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It All Comes Back to Hungary: Soros, Cultural Marxism, Lukacs and Bela Kun

Posted on | July 13, 2017 | Comments Off on It All Comes Back to Hungary: Soros, Cultural Marxism, Lukacs and Bela Kun

 

Vox Day calls attention to interesting news from Hungary:

The Israeli ambassador in Budapest has called on the Hungarian government to end its campaign against Jewish billionaire George Soros, which he claims is stoking antisemitic sentiment.
The Hungarian government has recently rolled out a nationwide billboard campaign, urging Hungarians to stand firm against the ruinous influence of the Jewish financial speculator.
George Soros is well known for his involvement in the open borders campaign, with his Open Society organisation essentially acting as a front for the criminal people smugglers bringing third world migrants to Europe.
What is lesser known however, is the extent to which Soros is using his ‘soft power’ to influence civil society.
The Central European University in Budapest was founded and bankrolled by the Jewish billionaire, and has attempted to exert its influence against Viktor Orbán’s popular government in loosely veiled retaliation for recent legal measures against the university.
In recent months Hungary has seen protests by students carrying the Soros message against the potential closure of the university, with some fearing that this could be the beginning of another ‘colour revolution’.
Soros’ Open Society organisation has also worked tirelessly behind the scenes against the Hungarian government’s opposition to illegal immigration, despite the fact that 98.5% of Hungarians rejected illegal migrant quotas in a referendum just last year.

The spurious claim that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Soros, or that Hungarian officials are wrongly scapegoating Soros, is reminiscent of how Communists (and their liberal stooges) in the 1950s claimed that so-called “McCarthyism” was inspired by anti-Semitism simply because certain high-profile cases (e.g., Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) involved Communist Jews. Many of the leading anti-Communists of the Cold War were also Jewish and, in point of fact, the federal judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to the electric chair was himself Jewish.

In conflating opposition to Soros’ subversive agenda with anti-Semitism, the Left is mirroring neo-Nazi rhetoric, which is . . . not helpful.

What intrigued me about this story was that opposition to Soros has become a nationwide issue in Hungary, which can rightly be called the birthplace of Cultural Marxism, as Linda Kimball has explained:

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow, Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters. . . .
In 1923, the Frankfurt School-a Marxist think-tank-was founded in Weimar Germany. Among its founders were Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. The school was a multidisciplinary effort which included sociologists, sexologists, and psychologists.
The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revolution based on culture . . .
The end product was Cultural Marxism, now known in the West as multiculturalism.

Totalitarians cannot tolerate rival sources of authority, which is why all totalitarian regimes seek to destroy religion and the family as independent institutions. Loyalty to traditions inherited from our ancestors, a sense of duty to our own flesh and blood, and faith in an eternal God as the source of eternal law, are a stubborn obstacle to the revolutionary agendas of totalitarian fanatics.

Hungarian dictator Bela Kun (left) and deputy commissar Georg Lukacs (right).

Very few young people today know anything about the history of Communism, and not one in a thousand American college students would be able to correctly identify Bela Kun, but the nightmare of the Red Terror in Hungary which began after Kun’s Bolsheviks seized power in 1919 has surely not been forgotten by the Hungarian people. One of the Bolshevik commissars, Tibor Szamuely, declared in a speech: “We will exterminate the entire bourgeoisie if we have to!”

Now, nearly a century later, Hungarians find themselves threatened by a flood of Muslim “refugees,” and the subversive Soros is trying to foment a new revolution to impose his agenda on Hungary:

On billboards across Budapest Soros stands accused of being a political puppet master. [In June], in a move seen as directly targeting Soros, Hungary’s parliament passed legislation requiring NGOs to declare themselves as “foreign agents” on their websites and documentation if they receive funding from political sources abroad. . . .
Soros’s reputation in Hungary took a particular hit during the 2015 migrant crisis, when his advocacy for the humane treatment for refugees ran up against Hungary’s ultra-conservative government, led by [Viktor] Orbán, a rightwing nationalist.
In recent months, the dispute has intensified. The prime minister has described the billionaire as someone who had “ruined the lives of tens of millions of people” with currency speculation.
Soros hit back with a speech in Brussels [in June] in which he referred to the Hungarian government as a “mafia state” and said: “He [Orbán] sought to frame his policies as a personal conflict between the two of us and has made me the target of his unrelenting propaganda campaign.”
Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, told the Guardian that the Brussels speech was a “declaration of political war on Hungary”. Soros-funded organisations, Kovács said, were engaged in “political activism camouflaged as NGO work”.

