Good day on the 21st of August, one day after the quintessential Hungarian Holiday, St Stephen’s Day, the founder of the Hungarian State. We have been here in the Carpathian Vale for over a thousand years and if you look at the shifting borders of Europe over the time we’ve been here – crudely summed up in a video under sources – you will understand my people better. We have seen the rise and fall of Holy Rome, we have been caught up between Christendom and the Ottoman Turks, defending Europe against the barbarians – as we were told – and after a short flirtatious period with the Habsburgs and Austria, we became the Happiest Barracks in the Soviet Peace Camp, the spearhead of the Warsaw pact, until it was no more. And while we are a torn, battered people existing in this current Fourth Republic, we are still here.
As you know my name – Tóth, meaning Slav – means that my ancestors did not come here from the Uralic Steppes, across the Verecke pass as have the traditional Hungarians, no. A total of four of our thirteen Great Martyrs – called the blood-witnesses of Arad, respected dead men of the 1948 bourgeois revolution – were pure ethnic Hungarians, the rest were a collection of Slavic, Germanic and even Anglo Saxon people. Hungary, if you like, was the original melting pot before there was a United States. The reason I’m writing to you this Sunday is because I want to bring our perspective to this crucial, consequential moment in Human History.
In the coming weeks and months it will be very easy to despair, especially across Europe. We will be facing a severe cost of living crisis, possible blackouts and energy bills we have never seen before and many of us will have to decide between a warm meal and making the rent. Until sane voices prevail, things unquestionably look bleak. It will be very easy to hobble together and speak of doom and gloom, and cry about life fast becoming impossible to finance. This is natural, and I have focused this week on the roots of this crisis, the great divorce between Eurasia and the traditional Colonial West – a divorce that Western commentators are going through the four stages of grief confronting, as detailed wonderfully by Yugopnik – and not enough on the people living here.
So today I will skip the cold news and bring you a cautious piece of Good News as I see it. An era has ended and we are yet to see the full price, it’s true. We will unquestionably suffer, picking up food deliveries – as if somehow the bicycle was a new breakthrough technology – for Belgian firms and answering the phone for angry clients in the vast foreign help desk industries we allowed to take hold in our countries. But it will not destroy us, and I will be the first to say, there is light at the end of this particular tunnel.
In 1945 our fields were engulfed in flame, our cities reduced to rubble, a just punishment for our leadership that supported the Reich’s assault on the Soviet Union with one voice more feverish than the last until the bitter end, but the next couple of decades turned out to be the best our people have ever seen. Imagine : no power, food shortages and walking among the ruined remains of what used to be Budapest, and in just ten years waking up to a brand new country. Our reconstruction was the fastest in Europe. This was the time of the Heroic Builders – Építők – that took us from ashes to a space faring civilisation with the help of our soviet friends. World-class education and healthcare, heavy industry – like my beloved Ikarus bus – and a dynamic household commodity production. Our fridges were Lehel, our washing machines were Hajdú, our soft drinks were Márka, all made here, by Hungarian hand. Every year a new locomotive entered a new track, connecting yet another village or town to the network, which meant the arrival of prosperity : New jobs, bistros, schools, hospitals, sports halls and The Pictures, which we now call cinema. It was the most remarkable era in my people’s history and nobody saw it coming when Berlin fell.
I will go out on a ledge and suggest – cautiously – that this coming era of European collapse can in fact mask something similar. We could – after the dust has settled and those responsible, ousted – in fact transition to something healthy and overdue : A period of transformation of reindustrialization, and whatever country you live in there is hope that soon your people will make their own locomotives, automobiles, household goods and all the rest. And it just might be a much healthier world than what we have been living through for the last three decades.
It will – however – require real work, not the comfortable decadence we have been advertised. Take the 2018 poll under sources to heart, where young people were asked what they aspire to become once grown up. It warmed my heart and at the same time terrified me when I saw it. It indicates that in the United States and Kingdom children overwhelmingly wanted to become what we call influencers, an unproductive commentator, a de-facto drain on their otherwise hopefully productive societies once grown, while in China young people wanted to explore the Cosmos at an incredibly high rate. The only hopeful factor to the poll was that even though at half the rate, children in the West still enjoyed learning enough to dream of one day teaching, it is another matter what happens when they embark on the road to the honored profession, only to find that it is emotionally and financially impossible to manage.
Things look horrific right now, especially in Europe, but I hope that after the rain, a new society can emerge from this current chaos, one that turns away from the lonely screen – I understand the irony, believe me – and one where all the mighty hands of the working people can be employed in the quintessential project of constructing a new country. This post is not a political prediction, I am not talking about a new People’s Republic or a new Bolshevik Union emerging from a Revolution, I am only describing a new turn our people might take in the face of the current crumbling of the L’Ancien Régime, the old Leadership.
The cover photo shows the plight of a typical family in 1935 – born into bondage, destined to work the fields for life in a basically medieval country after “benefiting” from four years of Papal Education – and a mere five decades later, watching Hungarian television in their new apartment, riding Hungarian buses, cars and motorcycles. This was the Hungary I was born into, and I have been waiting for her to wake up from slumber for three decades. People became engineers, doctors and teachers, and they just might once more. As you know I live in an area of Pécs called Uránvárós – Uranium City – built for the miners like my grandfather, and literally every building I pass each day was built in the fifties, only receiving a new coat of paint and ugly plastic windows in the last 30 years of stagnation. This is what happened when a people took their economic destiny in their own hands and in turn this is what happens when that destiny is taken away.
Even if in your country the tragedy was not quite so stark or evident as ours, people across Europe are feeling that they have lost something in the last 30 years of this union. It may just be national identity, or good paying jobs or as with us, it could be entire industries, and the people know this deep down, and resent it. Whether you sit on the traditional political Left or Right, you should have hope, right now, for something better to follow. Things are coming to a head, and while the leaders come and go, the people are eternal, and we will withstand this current storm as we have so many others.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. Have a lovely Sunday afternoon or evening, or perhaps a Monday morning down under, whatever sky looks down on you reading these lines.
I don’t know if I wrote this more for you or myself, or as a reaction to Ben Norton – of Multipolarista – continuing the century-old tradition of attacking allies in the CPI, but I had it outlined in my head and believed it was necessary, especially today. It should be the time of unity for the people, we must come together during a crisis. On a personal note, I have a new rule in effect : I physically can’t keep up with notifications and messages, so I have to find a system to ease the burden, so starting this next week, I will try to catch up with everything one final time, and afterwards I will only follow comments, shares and likes on material on my profile, not in various groups. Half a year ago I loved to wake up and get to work, but recently I dread the mornings and the literal hours of community management, so I hope you understand.
Peace, Land and Bread
From Facebook Archives : 21 August 2022
SOURCES
- Source – Europe’s Borders 2400 years ( VID ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI - Source – The Poll:
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-astronauts-survey-2019-7 - Source – Yugopnik’s Four Stages of Grief ( VID ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fgHBPyiSuI