Orban goes full on anti-semite

[Nefertiti2]

George Szirtes in the Guardian

[ad hoc]

Yep this is precisely why the full horror of colluding with Jobbik is almost (almost) thinkable. Orban has to be stopped and if he wins a big majority next weekend, (as will almost certainly happen without opposition collaboration), Hungary moves into full on Putin/Erdogan world. It's already basically there, but there is still a veneer of democracy.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I can see this is an extremely hard call. Would you suggest getting together with Jobbik? I think you're saying not.

[Lang Spoon]

The EPP are enthusiastically tweeting for Orban’s mob. This is fucked.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Oh Christ.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This shitshow is being funded to the tune of 3.5bn Euros a year (net) by EU tax payers.

[ad hoc]

I can see this is an extremely hard call. Would you suggest getting together with Jobbik? I think you're saying not.

I am conflicted. No one should trust Jobbik. But a big victory for Orbán is a huge disaster.

[ursus arctos]

Genuinely shocking (to me) from the president of the European Peoples' Party in the European Parliament (member of Les Républicains, not even the FN)

https://twitter.com/JosephDaul/status/979656982121467904

[Tubby Isaacs]

I am conflicted. No one should trust Jobbik. But a big victory for Orbán is a huge disaster.

That's exactly how it looks to me, at this distance.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I'd never seen this before. I knew it was bad, but this is beyond belief.

https://www.georgesoros.com/rebuttal/

[ad hoc]

Nick Cohen does his usual trick today of writing a half column of sense and a half column of anti anything left diatribe. The first half is on Orbán. The second half compares him to Corbyn. Cohen is such a cunt

[N est à?]

Fidesz are doing the other parties of the EPP would like to do, if they had similarly scattered and demoralised opposition.

[Tubby Isaacs]

[Lang Spoon]

Pizzagate? Hang on, she was on the Idiot Left the last time I looked. Pals with Michael Moore.

[ad hoc]

https://twitter.com/liliebayer/status/981076912368996352

[Flynnie]

Pizzagate? Hang on, she was on the Idiot Left the last time I looked. Pals with Michael Moore.

She went full Trumpkin in the last 2-3 years. Fuck knows why.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Does anybody know much about this thing where Orban took control of lots of private pensions?

That sounds incredibly dodgy.

[ad hoc]

Yes that was a while ago. Here's a news piece about it from then. No idea what has developed in the intervening 4 years https://www.reuters.com/article/hung...0TG2MP20141127

[Tubby Isaacs]

Cheers, ad hoc.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

As they are wont to do, populists like Orbán rail against immigration, Islam, the orthodoxy etc. purely to deflect attention from real problems, to wit healthcare, political and everyday corruption, poverty and social inequality which are the areas most Hungarians are concerned about (according to the Ipsos survey below), not the 1,500 asylum seekers. (I bet Orban doesn’t animadvert too frequently on the €26bn Hungary will have received from the EU between 2014 and 2020).

Ipsos Public Affair poll, Dec. 2017:

Which three of the following topics do you find the most worrying in your country?

In Hungary:

Healthcare: 72% (1st of all 27 countries surveyed)

Poverty and Social inequality: 56% (2nd, behind Russia)

Financial/Political corruption: 56% (4th behind Peru, Malaysia and South Africa)

(by contrast, Immigration control is a concern for only 11% of Hungarians, Crime & violence: 12%, Moral decline: 13%, Unemployment and jobs: 19%).

[Tubby Isaacs]

Less than a quarter of Hungarians think the country is on the right track- beating Italy, Mexico and Brazil.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

[from Nef’s Guardian link] “Their task, should they get to power,” says Orbán of those who oppose him, “is to execute ‘the grand plan’.” Europe, he claims, is about to be invaded by tens of millions of people from Africa and the Middle East and “if Europe does nothing, they will kick down our doors. The history of the conquered nations will be rewritten by others, and those who are still young will see how they become minorities in their own country.”

