A vicious public backlash
When Zoltan Fenyesi offered a free holiday at his guesthouse to a group of refugees, he thought the act might become an example of Hungarian hospitality. By introducing them to his neighbours in Ocseny, a village of 2,300 in south-west Hungary, he hoped it might also prove the refugees posed no danger.
Instead his offer last month provoked a vicious public backlash. A fraught town hall meeting called to discuss the invitation was captured on camera by local media, Mr Fenyesi received death threats and the clashes sparked an anguished national debate over how far ordinary Hungarians should go in fending off foreigners. In the process, Ocseny has become a byword for racial fear.
Viktor Orban, in a very Trump-like move, supported the protest and brought it to national attention. Yeah, that’s what we need, more fear and hatred of foreigners!
Meanwhile
the populist-nationalist Fidesz government is sending leaflets to every household in a “national consultation” over an alleged plan by George Soros, the Hungary-born billionaire investor, to flood Europe with refugees.
And poison the wells and make bread out of the blood of children.
Zoltan Fenyesi has been subject to threats, including threats to cut off his head.
“What happened [in Ocseny] was not civil disobedience or resistance, but the first step towards lynching,” wrote Andras Sztankoczy, a conservative columnist, in a Hungarian newspaper last weekend. Despite the threats against Mr Fenyesi, Mr Orban said there was “nothing wrong” with the protests.
Many sides, many sides.
Although he fears for his safety, Mr Fenyesi makes a point of continuing to live his life in Ocseny as before — frequenting the same pub and speaking with his neighbours. But something deep in Hungarian society has changed, he says, adding: “What our government is doing will leave a scar for generations.”
It’s like that here too. The hatred and contempt Donald Trump has stoked will be with us for generations.
This kind of energy, historically speaking, doesn’t ever seem to dissipate; it builds and builds until it overflows in orgies of madness and violence and leaves the survivors dazed and wondering how they got to the point of wrecking everything. During its height, people in this kind of orgy devote far too much effort into machines (metaphorical and, in the last century, very-much-not metaphorical) designed to eat people.
One would think we’d have gotten ample evidence by now that building people-eating machines is a bad idea; that the machines are happy to eat *anyone*, even if they start as foreigner-eating machines or Jew-eating machines or heretic-eating machines or oligarch-eating machines (or TERF-eating machines or fascist-eating machines). All it takes is for the creators to lose control of their ___-eating machine, and then be denounced as ___ themselves, for the machine to happily eat them. We’ve seen this happen every time wide-scale vindictive violence has been adopted as a political solution; people build machines to eat their enemies, and they label more and more people as enemies, until some of those enemies get control of the machine and feed the machine’s creators to it.
The best-engineered machines go through several successive coups, happily gobbling up whomever falls out of power. It’s only once enough people have been convinced that feeding each other to the machine is a bad idea that the machine runs out of fuel, and that can be *generations* after the machine was first constructed. Only very occasionally has violent intervention successfully destroyed such a people-eating machine, and it seems far too many people have forgotten the lessons of that intervention and are preparing to build brand new machines of their own again.
I honestly don’t know what to do, short of letting them build those machines and, hopefully, having enough people survive to conclude that it’s a bad idea and not do it again for another few generations.
Well put. We in the UK have always been in love with people-eating machines. Brexit is a people-eating machine. So is the current fetish our government has for surveillance. And yet so many people support these things even as they feel the teeth cut into their flesh.