{"id":692,"date":"2018-12-31T23:41:58","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T23:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=692"},"modified":"2018-12-31T23:41:58","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T23:41:58","slug":"baseness-in-the-carpathian-basin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/31\/baseness-in-the-carpathian-basin\/","title":{"rendered":"Baseness in the Carpathian Basin"},"content":{"rendered":"

The insightful March 8 essay on\u00a0Hungary’s Self-Destructive Demons<\/a>,\u00a0by poet\/journalist Thomas Orszag-Land<\/a> described the complex and sinister relationship between the stunning success of Viktor Orban’s opportunistic megalomania and his unscrupulous exploitation of the unreconstructed cultural affinity of the Hungarian populace for the ugliest and most vicious forms of denial, scapegoating and xenophobia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Apart from a couple of points on which it (forgiveably) goes a bit over the top (about the potential for kingship and the triple “junk” quote), Orszag-Land’s March 8 essay is temperate, timely and telling, and has since been not so much overtaken as confirmed by events, with\u00a0the self-ratification, by Orban’s supermajority, of the constitutional amendment self-indemnifyng Orban’s new constitution from oversight by the constitutional court.<\/p>\n

Orszag-Land\u00a0raises the interesting hypothesis that although Orban has successfully used his supermajority (as well as the pork-barreling of the electorate, party faithful and oligarchs) to entrench his power far beyond the possibility of reversal even under any ordinary electoral majority defeat by the (shamefully and self-destructively divided) democratic opposition, he may yet be undone by having profoundly alienated the only forces that can sustain the dictator of a small, poor country in modern times: either powerful international economic interests or the support of powerful surrounding nations.<\/p>\n

And there is another potential contingency: Orban is not stable. He has already demonstrated himself to be a psychopath, has already been showing signs of mounting paranoia, is rumored to be under treatment for bipolar disorder, and seems to be less and less aware (or perhaps less and less in control) of the fact that Hungarian is translatable into any other language — and diffuses at lightning speed in today’s online era — so that his so far successful double-talk (in contemptuous jingo for his compatriots and sugary demagoguery for the rest of the world) may yet prove his undoing, impelling his hitherto intact cult following to jump ship out of self-interest, rather than to continue to sink with their leader, as his antics become more and more dissociated and pathological.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hungary is not, after all, North Korea (and not just because it lacks China to prop it up, come what may).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The insightful March 8 essay on\u00a0Hungary’s Self-Destructive Demons,\u00a0by poet\/journalist Thomas Orszag-Land described the complex and sinister relationship between the stunning success of Viktor Orban’s opportunistic megalomania and his unscrupulous exploitation of the unreconstructed cultural affinity of the Hungarian populace for the ugliest and most vicious forms of denial, scapegoating and xenophobia.\u00a0 Apart from a couple … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Baseness in the Carpathian Basin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":693,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions\/693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}