Viktor Orbán et l’obsession du « Grand Remplacement »


[part 1/2]

Quelle surprise to find that Viktor Orbán is an ardent advocate of the “Grand Remplacement” theory, or “replacism” (the colonisation of Europe by Muslim immigrants, basically an extrapolation of Enoch Powell’s speech-rants), the new(ish) European obsession. It’s interesting to look at the origins of this theory and how it developed in its birthplace, France, before contaminating the rest of Europe.

The New Yorker: The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”. The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry.


The Grand Remplacement theory was first expounded by uber-oddball Renaud Camus (72, below, outside of his 12th century hilltop military castle), a former socialist who entered the nébuleuse of French ultra right groups in the 1990s through the back door and quickly moved up the ranks to become their main theoretician. He now leads the “National Council of European Resistance” and is a prolific author (over 100 books).



Renaud Camus is one of the many high profile progressophobes, new reactionaries and assorted fruitcakes who revel in stoking controversy with their Manichean worldviews and have been thriving in France in the past two decades as mainstream media have trivialised extremism (everybody wants their piece of the pie and to hell with the consequences).

Politically they’re a very broad church and hail from right across the spectrum, with cross-party drifters a regular occurrence (quite a few old hard leftists who’ve gradually drifted to the alt-right but have kept the shibboleths of Marxism; in the same vein, others, just like Orbán, started on the left before gradually embracing illiberalism), with the odd one from the whatever-is-the-latest fucked up Contrarian “Let’s shake things up”chaos School of Thinking. They are a loose group of academics, writers/essayists, philosophers, journalists, teachers, TV personalities, traditionalist Catholics (growing Catholic social conservative movement in France) chancers and screwballs. The lines have shifted and opposite political extremes intersect on many subjects. But while they are difficult to place on the political chessboard as they come in many shapes, forms and (dis)guises, they now spontaneously coalesce behind the traditional thematic of the hard right.

Their true motivations are less and less ideological IMO and increasingly financial, and there’s a parallel here I think with Viktor Orbán re his gradual alt-right radicalisation, the thrust of it having been engineered to mask widespread corruption and personal enrichment IMO.

It would be indeed very naïve to think that these ideologues are solely motivated by the dissemination of their ideas, because kerching!, they have strong vested interests in the lucrative “outrage economy” as they progressively realised that they were turning a niche business into a huge industry (bestsellers, media contracts, conferences, consultancy work, wall to wall coverage of their latest outbursts etc. there’s a sensationalist marketing strategy underpinning this). The anger & polarising industry is the new gold rush and the top diggers are now millionaires, eg Natacha Polony, paid €28,000/month for years for a short daily radio slot; or Éric Zemmour, arguably France’s most successful extreme polemicist (ubiquitous on mainstream TV, radio & press), his 2014 book “Le Suicide français”, on France’s terminal and inexorable decline (yawn), was a runaway success: 300,000 copies shifted in the first two months alone. Not strong on substantiated facts/data and sources but eh, “it’s not a doctoral thesis” as Zemmour replied to his detractors.



The Irish Times: Éric Zemmour’s ‘The French Suicide’ attacks feminism, immigrants and ‘the gay lobby’ (that have destroyed France since 1970)

(in passing, here’s an interesting excerpt from the New Yorker’s review of Zemmour’s book: “It is highly revealing that Zemmour uses the term “virilité,” or virility, some twenty-three times in his five-hundred page book, suggesting a certain fixation.”)

[ursus arctos]

Kev, where is the money coming from in France?

In the US, as you know, it is largely a combination of reactionary zillionaires (the Kochs, Mercers, Scaife, etc.) and the gullible who buy books pushed by the likes of Fox and talk radio and pay hundreds of dollars to see their "heroes" live.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

[part 2/2]

The new reactionaries have hogged the French media airtime since ~2000 (so much for the “curtailing of free speech”, they’ve never been off TV & radio channels for 20 years!) when a ragtag bunch of “néo-réacs” such as Renaud Camus, Éric Zemmour, Alain Finkielkraut, Élizabeth Lévy, Michel Onfray (a “post anarchist hedonist-libertarian” – by his own definition, new reactionaries love to obfuscate – with a massive following, who’s often at pains to portray himself as a defender of the little guy and crusader for the working-class but is anything but on close inspection) and many others started to supersede the traditional breed of French intellectuals. The latter are still around but struggling to be heard above the din generated by the media-savvy rabble-rousers.

