There was a time when we read articles about our country and the Hungarians with interest. See, this is how a stranger sees us. Today, however, these writings are more likely to increase our blood pressure, they do not enrich our self-knowledge, but we can read back the lies spread about us by the Hungarian party people.

Of course, the opposing side can claim that they see it right, since they are independent objective and we are government propagandists. Come on, let's see how an American journalist living in Budapest sees Hungary, and how does he see his native country from Budapest?

Rod Dreher, editor-in-chief of The American Conservative, put his thoughts on paper after the armed attack in Baton Rouge that claimed 7 lives. We quote some details of his writing that concern us as well:

In the past, when things like this happened, I of course condemned them, but my reflexive reaction was to a) point out that America in general is a violent country and always has been, and b) that I grew up in a southern gun culture where the such things are unknown because we were all hunters who treated firearms with great respect, and c) anyway, the Second Amendment. (This includes the right of American citizens to bear arms - ed.)

All of these things are still true! Note that these carnage are never committed by young men who grew up in a gun culture that has anything to do with hunting.

However, living in a violent country makes you used to such things. When I saw the Baton Rouge news, I thought, "Well, that's normal these days." Which is crazy, but that's life in America.

/…/

Otherwise, the European solution - take away all the guns - would be illegal in America, would never work, and does not address the fundamental problems of American society.

And yet…living outside the US and reading these stories from a western country where this never happens is truly sobering. All the usual things that people say when things like this happen may even be true, but it's shocking that we've become such a society.

/…/

I now live in a city and country that is significantly poorer than the United States, but where this kind of violence is almost unheard of…. One realizes that poverty is not really an explanation for why things are the way they are in the United States. That's part of the problem, but not the whole point. Neither is racism. The fact is that we are all experiencing the disintegration of our society, a process that has many causes, but which cannot be stopped or even mitigated until we can talk openly and seriously about the causes - even if the causes include us and they also affect our cherished beliefs.

In Europe, Hungary is considered a mummy by Western Europeans. It is governed by a populist conservative, Viktor Orbán, who is hated by the Western European elite for various reasons. Among other things, because it completely rejects the multiculturalism that ensures open borders accepted by the Western European elite.

All the problems of crime, extremism, anti-Semitism, ghettoization and terrorism that most Western European countries struggle with (or don't struggle with) do not exist here in Hungary. Why not? Because there are very few Muslim immigrants. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. You may remember that two summers ago... when, during the wave of violence related to the events in Israel, the police were deployed in European capitals and even in Los Angeles and New York to protect synagogues and Jewish businesses against Muslim violence, there was no such thing in the Hungarian capital need. I walked daily in the old Jewish quarter and saw Jewish families doing business, walking with their children, and so on, who were not protected by the police and the military because they did not need to be protected. It was shocking. And yet, the Western European media shouts about how terribly anti-Semitic the Orbán government is, because its members criticize György Soros.

Western European and British people living in Budapest tell us that their friends and family members at home have the impression that the streets of the Hungarian capital are overrun with skinheads and brownshirts, as well as brutal police officers who enforce order. This is ridiculous. You don't often see police because this is a peaceful, orderly country. This is a country where you can walk alone late at night and probably not have to worry about being robbed or attacked. When my friends from Alabama visited last year, they were shocked by this. And I was shocked at how shocked they were, because I already took it for granted that walking down the street without worrying about my safety was normal.

So we can begin to understand that Hungary plays an important role in the narrative imagination of Europeans (and the American media and government elite) in order to distract their own people from why it is that Hungary is such a safe and normal place, while their own cities are not. those? They have to invent this myth of Hungarian fascism to avoid the hard questions about how they run their own society.

When I travel in Western Europe and meet people who find out that I live in Hungary, you can see that they become sad. From then on, the conversation becomes quite predictable: I tell them that Budapest is a beautiful city, full of fun things to do, and very safe and pleasant. I can see on their faces that they have a hard time believing it, because they only know what they read in the media and what kind of right-wing hell reigns there. This is a big lie! A lie that is spread for political reasons, to support the liberal, globalist, multiculturalist narrative.

The other night I met a young Spanish scientist who works here, and he talked at length about how Hungary is demonized in the Spanish media and in Spanish institutions. When he first arrived here, he was shocked to find that it was all bullshit. Then he began to think about why exactly it is in the interest of the left-wing government and the left-wing media to maintain this myth about Hungary.

Hey, I understand. /…/ we use different narratives so that we don't have to question our own faith. We accept gun violence as a fact of life in the United States... Yet living in a peaceful European city (and of course Budapest is not the only one) and seeing my own country from afar, one wonders why we can't have things as nice as they do. Yes, I know: Europe is relatively peaceful because it is full of Europeans, and America is not because it is full of Americans. Culture matters. Still, the experience of seeing America from abroad makes me think. I see how damnably we have ruined our own country, and I begin to defend the Hungarians, Slovaks and other peoples, whom the American elite and the Western European elite see as backward post-communist peasants who need to be educated for liberal democracy. One of my readers, responding to my post asking when the turning point in American life was the awakening, wrote to me last night:

I live in a neighborhood where teachers also live. They told me that prior to 2016, they might have encountered a student or two who identified as "transgender," which was strange, but easily accepted or ignored. Now, when I ask them how many transgender students are in their high school, there are too many to count. So I think the big turning point was Bruce Jenner, who was a member of the Kardashian family and knew how to manipulate the media, how to make a complete untruth seem normal. Since then, only unreality has been natural.

This does not exist in Hungary - yet. But the United States and the European Union are doing their best to bring this "Blessing of Freedom" to this country. American culture is a giant machine designed to export dysfunction and social breakdown and call it freedom.

Look, I'm American, not Hungarian, and there are things in this country that I will never understand. That's okay. But in the last two years, when I lived and worked in Central Europe, I found that these people may not be very religious (except Poland), but they still have an intact culture, and that they are completely vulnerable if those ideas are imposed on them and practices that led to social disintegration in the USA and Western Europe.

What do you think the Hungarian resistance against György Soros is about? About devoting his huge fortune to trying to turn Hungary and other ex-communist countries into San Francisco. And there are American conservatives, especially the establishment in Washington, who, knowing little or nothing about these countries, uncritically buy into the lies about them…

Author: Rod Dreher

Source: The American Conservative

(Title image – illustration/Twitter )

The full article can be read in English here.

Raymond Oliver Dreher Jr. - better known as Rod Dreher - is an American writer and editor who lives in Budapest, Hungary. He is a senior editor and blogger for The American Conservative and the author of several books, including How Dante Can Save Your Life, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies. He has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in National Review and National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Touchstone, Men's Health, the Los Angeles Times, and others.

He was the film critic for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the senior film critic for the New York Post. His commentary has been broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Court TV and other television outlets.