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  • #16
    Originally posted by GVChamp View Post
    Astralis is American, though. The specifics of the EU politics aren't really our problem, and interference (like Obama lecturing the UK on BREXIT) is not needed. We just want minimum buy-in for certain values and institutions like the UN, IMF, Basel capital standards, WTO, stuff like that. I think the cohesion fund is stupid and practically everyone thinks the Euro is stupid (except the Europeans themselves).

    I don't really see Turkey and Hungary being in the same league. Hungary is still listed as a "Free Nation" by Freedom House. Turkey is listed as an authoritarian state on par with Iraq. Their attitude towards the press is not great, but who cares?
    I really don't see anything that Hungary or Turkey has done that would deny them NATO membership. I mean they have not violated any of the Treaty's Articles.
    Chimo

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    • #17
      Originally posted by WABs_OOE View Post
      Europe still needs the US if nothing else than a source of munitions. Europe has not stockpiled enough bombs for their own use.
      I think you're mostly referring to the Libyan intermezzo, where this was claimed publicly. The problem? The ones who claimed so were exactly two sources: The US government and NATO. It continued to be perpetuated mostly in the US press.

      What it ended up with in reality was that exactly two countries, Norway and Denmark, had asked NAMSA to procure bombs for them as their stockpiles were running low. Neither the French nor the British nor the Italians did so. And neither did Belgium, for that matter. Two countries provided the bombs for that procurement - the US and Germany.

      There are some claims (e.g. PRI) that the US is currently exhausting its own stockpile in Syria...

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      • #18
        Originally posted by kato View Post
        So, you're coming around to the (Western) European view of it?
        Probably not.

        Were I Hungarian, or Polish, or Italian, I'd want a strong NATO, and a weak-to-non-existent EU. One guarantees my security, the other is technocratic domination bought with public works.

        I do admit those cohesion dollars are mighty tempting, but both Hungary and Poland are going to converge without them eventually. I'm not selling my kid's future to Paris and Berlin for a few more highways today.
        "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

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        • #19
          Originally posted by kato View Post
          I think you're mostly referring to the Libyan intermezzo, where this was claimed publicly. The problem? The ones who claimed so were exactly two sources: The US government and NATO. It continued to be perpetuated mostly in the US press.

          What it ended up with in reality was that exactly two countries, Norway and Denmark, had asked NAMSA to procure bombs for them as their stockpiles were running low. Neither the French nor the British nor the Italians did so. And neither did Belgium, for that matter. Two countries provided the bombs for that procurement - the US and Germany.

          There are some claims (e.g. PRI) that the US is currently exhausting its own stockpile in Syria...
          Two wars come to mind. The Kuwait War (2000 sorties per day) and the Kosovo (400 sorties per day) War where the US did some 70-80% of the operations. In Lybia, the US fired 100+ cruise missiles at Lybia, the UK fired 12. In the Iraq War, Baghdad received 700 missile attacks, that's nearly the entire UK STORM SHADOW procurement.

          In a war against Russia, the most likely West European enemy, those expenditures would look like a drop in the bucket.
          Chimo

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          • #20
            not broadcasting any specifics here, but modern war requires significant stockpiling, stockpiling even the -US- could use more of.

            for the European nations, with their tiny budgets...yeah, they needed (and need) more munition stockpiling. hell, even the Israelis went bingo during the Hezbollah conflict and had to emergency ship from the US.
            There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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            • #21
              https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...315_story.html

              Trump loves a strongman, so of course he fawns over Hungary’s Viktor Orban


              By Heather A. Conley and Charles Gati May 25

              Two important American visitors showed up in Budapest on Wednesday. One was Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House adviser who is an admirer of Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orban; he addressed a conference on “Europe’s Future ” organized by Mária Schmidt, an Orban counselor with Bannon-esque ideas about maintaining a Christian culture in Europe. Bannon had called Orban “a man of principles” as well as “a real patriot and a real hero” earlier this year. The two spent an hour together Thursday.

