A very fair and accurate picture provided by Christopher Adam. Yes, Budapest is still in many ways a wonderful city, worth visiting. But this is despite Orban’s corrupt and autocratic regime, not because of it.
And, yes, the Orban regime is hypocritically using the memory of the Hungarian refugees of 1956 as part of a cynical and demagogic foreign campaign to capitalize on former worldwide good will toward Hungary to camouflage the regime’s current shameful hate campaign against refugees, soon to culminate in a “Referendum.”
Orban’s domestic hate campaign (now being masked by his charm campaign in Montreal and elsewhere) is not even being conducted primarily because of visceral hatred on the part of the Orban regime. There is real hatred there too, of course, but Orban cultivates it in the Hungarian populace mainly out of self-serving opportunism: Orban systematically foments fear, anger and loathing to distract the Hungarians from his depredations on both their civil liberties and their public funds (along with his enormous cut from all EU subsdidy funds) and their liberties, which he steals to enrich hmself and his accomplices and to keep increasing his personal autocratic powers.
Hungary’s cultural charm is real. The Orban regime’s cynical charm campaign is repugnant, reprehensible, and should be unmasked by all decent, thinking people, Hungarian or otherwise.
Stevan Harnad
Canadian-Hungarian Democratic Charter
