march 2005

DARLING OF THE WEST

Istvan Lovas

First, a quiz: Name the country where the head of the Financial Supervisory Board is attacked by baseball-bat wielding thugs, then, forced out by government fiat to be replaced by a compliant yes-man.

Name the country where government introduces legislation to put a virtual end to the independence of the central bank.

Name the country where the head of the national Statistical Office is removed illegally and replaced by a government yes-man.

Name the country where a radio station close to the heart of the government repeatedly calls for the cruelest murder of its political opponents and leading journalists considered critical of the powers-that-be.

Name the country whose prime minister prohibits his administration from giving interviews or statements to -- as he terms it -- the "opposition press"?

Name the country..

Yes, one could continue this horror quiz on and on and on --but you get the point.

A bit of help, though: No, it is not Burma. Neither is it Zimbabwe. The darling of the West is a new member of the European Union, and one of the best friends the United States and Israelcan have.

Welcome to Hungary, the eastern neighbor of Austria.

It is a country whose government is headed by an ex-Communist functionary-turned billionaire, a la Khodorkovski of Russia, thanks to the rapid-fire sale of state assets that followed the collapse of the one-party state.

His name is Ferenc Gyurcsany, who, following a stage-managed handover of his current office a few months ago, replaced Peter Medgyessy, a one-time agent of the Communist secret police working under the code name of D-209 and also a newly minted billionaire.

But you would not know any of these facts about Hungary by reading the Western media. Not a whistle, not a hiss. As the American online daily Information Clearing House motto tells you, that's "news you won't find on CNN."

The Western media loves the government of ex-Communist thugs turned neo-liberals, whose career can be best described as the glorious path leading from Karl Marx to Al Capone. Or better yet, from merely reading Das Kapital to stealing it. You would not find a bunch of politicians more pliant and more subservient to fulfilling any and all requests from Washington or Tel Aviv. Or London. Or Paris. Or George Soros. Or from any multinational company desirous of privatizing the last remaining national assets, such as the national airline carrier MALEV, the national railways MAV, or the national post office.

Do not expect to hear about domestic dissent. The incumbent government controls about 90 percent of the press. That is the part of the media that absorbs practically all government advertisements. Private corporations - with a few exceptions - have also learned the lesson and know where to advertise, as they are dependent on the good graces of the state in the form of tax holidays, lucrative government projects, and direct or indirect subsidies.

During the shock-therapy privatization period, Western investors were all too happy to buy up everything dirt cheap, starting with the formerly Communist party-controlled media, the overwhelming majority of which is now in the hands of foreign companies. Members of the old-style editorial boards, the Communist-era media nomenklatura, were more than happy to sign the sweetheart deals that guaranteed them the right to pick their successors, the editors-in-chief and the boards themselves. That is how the former Communist elite virtually overnight shed its former Communist skin to become, gladly and voluntarily, the most zealous disciples of neo-liberalism.

In sharp contrast to many countries in the West, where the heads of large corporations tend to be right-of-center conservatives, while those of the cultural scene tend to be leftists and liberals, in Hungary there is no such division of laboring spheres. There, the winner takes all: the economy, the wealth, and the media -- the works.

In Hungary, the incumbent governing coalition is made up of two parties.

One of them is the senior party of the ruling coalition, the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), the legal successor to the erstwhile Hungarian Socialist (Communist) Workers Party. Tellingly, this simple fact is virtually never mentioned in a Western media that likes to project the neo-liberal Hungarian Socialist Party as a genuine "social democratic" party.

This party is now in power for the second time since the "system change" of 1990. The second time the HSP won the election was in the late spring of 2002. It was an election about as clean as the one in Ukraine, with the exception that it was not in the interest of the West to call attention even to its most egregious irregularities. Oddly, all pollsters predicted, even as late as at the exit polls, a certain defeat for the Hungarian Socialist Party. After tallying the votes, however, the HSP was declared the winner.

But why would the West cry foul when London and Tel Aviv directly assisted the former Communists with election software and hardware, and the latter providing even the chief campaign guru?

Seeing the victory of their best and most subservient local allies, the West, led by the U.S., gave out a collective sigh of relief.

Characteristically, the then-American ambassador to Budapest, Nancy Goodman Brinker, who was nervously monitoring the election returns from her embassy overlooking the Soviet-era "Freedom statue" (a Stalinist-style obelisk dedicated to the memory of fallen Soviet soldiers during World War II), unabashedly rushed to the headquarters of the former Communists to congratulate them.

