Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban on the Reality and Lessons of War, By Richard Miller (London)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has given a long speech about what the Ukrainian war has taught us. While many points are made, such as the economic resilience of Russia, for our purposes, the most important relate to the philosophical and meta-political ramifications. The West is undergoing collapse in importance in the world; "Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn." The Western expectation was that much of the world would stand with the West against Russia, but instead countries like Turkey (a member of NATO) and India, side with Russia. Orban sees this as the major problem facing the West, that could lead to its decline and eventual fall:
"Seventhly: the war has exposed the fact that the biggest problem the world faces today is the weakness and disintegration of the West. Of course, this is not what the Western media says: in the West they claim that the world's greatest danger and problem is Russia and the threat it represents. This is wrong! Russia is too large for its population, and it is also under hyper-rational leadership – indeed it is a country that has leadership. There is nothing mysterious about what it does: its actions follow logically from its interests and are therefore understandable and predictable. On the other hand, the behaviour of the West – as may be clear from what I have said so far – is not understandable and not predictable. The West is not led, its behaviour is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation that I described in my presentation here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky. This is the challenge to the West in the form of the rise of China and Asia. We should be able to deal with this, but we are not able to.
Point eight. Arising from this, for us the real challenge is to once again try to understand the West in the light of the war. Because we Central Europeans see the West as irrational. But, Dear Friends, what if it is behaving logically, but we do not understand its logic? If it is logical in the way it thinks and acts, then we must ask why we do not understand it. And if we could find the answer to this question, we would also understand why Hungary regularly clashes with the Western countries of the European Union on geopolitical and foreign policy issues. My answer is the following. Let us imagine that the worldview of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. Meanwhile the West thinks that nation states no longer exist; this is unimaginable to us, but all the same this is what it thinks. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant. In our conception, the world is made up of nation states which exercise a domestic monopoly on the use of force, thereby creating a condition of general peace. In its relations with other states the nation state is sovereign – in other words, it has the capacity to independently determine its foreign and domestic policy. In our conception, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And from this emerge shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. This is what we think of as the nation state. What is more, we do not see it as a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century: we believe that nation states have a biblical basis, since they belong to the order of creation. For in Scripture we read that at the end of time there will be judgement not only of individuals but also of nations. Consequently, in our conception nations are not provisional formations. But in complete contrast Westerners believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny the existence of a shared culture and a shared morality based on it. They have no shared morality; if you watched the Olympic opening ceremony yesterday, that is what you saw. This is why they think differently about migration. They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal internationalist conception of space. This is why they are oblivious to the absurdity – or they do not see it as absurd – that while in the eastern half of Europe hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing one another, in the west of Europe we are letting in hundreds of thousands of people from foreign civilisations. From our Central European point of view this is the definition of absurdity. This idea is not even conceived of in the West. In parenthesis I note that the European states lost a total of some fifty-seven million indigenous Europeans in the First and Second World Wars. If they, their children and their grandchildren had lived, today Europe would not have any demographic problems. The European Union does not simply think in the way I am describing, but it declares it. If we read the European documents carefully, it is clear that the aim is to supersede the nation. It is true that they have a strange way of writing and saying this, stating that nation states must be superseded, while some small trace of them remains. But the point is that, after all, powers and sovereignty should be transferred from the nation states to Brussels. This is the logic behind every major measure. In their minds, the nation is a historical or transitional creation, born of the 18th and 19th centuries – and as it arrived, so may it depart. For them, the western half of Europe is already post-national. This is not only a politically different situation, but what I am trying to talk about here is that this is a new mental space. If you do not look at the world from the point of view of nation states, a completely different reality opens up before you. Herein lies the problem, the reason that the countries in the western eastern halves of Europe do not understand one another, the reason we cannot pull together."
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/viktor-orban-the-ukrainian-war-is
"Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, gave a long but fascinating speech last weekend about how war reveals the reality in which we live. "This reality was not visible and could not be described earlier, but it has been illuminated by the blazing light of missiles fired in the war". He spoke at length about the real situation of power in Europe as revealed by the Ukrainian war, as well as some glimpses into the new world that is in the making.
Orban describes the Ukrainian war as "our red pill". He likens it to the 'Matrix' movie, where Neo was faced with the choice of swallowing the blue pill and staying in the world of surface appearances or swallowing the red pill and descending into reality. Orban says that we have been given this red pill and we must swallow it.
And now, armed with new experiences, we must talk about reality. It is a cliché that war is the continuation of policy with other means. It is important to add that war is the continuation of policy from a different perspective. So war, in its relentlessness, takes us to a new position from which to see things, to a high vantage point. And from there it gives us a completely different – hitherto unknown – perspective. We find ourselves in new surroundings and in a new, rarefied force field. In this pure reality, ideologies lose their power; statistical sleights of hand lose their power; media distortions and politicians' tactical dissimulation loses its power. There is no longer any relevance to widespread delusions – or even to conspiracy theories. What remains is the stark, brutal reality.
