It is characteristic of the moral state of the Western federal system that it wants to defeat Russia rather than recognize its right to a secure existence.

I was fourteen years old in 1956, the Hungarian revolution, I can confidently say, was the greatest experience of my life. The fact that the Russians are leaving and we can live in an independent, neutral Hungary was such an uplifting feeling that I haven't felt since, especially not during the regime change, when, based on the knowledge I gained at my workplace, I was sure that the country's economy would be improved by privatization, liberalization and deregulation - which is it was the economic slogan of regime change - it will be destroyed.

I also started my career as a public writer by writing a short gloss in Élét és Irodalom with the title Rather than an atomic bomb , which was based on a sixties joke about the fact that if an atomic bomb were dropped on the country, it would not cause as much damage as our leading economists and our politicians are preparing.

Thirty years later, I can admit I was wrong, maybe I should have mentioned a hydrogen bomb.

When I had to vote on NATO membership and later on EU accession, I voted no in both cases. I opposed NATO membership because I had not forgotten my youthful enthusiasm and the goal and promise of the revolution, a neutral Hungary, and I was unable to comprehend that now, when we had just freed ourselves from the grip of the Warsaw Pact, where - I would just like to remind you - in such an operation we had to participate in which we didn't want to, why should we immediately become members of another military camp that does not serve the interests of Hungarians?

This operation, to which I am referring, was a friendly aid to Czechoslovakia, about which the news coverage began on the morning of August 20, 1968, something like this: MTI was authorized to announce that Hungarian military formations crossed the state border of Czechoslovakia this morning together with the troops of the Warsaw Pact... The quote may not be quite accurate, but after fifty-four years the memory gets a little hazy. János Kádár tried until the last moment to convince Dubček to come to an agreement with Brezhnev, this was the famous but now apparently forgotten meeting in Yews. But our leaders did not learn from history, during the regime change the former Russian base in Taszár soon became a NATO base, from which they immediately began bombing the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Yugoslavia.

And I voted against EU membership because I was aware that the Hungarian economy is not competitive on the EU market, and I thought that first the small Central European states should learn among themselves what capitalism is and then cautiously, small step by step to join the Western countries, which were even stronger than us,

but here (almost) everyone was crazy to open a pastry shop in Vienna as soon as possible.

All these old memories surfaced in me because a few days ago I received a manifesto, which says that Hungarian and Austrian political and social organizations joined forces to defend Austria's neutrality and to achieve Hungary's neutrality.

According to the proclamation:

"It has become an obsession of NATO's leading powers that they can defeat Russia by escalating the conflict in Ukraine and dragging in those who want to stay out of it.

They send offensive weapons to Ukraine and cherish the plan to open a "second front". It is said more and more often that Russia must be occupied and dismembered. Pressure is put on Austria to abandon its neutrality and side with the pro-war. They want to force Hungary, as their NATO ally, to take up arms against the Russians and become part of their conquering plans.

It is characteristic of the moral state of the Western federal system that it wants to defeat Russia rather than recognize its right to a secure existence.

We reject NATO's peace, Pax Americana, because we want East-West reconciliation and peace. We believe in the principle of indivisibility of security. No one has the right to assert their own security at the expense of the security of others, as is being done with NATO's eastern expansion. We are convinced that the key to a peaceful solution lies in satisfying Russia's legitimate security demands. In order for them to respect our safety, we must recognize theirs! We want neutrality, an active policy of neutrality for peace, against the war policy of the Western powers."

Among the signatories are Hungarian organizations and persons (usually left-wing) that I know and Austrian organizations (presumably also left-wing) that I do not know, but regardless of who signed it, I fully agree with the contents of the manifesto.

The total Euro-Atlantic media has already managed to convince the Swedes, who have been neutral for two hundred years, and the Finns, who have been neutral for seventy years, that there is a huge danger lurking for them without NATO membership, which, interestingly, did not exist when the Soviet Union was still in full power. Moreover, the Finns owed their economic rise to a significant extent to their favorable economic relations with the Soviet Union. As a neutral country, they could receive advanced technology from the West, the COCOM list did not apply to them, and cheap raw materials and energy from the East, to which they of course added their own diligence.

As for the Russian-Ukrainian war, the whole drama unfolded before our eyes (perhaps a movie will be made of it one day), as the easing of the Cold War, the East-West embrace (look at the photographs and films from the time) was gradually replaced by confrontation and an unfolding war, the end of which no one knows yet. It started with the 1986 Reykjavík summit (Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev), which essentially ended the Cold War, followed by the 1989 Malta meeting (Gorbachev, George Bush), where preparations were made for the democratic transformation of the eastern half of Europe and German reunification.

This was followed by German reunification talks in 1990, where US Secretary of State James Baker literally told Gorbachev:

"If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is part of NATO, the jurisdiction of NATO forces would not extend an inch further east."

This statement can be found in the fifth of the thirty documents published by the American National Security Archive in 2017 (and in two other places), which I only mention in case NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also reads this article, because he knows that such no promise was made. But that was the peak, after that there was a reduction in relations until the war, and

it was not Russia that expanded and threatened the West, as the mainstream media now wants us to believe, but NATO expanded and for this purpose, for example, in Ukraine, 5 billion dollars were spent to support pro-Western organizations and politicians, color revolutions.

They financed the demonstrations on Maidan Square and at the end even shot into the crowd in order to distract the president representing Ukrainian neutrality, even though two-thirds of Ukraine's population still rejected NATO membership.

Hungary became the loser of two world wars and mutilated it in such a way that it did not want to participate in either of them. It was therefore completely understandable that we wanted to be neutral in 1956, and it is completely natural that we want to stay out of the current war, and that we want the war to come to an early negotiated end with a result that not only protects the legitimate security interests of each party, but the rights of individual nationalities are also taken into account.

Unfortunately, Hungary's neutral status is currently neither a political nor an economic reality. However, we could start the economic preparation. This requires the creation of an economic structure that is less dependent on external blackmail, whether they want to teach us a lesson from the East or the West. This is not impossible to achieve and its design can be started even today.

Károly Lóránt is an economist and advisor to the National Forum

Source and featured image: Magyar Hírlap