“We are an island of peace and security,” said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two weeks ago in Sátoraljaújhely, a town in the northeastern corner of Hungary. He described Hungary as such during a speech commemorating 100 years since the traumatic Treaty of Trianon. At the time, few would have imagined how prophetic those words would seem in light of the recent violent riots and ideologically driven attacks on cultural monuments that have shaken the United States and Western Europe.
The images of burnt-out cars, shops ablaze and shattered store windows have been non-stop; then there were the videos of police officers being hunted and crowds of vandals looting and ravaging the historical heritage of major cities in the US, Paris, Brussels and London. It should all be enough to convince anyone that the entire “anti-racist movement” no longer has anything to do with the death of George Floyd. In reality, it has been an undisguised assault on the established social order, with the end result being that there is no peace or security left in the West.
The original news item we all saw and read was that an American citizen lost his life due to aggressive police action. However, like many similar incidents before it, this case was overwhelmingly colored with the charge of racism by mainstream liberal media. They stressed that the police officer who perpetrated the crime was white and had previously used force many times, while the victim was black.
Reports conspicuously omitted or glossed over Floyd’s past criminal convictions for drug possession, theft, breaking and entering, and armed robbery of a woman in their attempt to paint him not just as a victim, but as a hero. Over the past two decades, Floyd had spent some seven years behind bars.
The death of even a single man is a tragedy, and if this was indeed a case of police brutality, the full force of the law must come down on the perpetrator. But, again, it should be the full force of the law that comes down upon him, not paramilitary groups formed on the basis of ideology or ethnicity. However, the narrative for this event became a story focused on race theology, which most certainly wouldn’t have been the case if the victim had been white and the perpetrator black. Using racism as a pretext, an anarchist wave of protests and destruction in the name of George Floyd were suddenly made to appear legitimate by the media and willing corporations.
According to this quasi-religious “anti-racism” movement, there is good and bad racism, with “good racism” acting in the interests of the oppressed. If we take a step back to observe the entire political horizon, we will see that in the name of some utopian radical sense of equality, the concepts of normal and abnormal as well as order and disorder have been reversed.
The unspoken argument justifying the vandalism of the mob that destroyed small shops and torn down statues of statesmen — the argument that justifies the criminals who wish to obliterate dissenters both morally and physically — is that blacks in America, and immigrant minorities in Europe, are oppressed by a “bourgeois” society still unpardonably dominated by whites. The argument further states that this oppression has become so extensive that the only possible solution for achieving social and racial justice in the name of equality is systemic aggression directed against those in power.
The fact that socialistic aspirations see physical brutality as the only way to achieve such imaginary, absurd levels of justice should surprise no one. As the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut, who happens to be Jewish himself, observes, “Anti-racism is the communism of the 21st century.”
The view today that it is not enough to be passively anti-racist has directly led to the labeling of whites who do not actively exercise self-criticism as racists, which is best exemplified by the trending social justice catchphrase “white silence is violence”.
Today’s Western moralizing, at times fanatical in its self-loathing and self-humiliation, has been engendered by Black Lives Matter and the postmodern antifascist movements riding on its coattails. Lest we think that what we see is simply a current reinterpretation of the student riots of 1968, the “pacifist” hippy protests against the war in Vietnam, the militant feminism of the 70s, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is important to remember this new movement has many novel elements.
First and foremost, there is the polarization of the public sphere, which had already been present but is now becoming institutionalized. Progressive media and political commentators, who pose as independent and fact-based, report a narrative based on the notion of “justly outraged but peaceful protestors” and either stay silent about the facts of looting and murders or refuse to connect those events to the demonstrations. In some particularly morbid cases, they actually depict the violence as something positive, something to be welcomed, as in the case of the six blocks in central Seattle that are now occupied and declared “autonomous” by gangs.
The distortion of reality by the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic is in part to blame for the fact that American hooliganism — ostensibly the offshoot of popular notions of tolerance, acceptance and understanding — only needed a few days to spread to European cities.
This fact also shows that recent decades of efficient and professional “social sensitizing” campaigns worked as intended. The ideas behind progressive lifestyle freedoms, cultural egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and ethnic diversity were spread globally using underhanded and covert communication strategies with such success that when the need arose to institutionalize political correctness and human rights fundamentalism, the implanted “memories” were readily recalled and embraced.
It is no surprise then that there are millions on the streets ready to serve the cause of “European BLM.” On one hand, immigration has made Europe diverse enough for the migrants living in large Western European cities to easily channel the “quasi-revolution” grown out of a U.S.-specific event with large numbers. On the other hand, many young white people who grew up on a steady diet of liberal “values” through their incessant exposure to advertisements and media that enshrine such values have sided with the “oppressed blacks” and other minorities. The spiritual groundwork had been well laid prior to the political action we see now.
It is perhaps even more conspicuous that the “black liberation movement” has by now gone from abolishing slavery to demanding the abolishment of police. The related political PR has reached the point where it is celebrating anarchy and demands the complete erasure of the past – much like communism did.
It is the main function of power to provide safety and security, but today they say that using legitimate power is an executive overreach and thus portrays the connection between power and security as meaningless. That the demands to abolish the police can be elevated to the realm of completely legitimate and widely supported political messages with such speed serves to support the validity of the often-repeated — though seemingly not enough — conservative “cliché” that the globalist liberal intrigues carried out under the triune banner of liberty-equality-fraternity have as their true overarching aim not merely the humiliation of Western Civilization but its complete destruction.
Yes, the lifestyle we believe in is under an all-out assault. I’d like to add that the first victims of the dismantling of law and order will be minorities – anti-racist demonstrators recently chanting “filthy Jews!” at the Place de la République in Paris was an early sign of this.
As Frank Furedi recently wrote, the sole purpose of the crusade against whites is to help a part of the cultural elite to consolidate their political and moral authority. Yes, the irony of the current upheaval is that the civilizational order that was already on its knees and is now marked for destruction by these vandals has the approval of liberal political and economic elites. These very elites were ironically among the chief beneficiaries of this consumer society even as they now call the rule of law and order “fascism,” and they clearly intend to remain at the helm of (and profit from) the current madness.
The key to understanding this paradox is the attitude to the past – to be more precise, the attitude of postmodern progressives to the past. Radical utopianism suggests an utterly rejectionist dissatisfaction with the present; the main message is that everything that connects us to the past is a vestige to be eliminated. And when these “vestiges” finally disappear entirely, then and only then can a paradise on Earth based on equality, justice and, naturally, mindless consumerism can be established.
This is why “exclusionary” language must be transformed, why they must ritualistically tear down and plunge into the river statues commemorating the heroes of the past, why history books must be rewritten or removed, and streets and squares renamed. After all, the history of Western civilization was shaped to a great extent by white, heterosexual men – and for that reason, in the eyes of progress, this civilization was born in sin and the descendants of these men today must repent and give up their “white privilege”.
However, let us not think that we have arrived at this point with the shocking suddenness many now feel. No, there was a long road leading up to this point. The kneeling white passers-by apologizing for the “crimes” of their forefathers are not products of a mere hedonistic moment. Incitement against authority, the relativization of natural ties, the rejection of tradition, the absolutization of progress, and the abuse of liberty have all been here with us for decades, surrounding us entirely and interfering with every aspect of our lives. The West – what was left of it – has now fallen, a victim of its own tolerance. They first deconstructed their own pride, then their culture, and now their social order.
Hungary can still avoid this fate, but we must reject the mantra of political correctness. We must not fall victim to the revenge of the mob. In Hungary, there is still peace and security.
