Allow me to be as provocative as possible. And what could be more provocative in today's world than someone quoting Putin?
Well then, I will do this now, simply because the Russian president - no matter how much we condemn the attack on Ukraine - sees the operation and motivations of this West (pardon, the West) quite accurately. Which operation and intention have brought him to the point where he even tries to regulate his own member and ally, and tries to change his political relations - understand: to override the will of the people expressed in free elections.
Because this is what he is doing in Hungary, for example, and let us be happy that he is doing "only" this much, since, for example, he carried out a military coup in Chile fifty years ago, and he did not shy away from assassinating the president who came to power in free elections, Salvador Allende. That Allende was a communist? It can be done. And what happened to Imre Nagy? And then, anyway, what is the difference between the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and the American intervention in Chile in 1973? Maybe it's time to think about that too.
And then come Putin, who gave a speech to the guests of the Valdaj Klub last year. And after stating that "we are probably facing the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of the Second World War" - who would dare to argue with that? –, he declared that the West (I always mess it up, Master Freud is fiddling, so his majesty, the West)
"denies the sovereignty, identity and uniqueness of countries and peoples, and tramples on the interests of other states. Anyway, even if they don't use the word denial, they actually do. Apart from the creators of the rules I mentioned, no one has the right to preserve their identity: everyone else must comply with these rules.”
I don't think anyone can seriously argue with this statement.
At most, we can shade this picture by saying that the United States already denies the sovereignty of European countries and peoples and wants to impose its own rules on the old continent, and the powerful leaders of Europe either because the United States bought them by the pound or because they believed they believe this nonsense, they also deny the Europe of nations, they think of some kind of new European Union, the European empire in which the powerful Western countries dictate the (American) rules, and woe to those who do not fall in line. (This is exactly what we see today in the case of Poland and Hungary, but soon the Slovaks will also be able to experience what it is like when the West, America and Brussels - i.e. the new Soviet Union - are angry.) "[…] the modern West is essentially about smoothing over and erasing all differences .
What's behind it?
First of all, the declining creative potential of the West and the desire to hold back and prevent the free development of other civilizations", states the Russian president, and there is no need to open a debate about this either. Yes, today there can be no other way of life, no other value system, no other world view, no other culture and no other civilization than the increasingly sick, increasingly decadent, increasingly self-destructive - and consequently increasingly aggressive way of life, value system and culture - as long as the woke and cancel culture can still be called a culture at all. And, of course, there is also pure and pure material interest behind this - this is how Putin puts it:
"Of course, there is also an openly mercantilist interest. By imposing their values, consumption habits and standards on others, our opponents - I will be careful with the words - try to expand the market for their products.
The goal in this course is ultimately very primitive. It is noteworthy that it promotes the universal value of the culture and worldview of the West. Even if they do not say it openly, although in fact they often say it, they behave as if it is so, as if it is the basis of life, and the policy they pursue is designed to show that these values are unconditionally accepted by all other members of the international community. you have to accept. I would like to quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous Harvard graduation speech in 1978. He said that the "continuous blindness of superiority" characteristic of the West - and this continues to this day - which "maintains the belief that vast regions of our planet must everywhere develop and mature to the level of the Western systems of today". He said this in 1978. Nothing changed."
But. A lot has changed since 1978 - the essence of the changes is that the free world of our former dreams, the brilliant West, has lost itself, it has rejected all its traditions, religions, all its former beliefs, and like all civilizations that have begun to rot, it is becoming more and more distorted, more and more sick, and more and more disgusting. he lies to himself about "new values", whether it's about gender ideology, the mental illness of the woke and cancel culture, or the racist madness of "Black Lives Matter", the new talk that follows from all of this, the brain-dead rampage of PC; about anything that the West is so proud of today, because it has nothing to really be proud of anymore.
"Today, the liberal ideology itself has changed beyond recognition. If in the beginning, classical liberalism meant that every person can do and say what they want, in the 20th century century, liberals began to say that the so-called open society had enemies, and that the freedom of these enemies could and should be limited or even abolished. This reached the point of absurdity where all alternative opinions were declared subversive and dangerous to democracy.”
Putin sees the point quite clearly.
And now let's take a look at Ferenc Kölcsey's oeuvre, it's not superfluous, if we already owe him our national anthem. In his work Parainesis Kölcsey Kálmánhoz, Kölcsey puts it this way:
Humanity as a whole is not like a large family divided into innumerable clans, each member of which is our relative and counts equally for our love and services. However, understand well! - man is a finite animal, his influence can only work within a certain defined circle. Therefore, do not believe that God created us to be equal brothers of all the children of the earth and equal citizens of all the provinces of the earth. The sun illuminates vast celestial bodies, but it does not affect all parts of the universe: thus, a person, if he has inherited great strength and receives a position from fate that corresponds to his strength, can shine as a beneficent sun in front of thousands, even millions; but exerting a beneficial influence on the entire human race is not a gift for even the greatest of the great.
I could never understand: who are they who call themselves world citizens? Human talent is a tiny lamp that can fill a narrow circle with its light at the same time; and if it is dragged from one place to another, it leaves darkness behind. We need to connect it to a certain place in order to make it happy with beneficial lighting all the time. Everything that is divided into too many parts is lost in its own smallness. That's how love is. Where is the man who, wishing to dedicate himself to all the countries of the earth, could carry a burning passion for them in his bosom? Leonidás could only die for one Sparta, Regulus only for one Rome, Zrínyi only for one Hungary. This does not require a long proof; look into your heart, and there you will find the science taken from nature, which chains your love to a household and, beyond that, to a country.
It would be difficult to formulate the essence of homeland and patriotism more perfectly than this, and at the same time to summarize more perfectly the impossibility of cosmopolitanism, the self-deceiving good-naturedness and self-destruction of "I am a friend of the whole world" (see: migrant crisis and Wir Schaffen Das!).
Kölcsey's Parainesis was published in 1837. And almost exactly one hundred years later, in 1945, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper's main work (the syllabus of George Soros's life), The Open Society, was published. And in this we can read:
"Whoever puts his own people, his own nation, his own political community before others in his head, heart, and soul is building a dictatorship, whether he knows it or not."
I repeat these because we must see and understand. And everything is understandable from these two. Homeland and nation are understandable, and homelessness and emptiness are understandable. And, of course, how the Hungarian Prime Minister became a "dictator". Because he considers his own people the most important. And that's a sin today. This must be countered today, it must be removed. But we must know that we cannot allow this. A moron wrote a long article the other day about how the greatness of the West lies in its ability to constantly change. Well, if we dare to understand how the West has changed in the last eighty years or so, from the end of the Second World War to the present day, then we must also understand that we must stay out of this change at all costs.
Because at the end of this road, nothing awaits us, emptiness, alarming sameness, rootlessness and genderfluid pus. I'll say it again, open Babits: "and if the newcomer / looks down and says: "I am the New!" - answer: / "The Old was better".
That's what it's about. And if nothing else, Putin surely knows this well. If the West has a future, that future is here today, in the middle, and a little further away, in the always looked down upon, always despised East. (Oh, sorry, in the East...)
Featured image: MTI/Szilárd Koszticsák