France’s Obsession With Decline Is a Booming Industry


There’s no business like show outrage business.

Put simply, in one generation France has gone from the Claude Lévi-Strauss/Bernard-Henry Lévy/Pierre Bourdieu type of intellectuals popular in the 1980s-90s to this new reactionary lot. The factors that facilitated their phenomenal rise can be traced back to the late 1990s/early 2000s: they are the emanation of the neoliberal revolutionary era of 1980-90 and emerged post this backlash swing of the pendulum to the right (Bourdieu has written about this transitional period, notably in Contre-feux). Sometimes the odd witty gem emerges from their diatribes, such as this one from Régis Debray, an old leftwing battleaxe and former Che Guevara & Fidel Castro comrade: “Culture is dead in France, too many ignorant, uneducated young people who think that De Gaulle is an airport”.

For the last two decades, these professional polemicists and “déclinologues” have been rehashing the same old tired tropes and reactivated myths, i.e PCness, the decline of patriarchy, the “harmful consequences” of feminism and the feminisation of society, the “mess in France and the West brought about by the poisonous May 68 legacy”, the imminent end of France & the West (that old Spenglerian narrative chestnut…), “cultural leftism”, bien-pensance and the bien-pensantocracy, masculinity/virility/the emasculation of men, postmodernism, the “pensée unique” (orthodoxy, groupthink) etc. – Jordan Peterson is so old chapeau… – with, of course, immigration/race/national identity/“Islamo-Leftism” looming large in their considerations, a nationalist thematic which has now effectively become their stock-in-trade, and through which prism they view most subjects, however unrelated they may be, eg football.

Although it has to be said that Renaud Camus is much more of a recluse these days up in his 12th-century fortress, probably readying himself to fend off an imminent invasion from the Moors, as he’s been discarded by the media – too weird, too medieval and he’s served his purpose – but he’s still very active on the Net and his vile ideas have taken root all over Europe.

Renaud Camus is worshipped by French ultra right groups, notably pan-European ultranationalist movement Bloc identitaire whose members have long infiltrated the Front National (Maxime Brunerie, the neo-nazi who attempted to assassinate Jacques Chirac in 2002 on Bastille Day, was a Bloc identitaire member). Also the notorious GUD, a violent fascist group on which I wrote several long posts in the French Presidential 2017 thread as the GUD-Front National connections are still robust.

Interesting to note at this juncture that one of Camus’s closest allies since the early 2000s is none other than… French Academician and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Polish Jewish refugees who survived Auschwitz, now France’s most high profile controversialist with Éric Zemmour. He makes no secret of it and regularly sticks up for Camus, but that doesn’t seem to unduly perturb the many people who hold Finkielkraut in high esteem.

Five months ago, Camus tweeted this: “Le génocide des Juifs était sans doute plus criminel mais paraît tout de même un peu petit bras auprès du remplacisme global”. (The Jewish genocide was probably more criminal but it seems like small beer compared to global replacism). The UEJF, Union of French Jewish Students, immediately pressed charges (for “contestation de crime contre l'humanité”, contesting crime against humanity).

Finkielkraut defended Camus in an impassioned plea on RCJ, a Parisian Jewish radio station.

Alain Finkielkraut reprend à son compte la théorie du “grand remplacement” de Renaud Camus (Finkielkraut endorses Camus’s “grand remplacement” theory)

I doubt Finkielkraut endorses everything coming out of Camus’s mouth, but it is still a very troubling sort of anointment from France’s leading intellectual, whatever that means today.

He has been known to blow a fuse in debates…

[Tubby Isaacs]