Ambassador Brinker, a campaign contributor and personal friend of President Bush, caused quite a stir in Hungary when, a few weeks after her arrival in Budapest the fall of 2001, publicly charged that the Hungarian political elite, i.e., the then-governing right-of-center coalition, is the most anti-Semitic she has ever encountered anywhere. Although queried repeatedly by the right-of-center press, she would not offer evidence to substantiate her inflammatory offensive charges with a single quotation or example. An emissary of the sole superpower evidently does not have to play by the rules of ordinary honesty.

In fact, anti-Semitism has been the standard and very effective criticism of the accredited American diplomats and most Western journalists, who interestingly would use it ad nauseam only when their ex-Communist and neo-liberal allies are out of government. Ironically, it is a charge that is completely without foundation. Indeed, the reverse is true. For example, it was under the first right-of-center coalition in the early 1990s when Ronald Lauder was given a huge tract of land, free of charge, for a 99-year lease in the choicest part of Buda, the lush and hilly right bank of the river Danube that dissects the capital, to build his gigantic, fortress-like Jewish grade school and high school. It was also the first right-of-center conservative government that donated millions of dollars to the restoration of Central Europe's largest synagogue, a gesture made a decade before restoration work on important but long neglected historic Christian churches of the capital began. And it was the second right-of-center government (1998-2002), branded almost daily "anti-Semitic" by the Western press, that designated the remembrance day of the Holocaust a national holiday.

The baseless charge of anti-Semitism is repeated by American politicians and officials, such as Congressman Tom Lantos, born in Hungary, or Charles Gati, also born in Hungary and an advisor to Freedom House, an organization whose high ranking of Hungary's press freedom is at odds with the low rating of Hungary's press by other international press organizations, such as Reporters Without Borders.

The junior member of the incumbent coalition is the Alliance of Free Democrats whose real essence was defined, quite inadvertently but correctly, by the German liberal daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung as the par excellence party of left-liberal Jews living in Budapest. They include members of the former dissidents licensed by the Communist party but funded by the West, i.e., by the CIA, as the Oxford historian Mark Almond disclosed recently in the Guardian. In contrast to real Hungarian dissidents, they never spent more than a couple of days in prison.

With the fall of Communism, it was the Free Democrats who made sure that the formerly communist-controlled media became privatized by people like the late media mogul Robert Maxwell and subsidized by "philanthropists" like George Soros. The Free Democrats' virtual, ideological monopoly of the media has also been responsible for the creeping legitimization and return to power of the Hungarian Socialist Party. It was also the Free Democrats who have generated the searing hatred against Hungary's first right-of-center coalition government, composed chiefly of inexperienced, bungling historians, to a degree that is rare even in countries where opposing members liquidate each other.

It was the Alliance of Free Democrats that achieved, through the barrel of the picture tube and printed press, the 1994 landslide victory for the "Socialists." Although the margin of the Socialists' victory would have allowed them to govern alone, they took the Alliance of Free Democrats into the coalition to share the spoils at the urgings of the most powerful Western embassies in Budapest.

By now the two parties govern in a perfect symbiotic relationship. The Socialists deliver the votes; the Free Democrats deliver the support of the media and the not so tacit approval of the American, the Israeli and other Western governments.

Aside from the fact that conservative governments tend to be much less amenable to the wishes of foreign governments and investors, the real reason behind waging a relentless war against Hungary's right-of-center remains not only a taboo subject, but also an open secret in Hungary.

Many of the vocal, media-savvy intellectuals of the estimated 100 000-strong Jewish community view, albeit historically incorrectly, Hungary's pre-WW II authoritarian right-wing governments, and Hungarians in general, as co-responsible with the Nazis for the liquidation of the several hundred thousands Hungarian Jews. Hence their relentless clamor for collective "punishment," as they see it, of the inheritors of the original "sin."

Thus, Hungary today is a country torn asunder with the most venomous hatred, bordering on civil war. It has only one asset that is unassailable and not for sale: its good reputation in the Western press, one that will likely hold till the elections due in the spring of 2006.

Istvan Lovas is the Brussels-based correspondent for the independent Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet and one of Hungary's best-known journalists. He also worked at Radio Free Europe in Munich and New York. During the 1960s, he spent long years in prison for the illegal organization of a party in Communist Hungary. By training, he is a political scientist.