              The other visitor was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs A. Wess Mitchell, the highest-ranking American official responsible for U.S. relations with Hungary. Mitchell came to usher in a new era of accommodation between the Trump administration and the Orban government. This policy dispenses with the traditional foreign policy practice, followed by previous Republican and Democratic administrations, of conveying benefits for cooperative behavior and disapproval for abandoning American interests and values. Instead, this administration believes that offering high-level contacts and withholding criticism will improve an authoritarian regime’s behavior. For those who know Hungary’s politics, this is appeasement — the victory of hope over centuries of experience.

              Orban’s odyssey began in 1998 when, during his first term as prime minister, he started to flirt with nationalistic, anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments to try to win reelection in 2002. When Istvan Csurka, the head of an anti-Semitic party, blamed the United States for the 9/11 attacks (it got what it deserved, he said), the premier declined to dissociate himself from Csurka, despite a White House request to do so. Orban lost his reelection bid and did not return to power until 2010. He has since managed to change the Hungarian constitution five times to reduce judicial independence, restrict press freedoms and modify the electoral system to ensure that no viable opposition could ever form against him and his coalition. He has placed pliant and corrupt loyalists in positions of authority. And he still embraces anti-Semitism as a political tool, praising a Nazi-allied wartime leader of Hungary and using stereotypes to cast Jewish emigre George Soros as an outside puppeteer.


              In the past, U.S. administrations kept a certain distance from countries that espoused such policies and attitudes. During Orban’s first premiership, for example, President George W. Bush sent the Hungarian leader a hard-hitting, confidential “non-paper” — essentially a list of complaints — that was never answered, so the White House decided not to invite Orban to the Oval Office. The Obama administration denied visas for six Hungarian government officials because of corruption (and it certainly never invited the premier to the White House).

              The Trump administration’s friendly and intensive contacts with the Orban government represent a radical departure: It watches idly as Orban dismantles his nation’s democratic institutions. For instance, the pro-government weekly Figyelo recently issued an enemies list of about 200 prominent opposition individuals. Most were local civil society advocates, but the list also included U.S. citizens, many of them scholars of economics, Judaism and nationalism at the Soros-funded Central European University (such as Leon Botstein and Allen Feldman). The government has erected contrived legal barriers in an effort to close the institution, a graduate school devoted to liberal values and based in Budapest. Meanwhile, Hungary harassed the U.S.-based Open Society Foundations until they decided to move their operations from Budapest to Berlin. Two Hungarian newspapers, Magyar Nemzet and Budapest Beacon , shut down this spring as advertisers vanished because of their opposition to the Hungarian government, leaving only one print opposition daily.

              The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest have remained almost entirely silent about all of this.

              The compliant new U.S. approach was initially discussed at a Dec. 18, 2017, meeting of the National Security Council’s policy coordinating committee led by Fiona Hill, the council’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, and Assistant Secretary Mitchell, according to two sources familiar with the proceedings. They concluded that previous efforts under the Bush administration, and especially the Obama administration, had not paid off, so it was time to try something else.

              Accordingly, the first high-level meeting between the two sides took place at the White House on May 15, when John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, received Jeno Megyesy, Orban’s chief adviser on the United States. (Megyesy was also the official point of contact for then-Trump aide Carter Page’s meetings in Budapest during the campaign.) This coming week, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto is scheduled to meet Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; although Szijjarto has visited Washington an eye-popping seven times in the past 18 months, this will be the first such high-level bilateral meeting since 2012. The only step left would be for Trump to receive Orban — the first European head of government to endorse Trump over Hillary Clinton and congratulate him on his victory — at the White House.

              What, if anything, is the United States getting from Hungary for this appeasement? The $12 billion Russian-financed and secretly signed Russian Paks II nuclear plant in southern Hungary is one reflection of Orban’s Russian orientation. (Orban previously welcomed energy investments from the now-failed Russian South Stream pipeline.) Hungary spends only 1 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, among the lowest levels for NATO members, despite Trump’s insistence that nations step up their payments. (Budapest said last year that it would increase spending, but it has said this many times before.)

