I know it is much more comfortable to stay in our own bubbles, but in order to be better, we must push ourselves and step out of our comfort zones. Beside cultivating a relationship with our audiences (and educating them better on communicating liberty), we have to build the roads to others.
We don’t have a lot of time. If we don’t act now, we will entrench the semi-feudal, crypto-communist government. Our current situation is like extinguishing a fire: We shouldn’t care who hands us a bucket of water, the most important things is to put out the fire.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would make an excellent magician. While he diverts people’s attention with one hand, he steals with the other. Often literally.
We may recently often hear that something is a “Putinesque measure”. However, in Hungary, the governing party Fidesz, lead by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is really using Putin’s solutions as its point of reference. Let’s see how similar Orbán’s and Putin’s methods are.
Just like communism, Orbán’s regime is unsustainable and doomed to fail. Just like the communists, the current government sees only the collective, rather than the individuals. And the individuals who don’t share Orbán’s illiberal ideas are getting angry.Once again, they want liberty.
Fake news are like religion, you must believe them despite of all common sense and evidence to the contrary. Like any radical religion, it must be protected at all costs. And so, in the fifth volume, Dolores Umbridge made Harry write lines, etching them into his own skin, saying: “I must not tell lies”.
We must not remain silent, we must not accept fear. The government is still in power because it made people believe that it will protect them from the immigrants, NGOs, the EU and capitalistic and imperialistic American interests. And in the meantime they make people terrified of dissent.
With no independent media, no checks and balances, no civil oversight, one of the most corrupt governments in the EU can expand on its already immense powers and get even closer to Putin’s Russia. But it is not too late to act and save what remains of civil society in Hungary.
Years after communism failed spectacularly with the demise of the Soviet Union, long after the horrendous deeds of the collectivist dictatorships became well known, there are still people who have the audacity to laud mass murderers of the likes of Fidel Castro.
The answer to populism is not more populism. Demagogues can be defeated without lies. In the recent U.S. election two extremely untrustworthy candidates tried to outbid each other in telling the biggest lies. You can promise blood, sweat and tears and still be loved.