The Prime Minister breaks down into bullet points, the things that we can see once we have swallowed the red pill:
1.Brutal losses
Both sides have lost hundred of thousands of men but neither want to admit this. Why? Because both think they can still win and both are fuelled by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians think that this is a Russian invasion, violating international law and the Russians think they have the right to self-defence because NATO has overstepped the boundary by promising NATO membership to Ukraine and weapons on Russia's border.
So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not give up fighting the war. This is a road leading directly to escalation; if it depends on these two sides, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought in from outside.
2.China
Until recently, China was the USA's main challenger but now, with the proxy war against Russia, the two countries are being corralled together into a hostile camp. Orban says the answer to why this is happening has not yet been answered in any meaningful way.
3.Ukrainian Resistance
Ukraine has gone from being a helpless, psychologically debilitated buffer zone to a war-zone with a higher purpose. It now sees itself as belonging to the West's eastern military frontier region.
The meaning and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence – and there's no denying that it is quite aggressive and insistent. It is in fact the Ukrainians' demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that makes them capable of unprecedented resistance.
4.Russian Reality
Russia is not what we have been led to believe it is. Its economic viability is outstanding because they learnt lessons from sanctions imposed on them after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. The Russian financial system is not collapsing and today they have one of the world's largest food export markets.
So the way that Russia is described to us – as a rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy – is false. In fact we are talking about a country that displays technical and economic resilience – and perhaps also societal resilience, but we'll see.
5.Collapsing European Policy-Making
Today, Europe unconditionally follows the foreign policy line of the US - "even at the cost of its own self-destruction". Sanctions have damaged European interests and they allowed the Nord Stream pipeline to be blown up unchallenged.
Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context. In the same way, we failed to do the right thing in the case of the phone tapping of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the assistance of Denmark. So this is nothing but an act of submission.
We are witnessing the change of the old axis of power to the new - from Berlin/Paris to London/Warsaw/Kiev/Baltics and Scandinavia. The Americans and the liberal opinion-forming vehicles they influence are using public opinion to punish Franco-German policy that is not in line with American interests.
This change of power has only been made possible by the war.
The idea existed before, in fact being an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a huge German state and a huge Russian state, by making Poland the number one American base in Europe. I could describe it as inviting the Americans there, between the Germans and the Russians.
6.Spiritual Solitude of the West
"Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn". Now, the West has declared its expectation that the world take a moral stand against Russia but the reality is a lot of the world sides with Russia. China, North Korea, Iran, Turkey and India all side with Russia.
7.Weakness and Disintegration of the West
Orban says this it the biggest problem the world faces today. Russia has leadership and is hyper-rational - its actions follow logically from its interests and so are understandable and predictable. The West, on the other hand, is not led, does not have rational behaviour and so it not understandable, nor predictable. Because of this, the West is not able to deal with the rise of China and Asia.
8.The Aggressive Dwarf
The West's actions may be logically based on a different framework that Central European countries, such as Hungary, don't understand. Hungary views the world through the lens of nation-states, which they believe have historical, cultural and moral foundations ensuring peace and sovereignty. In contrast, Western Europe sees nation-states as outdated and believe in a post-national world where shared culture and morality no longer exist.
If you watched the Olympic opening ceremony yesterday, that is what you saw. This is why they think differently about migration. They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation.
The US is also grappling with this issue, as seen in Trump's efforts to restore the nation-state concept, opposed by those favouring a post-national state. The post-national thinking in the West emerged in the '60s sexual revolutions and student rebellions, which sought individual freedom from collective bonds. However, true greatness comes from serving something greater than oneself. Without this, individuals feel empty and society becomes aggressive and self-centred.
..if you … focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on that, on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity. And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluity that goes with it gives rise to aggression. Hence the emergence of the "aggressive dwarf" as a new type of person.
9.The Elite vs The People
This post-national condition in the West has dramatic political consequences, causing a deep divide between the elites and the populace, leading to conflicts over issues like migration, gender, war and globalism. This divide manifests as elitism versus populism, with the elites condemning the people's view as xenophobic, homophobic and nationalistic, while the people accuse the elites of deranged globalism and disregard for their concerns.
This rift undermines representative democracy, as the educated elite, who now make up 30-40% of the population, dismiss the values of the less educated working class. This dynamic influenced the European Parliament elections, where votes from the Right seeking change were co-opted by left-wing elites to maintain the status quo, resulting in a liberal oligarchy controlling Brussels and side-lining patriotic factions.
This also has consequences for us, because in Brussels the "3 Ps" are back: "prohibited, permitted and promoted". We belong to the prohibited category.
10. Boomeranging Western Values
Western values, once considered universal and central to Western "soft power," have become a boomerang, increasingly rejected globally. Countries like China, India and others are modernising and adopting Western values and Russian soft power has risen in place of Western influence, with LGBTQ rights becoming a divisive issues. While some countries have adopted pro-LGBTQ laws, many others resist, allowing Russia to use this opposition as a tactical advance and transforming what was once Western soft power into Russian soft power.
The speech continues but all in all, Orban says the war has helped us to understand the real state of power in the world. He claims the West has shot itself in the foot and has therefore accelerated the changes that are currently transforming the world."