The Board of Trustees of the CÖF-CÖKA has decided every year since 2016 on who they deem worthy of the Spiritual Defender award based on the suggestions received from the spiritual defenders. The award ceremony for the year 2022 was held on January 19 at the Novotel Congress Center, slightly moved to 2024. The opening speech of the packed event was given by the founding president of CÖF-CÖKA, László Csizmadia. This opening speech can be read below.
Dear ladies and gentlemen!
Spiritual patriots!
I am happy to announce that CÖF-CÖKA will celebrate its 15th anniversary this year. Among our founders, Ágoston Schulek and Izabella Bencze, already on their way to heaven, must be watching our steps with fearful eyes. Tamás Fricz and myself, here in our motherland, try to serve the traditional values of the people's majesty and civil courage with our work, together with two other members of our board of trustees, Attila Miklós Németh and Norbert Heizler.
We can do it, because hundreds of thousands of spiritual patriots, if necessary, show faith with their presence when the honor of the homeland calls us all. This is how the Hungarikum, the Peace March, was born. Following the eternal words of Ferenc Kölcsey, we believe that
"Home before everything".
We can share in trouble and joy together somehow, as a real family does in love.
Our nation has stood in the mud for more than a thousand years. Learning the lessons of history, we project a courageous, uncompromising but solidary and peaceful Hungarian image. We respect the cultural diversity and sovereignty of European nations. Among the flags of the EU's 27 member states, the red-white-green also flies there. As the indigenous population of Europe, it is our duty to express an opinion in the social and economic policy of our continent, to build and not to destroy. Our approach to life as spiritual defenders of the country is based on Judeo-Christian culture. Our voluntary work focuses on the triple unity of God-home-family. Our tool system is the news portal civilek.info, our Facebook and newsletters are popular, and the number of our followers is growing. We follow the daily events of the world, including Europe and Hungary.
We would also like to thank our supporters for their opinions and financial support. We have never accepted foreign money. In addition to true Christian morality, keeping in mind the interests of our nation, we consider our families to be our solid pillars. In our view, the distinction between good and bad always reflects objectivity.
• A caring government is good - while a government that sells off the Hungarians' silver and hangs bankruptcy on us is bad.
• The combination of Hungarian and foreign investments increases prosperity and creates jobs - while opening borders to predatory privatization and illegal immigration is bad.
• Bearing parental responsibility, bonding and belonging to the family is good - but alien moral teaching, LGBTQ, sneaking in among our children is bad.
• Employing foreign workers on fixed-term, temporary contracts, if the position cannot be filled with Hungarian labor, is good - at the same time, economic immigration aimed at taking over political power and forcing the migrant quota on us is bad.
• The EU can be a true representative of democracy and the sovereignty of the people if it represents the policy of equal nations. This would be good - an institutional organization that applies double standards, represents party policies, and implements a corrupt institutional bureaucracy is bad.
• Efforts to remove corrupt officials and parliamentarians, good - US-style federal type commonwealth bad.
Dear Spiritual Patriots, Comrades!
As you may have heard previously, CÖF-CÖKA does not sell sack cats. We will not change our ideals as civilians. The hunger for power and the possibility of becoming a party never took hold of us. We convey our principles in our daily work, whether it is social or economic policy. We do not employ investigative journalists paid from abroad, who perform questionable private investigative work for Judas money, on behalf of Soros, while hiding their clients.
I can say that many people help our honest work. So is our advisory board called C12. They are constant actors in our civil academies and in the media. They deserve to be listed by name, in alphabetical order:
• Barna Bodó, president of the Transylvanian Community of Hungarian Civil Organizations
• Economist Imre Boros
• Secret service expert László Földi
• Tamás Fricz, political scientist, curator of CÖF-CÖKA
• Georg Spöttle, security policy expert
• Constitutional lawyer Zoltán Lomnici Jr., spokesperson of CÖF-CÖKA
• Political scientist Zoltán Kiszelly
• Károly Lóránt, economist
• Katalin Mezey is a Kossuth Prize-winning writer, poet, translator
• Attila Miklós Németh, radio and television journalist
• Parish priest Zoltán Ostie
• Lawyer Zsolt Zétényi
We employ the competent committees of the EU. We are waiting for answers with our questions and petitions. Their answers are often meaningless. However, there is also a successful exception. After a five-year investigation, they confirmed our submission that the quality of foreign branded products and the types of goods sent from them to Hungary are not the same. As a result, the European inspection system was developed, according to which the Hungarian authorities can take advantage of sanctions against possible quality deterioration.
Our civil clubs are multiplying, our Civil Academies operate every month and are popular from here and beyond. You can read our articles and comments in Magyar Nemzet, Magyar Hírlap and other weekly newspapers and news portals.
Maintaining our civil affiliation, we continued our cooperation with the Polish Gazeta Polska 500 club. This year, on January 10, we held an extraordinary solidarity press conference at the Bem statue in defense of Polish democracy. On behalf of the clubs, the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Polska thanked us for our sympathy in a letter.
Our activities at the end of the year did not slow down either. In November, we organized the European Union Civil Cooperation Council (EuCET) with well-known intellectual patriots, leaders of foundations and associations from 18 countries. I recommend that you watch the exciting panel discussions on our news portal, which also aim to reform the European Union.
With the cooperation of the National Federation of Workers' Councils, the Italian UGL trade union with its two million members, as well as the Spanish trade union VOX Solidaridad, became our supporting and cooperating members.
Sharing our international cooperation, we started representing employees according to the "rowing in the same boat" method. We believe that a caring government can be most effective by becoming a community of employers and employees' families. Together with the independent trade union Egyenlő.hu, we considered it our task to have employers declare Christmas Eve as a public holiday for the sake of the employees. We can proudly say that 15 of the retail chains accepted our request at their own expense, led by Lidl Magyarország Bt, which was the first to apply. Gone are the days when class-fighting unions were needed. Instead of street protests, we need to create strong industrial and professional communities.
It was my duty to report on our joint work. At the same time, we came together today to celebrate. With a large family of spiritual patriots, let us greet those individuals and communities who, based on the decision of our board of trustees, receive their well-deserved awards here and now.
Finally, we know:
Nihil de nobis sine nobis, i.e. Nothing about us without us!
Featured image: László Csizmadia, founder of CÖF, chairman of CÖKA's board of trustees, gives a speech at the ceremony of the Civil Solidarity Forum - Civil Solidarity Nonprofit Foundation (CÖF-CÖKA), where the Spiritual Patriot Awards were presented at the Novotel Budapest Congress Center on January 19, 2024. MTI/Péter Lakatos
You can watch the opening speech here:
