For anti-Western fellow travelers Moscow still has its special Lumumba University. This university for the ‘friendship of peoples’, named after the Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), has trained students from the ‘unaligned third world’ to become skilled engineers, doctors and lawyers over the past six decades. After graduating, they incidentally had another curriculum in common: aversion to the multiform democratic legal order.
Budapest now has no less than three academies for radical right and hip conservative buccaneers: the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, the Deutsch-Ungarisches Institut and the Danube Institute. The coffee is better than in Moscow, where the communists once served only chicory sludge and the putinists now stinkingly expensive cappuccino. Their goal is still borrowed from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): to breed as many ‘organic intellectuals’ as possible for the struggle for ‘superstructure hegemony’. In American terms, they have to win the culture war with the progressives.
Read also: Here in Budapest, we conservatives are trying to add depth to the culture war
One of the fellows at the Danube Institute is the good-natured sociologist Eric Hendriks. Almost two weeks ago he described in NRC with baroque bravura how right-wing conservative ‘underdogs’ prepare themselves in the ‘majestic Jugendstil’ of Buda and Pest for the fight against the liberal ‘Western European Goliath’. A good culture war [stormt] through the soul” and thus creates “confusion – chaos – around true and false, good and bad,” says Hendriks. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who last week the European Union qualified as a hungarophobe follow-up to the unification projects of Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler, it pays part of the bill.
The text had not yet been published when Hendriks and twitter were wrathful NRC part. One of the arguments went like this. If folks from ‘anti-democratic’ Hungary are allowed to write a piece for the ‘free press’, which ‘should be pro-democratic’, then the end is lost and even ‘Hitler would have a piece in NRC allowed to write […]because yes, censorship”, informed media scientist Marieke Kuypers.
Despite its ahistorical claim that free media must necessarily be democratic – the Volkischer Beobachter appeared from 1920 in the press-free Weimar Republic – I started the apparently immodest piece with a slight trepidation. What turned out? The article contained news, as befits a serious newspaper, at least for me.
Eric Hendriks downplays the threat of Orbán’s ‘pirate bay’
I knew that Orbán uses his veto within the EU to serve Putin and betray Ukraine. But that the Hungarian leader is also building his own phalanx of fellow travelers for a European fifth column of culture, that was new to me.
Hendriks himself downplays the threat. He just wants the “horizon again […] to draw”. I believe him. He is genuinely democratic conservative. Moreover, his ambition to ‘open up imaginary worlds’ is so immense that he no longer has time to operationalize the culture war between those companies.
But not every ‘pierewaaier’ is as polite as Hendriks. His essay is therefore not only interesting, but also alarming. The Gramscian concept, which Orbán facilitates through his Lumumba institutes, is not about an exchange of contrarian views for the academic pleasure of everyone, but about concrete political power.
With that power in hand, the organic intellectuals of Orbán’s “Bay of Pirates” will write the program to justify the slashing of the multiform democratic order. That horizon alarmed me.
Just as I am glad to know that there are academics at Utrecht University, VU, UvA and other universities who, despite Russia’s war of destruction, still know nothing about Eastern Europe and therefore sometimes play into the hands of Putin objectively, I am Hendriks thankful that he opened my eyes.
The advocates of the pluriform democratic legal order should not bleat on Twitter, but should regroup in broad terms. ‘No pasaran’ – but in Hungarian.
Hubert Smith is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.