that he knew nothing about Szaniszló’s program on EchoTV. He simply accepted the recommendation of the committee appointed by the Orbán government and made up of right-leaning journalists. Balog also insisted that he couldn’t withdraw the prize. Either Szaniszló gives it back on his own volition or everything remains as is. (I might mention here that when the writer Ákos Kertész made the mistake of saying something derogatory about Hungarians his honorary citizenship of Budapest was withdrawn without the slightest difficulty.) In any case, Balog wrote a letter to Szaniszló in which he practically begged him to return the prize. He did, but only after he delivered another of his harangues on March 18 in an extra edition of Világ-Panoráma. This extra edition was just as long as his other programs, but this time it dealt only with all the indignities he had to suffer from the “szocik” and the “liberok.” One shouldn’t have expected anything else, but at least at the end he announced that he would return the prize–but not to the ministry but to the U.S. Embassy!

Hungarian Spectrum