The description of Orban as a “rightwing nationalist” leading an “ultra-conservative government” raises definitional issues. How does one distinguish an “ultra-conservative” from a mere conservative, for example? And what is it about Orban’s nationalism — other than his opposition to unlimited immigration — that makes him so “rightwing”?

Left-wing journalists apply these scary labels haphazardly in an attempt to conjure up images of goose-stepping brownshirts, to imply that Orban is a latter-day Hitler. Of course, I know practically nothing about Viktor Orban, and maybe he isn’t a very nice guy, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a murderous megalomaniac with ambitions of global domination. So unless Orban starts putting his enemies in concentration camps, or sending armored division to invade neighboring countries, I’m going to guess that the Hitler comparison implied by the phrase “rightwing nationalist” is as wrong as the Trump-is-Hitler rhetoric of the Left.

What we are actually witnessing — in Hungary, in the United States and in many other countries in recent years — is a populist reaction against the elite “progressive” consensus of which Soros is a prominent symbol. There is an international clique of influential people and organizations who share certain ideas about the future direction of political, social and economic policies, and who don’t want to be bothered with debating the merits of these policies. The ordinary people whose lives would be affected by the agenda of the elite aren’t being asked for their approval, and popular opposition to the elite agenda (e.g., the Brexit vote, Trump’s election, Hungary’s anti-“refugee” referendum) is treated by the elite media as evidence of incipient fascism. Never does it seem to have occurred to George Soros, or to anyone else in the international elite, that perhaps their policy ideas are wrong, that they have gone too far in their utopian “social justice” schemes. Unable to admit error, the progressive elite therefore resort to cheap insults and sloppy accusations of “fascism” to stigmatize opposition to the Left’s agenda. Why is Viktor Orban under attack by Soros-funded organizations? Why is the Left trying to depict Hungary as a fascist state? The real answer is not hard to find:

Hungarian President Viktor Orbán has sparked controversy after hosting a notorious anti-LGBT organisation in Budapest.
The US-based International Organisation of the Family (IOF) has consistently campaigned against gay marriage, and reportedly colluded with Vladimir Putin on anti-LGBT legislation in Russia.
[In May], Mr Orbán spoke at the group’s annual conference, entitled “Building Family-Friendly Nations: Making Families Great Again”.
The Human Rights Campaign describes the group “as a dangerous group of activists spreading anti-LGBT rhetoric and promoting laws and policies that criminalise LGBT people”, and the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) has designated the organisation a “hate group”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks at a May pro-family event in Budapest.

You can learn more about the International Organization for the Family (IOF) from its president, Brian Brown, who asks that Christians keep the IOF “in your thoughts and prayers.” You see how the Left now seeks to destroy Christianity by labeling Bible-based beliefs as “hate,” a typical tactic of cultural Marxism and a reminder of the Red Terror in Hungary.

Opponents of radicalism who study history know that the Left is often more dangerous to its friends than to its enemies, as illustrated by the fate of Bela Kun. After his Bolshevik regime in Hungary was overthrown, Kun fled to Austria, but in 1920 was arrested and eventually deported to the Soviet Union. There, he was assigned by Lenin to assist the Red Army in Crimea, where Kun was responsible for the arrest and summary execution of more than 60,000 civilians. Kun then became an operative of the Comintern until, during Stalin’s purges, he was arrested in 1937, accused of Trotskyism, and executed in August 1938.

As a great man once said, “It is history that teaches us to hope.”



 

 

Category: Hungary

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