              Many intelligent Hungarians — watching the complicity, or at least inaction, of the U.S. government — do not understand what is happening, they tell us. They know that Trump wants to be different from Barack Obama, including in his approach to Hungary. But they search in vain for logic in Trump’s posture. For those who still believe in the merits of a Western-style democracy there, which is a large majority in Budapest and a large minority in the countryside, the policy of appeasement signifies abandonment. They would like Washington to keep hope alive. People who suffer from, or are ashamed by, the government’s anti-Semitic discourse and attacks on liberal norms long for a different America.

              And there may be one. David Cornstein, the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary, who will arrive in Budapest in a few weeks, might make a difference. In his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early May, he spoke eloquently about promoting American values. He promised to fight against anti-Semitism, not just in Hungary but elsewhere in Europe, too. His nice, old-fashioned remarks were even cleared by the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. He received strong expressions of support from Republican and Democratic senators, including Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), who is something of an expert on Hungarian politics. There is still hope, then, that decent, humane values will be heard by Hungarians who, in search of answers, continue to look to the United States.

              But the hour is late. Orban’s vision has gained considerable appeal throughout Europe. In 2014, when he declared the end of the age of liberalism, he was seen as a pariah; today he is the leader of a xenophobic, authoritarian and often anti-American trend that haunts Poland, Austria and Turkey. He has won many converts to the cause of strengthening nation-states and weakening multilateral institutions, notably the European Union. His hostility to migration, particularly what he calls the “Islamic multitude” that “leads to the disintegration of nations,” is widely shared. He is admired for having built the first wall in Europe — on the Hungarian-Serbian border — to stem the flow of migrants in 2015. (Paradoxically, Hungary used to be admired for tearing down the barrier between itself and Austria, precipitating the fall of the Berlin Wall.)

              It remains as true today as it was in the 1930s that appeasement — the sacrificing of one’s principles to avoid confrontation with illiberalism — does not pay. Although we hope the Trump administration will reconsider its flawed strategy, recent events are not promising.
              There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

              Comment


              • #22
                Orban's new Government has proposed a new anti migrant law such that:

                The law would, among other things, put a 25 percent tax on civic migrant aid organizations that receive more than half of their funding from abroad.

                The organizations would also be required to register with Hungarian courts and their foreign employees could face expulsion if the government should determine that they have aided "illegal" migration. Groups that fail to register would also face fines.
                Basically giving money to a homeless person who happened not to have a Hungarian EU passport may be a fine-able offense.

                “We are building a Christian democracy,” Orban said. “An old-style Christian democracy rooted in European traditions, where human dignity is paramount and there is a separation of powers.”


                Not sure he read the same Bible as me. Charity is a Christian duty I thought.

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                • #23
                  I have to say, I'm a really big fan of the slogan of the Magyar Kétfarkú Kutya Párt (English: Hungarian Two-tailed Dog Party).

                  “What do we want! Nothing! When do we want it? Never!”

                  From this article: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/me...-smaller-again
                  Meet the joke party that wants to 'Make Hungary Smaller Again'

                  As politics descends into dark comedy, comedians are getting serious about politics. It’s a worldwide trend: In America, late-night tv hosts are some of Trump’s fiercest critics. The Five-Star Movement founded by comedian Beppe Grillo is now a party in Italy’s new coalition government. And in Hungary, the Two-Tailed Dog Party uses graffiti, stencils, billboards and other forms of street art in a guerrilla war of sorts against the ‘illiberal democracy’ espoused by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

                  Founded in 2006, the Magyar Kétfarkú Kutya Párt (MKKP) is more than just a ‘joke party’. It uses absurd inversions of the government’s own slogans to combat the narrow nationalism – anti-immigration, anti-EU and generally anti-internationalist – currently holding sway in Hungary.

                  For the 2006 elections, the MKKP’s platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day working week, lower gravity, free beer and two sunsets a day (in various colours). The standard candidate fielded by the MKKP was a two-tailed dog called Nagy Istvan, the Hungarian equivalent of ‘John Smith’.

                  Other MKKP plans included building a great mountain to provide some relief (literally) on the otherwise very flat Hungarian Plain, and the promise, symbolised by this poster, to ‘Make Hungary Smaller Again’.

                  The Trianon Treaty of 1920 is still a sore point in Hungary: in dismembering Austro-Hungary, it reduced the Hungarian component of the Empire to 28% of its former size, and to one-third of its former population, stranding millions of ethnic Hungarians outside post-World War I Hungary.

                  This poster reverses the frustrated calls by Hungarian nationalists to enlarge the country to its former borders. Instead, it proposes a smaller version of the outline of ‘Greater Hungary’ as an even smaller version of the homeland.

                  Listing a number of arguments for its proposal, the poster proclaims: Let’s deattach unnecessary regions along the border! All of Hungary’s immediate neighbours get a piece: Austria (A), Slovakia (SK), Ukraine (UA), Romania (RO), Serbia (SRB), Croatia (HR) and Slovenia (SLO).

                  In 2009, the MKKP graduated from street art to street protest, gathering around 300 protesters to chant: “What do we want! Nothing! When do we want it? Never!”

                  In 2010, the MKKP attempted to field candidates in the race for mayor of Budapest, using slogans that parodied actual populist ones. The MKKP promised “Eternal life, free beer, tax-deduction!” and “More everything, less nothing!” Another poster slogan read: “We promise anything!”

                  As if to underscore that last point, the MKKP said it wanted to open up an interplanetary spaceport at Szeged, create a new animal species out of bits of extinct ones, and open up a Hungarian restaurant on Mars – to improve the country’s tarnished image across the solar system.

                  The MKKP has had difficulty obtaining the required registration to participate in elections, one judge finding the party too ‘flippant’ for official recognition. On September 8, 2014, the party managed to register for the local elections later that year just 16 minutes before the deadline – leaving it no time to nominate any candidates.

                  In the summer of 2015, at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis, the right-wing government of Viktor Orban launched an anti-immigration campaign with billboards proclaiming: “If you come to Hungary, you can’t take Hungarians’ jobs away!”

                  In response, the MKKP and others launched an ‘anti-anti-immigration campaign’, setting up more than 800 billboards with ironic slogans, in both Hungarian and English. Their messages: “Sorry about our Prime Minister”, and “Feel free to come to Hungary, we already work in England anyway!”

                  The MKKP doesn’t just target Hungary’s political elite, but also its public institutions. The Hungarian State Railways unsuccessfully sued the MKKP for stickers proclaiming: “Our trains are deliberately dirty” and “Our trains are deliberately late”.

                  Absurd humour may be one of the last weapons of the liberal, internationalist elements in the Hungarian political spectrum. The MKKP is one of its focal points. The ‘anti-anti-immigration’ billboard campaign was funded by public collection: at 33 million forint (about $120,000), it received 10 times more than originally projected.

                  However, the absurdist strain is not a mass movement, at least not yet: a February 2016 poll indicated the MKKP commands just 1% support among the Hungarian general population. Still, the Two-Tailed Dog Party persists. In the run-up to the October 2016 referendum on migrant quota, the MKKP mocked the government’s anti-immigration platform, putting up posters with slogans such as:
                  • “Did you know there’s a war in Syria?”
                  • “Did you know that one million Hungarians want to emigrate to Europe?”
                  • “Did you know that in the Olympics, the biggest threat to Hungarian participants comes from foreign competitors?”

                  To protest against the referendum, the MKKP asked voters to spoil their ballot; they even released an app that voters could use to snap and publish their invalidated ballots – for which the party received a $3,000 fine. Eventually, 6% of the results were deemed invalid.

                  At the parliamentary elections in 2018, the party got 1.73% of the votes, still not enough to obtain a seat in the Hungarian parliament.
                  "Every man has his weakness. Mine was always just cigarettes."

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