Programming note: Please join me tomorrow for another edition of my still newish weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs Saturday at 5pm UK/6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~A headline to ponder from my old newspaper The Independent:
Labour councillor suspended after video emerges of him urging crowd to cut people's throats
Party says speech in Walthamstow 'completely unacceptable'
The elected representative's name is not Ahmed bin Jihad but Ricky Jones. Our leaders have done a splendid job in transforming our societies into irredeemably unpeaceable kingdoms. The good news is that, in California, masks are back.
As you know, the biggest story of our time is that half-a-millennium of western dominance is coming to an end, and the future will be built elsewhere. So, as this week ends, I would like to return to where we came in, with the far-sighted and profound speech given a few days ago by the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in a small Romanian village - and in particular his remarks on the current war in Europe, which remains "ongoing" (as Kamala would say) but which has vanished from the front pages. As I put it to RFK Jr on The Mark Steyn Show, you'd think, after the debacle in Kabul, that the beribboned buffoons of the Pentagon would at least take a twenty-minute tea-break before launching the next quagmire. But no! You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in its third-quarter earnings projections.
As many have pointed out on either side of the Atlantic, it should be laughable that countries indifferent to their own borders have suddenly decided that, of all places, Ukraine's are inviolable. Boris Johnson, for example, was happy to let Brussels annex Northern Ireland, but feels differently about the Donbass. Yet the black comedy of Euro-American pretensions should not blind us to the remorseless human tragedy. Any takers for a "Not In My Name" march?
Apparently not. Save for a "peace mission" from Viktor Orbán - who is not a popular figure with the globalists, or even with the nominally "centre-right" types at The Spectator:
Hungary is stretching the EU's patience to its limit
The supposedly pro-Brexit types at the Speccie say that like it's a bad thing - and indeed what follows is even more banale than that fatuous headline. As Mr Orbán notes at the beginning of his speech, the EU has "condemned the Hungarian peace mission" re Ukraine, with whom his country shares a border. We are now two-and-a-half years into this war. It's all fun and games if you're Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan, the Washington power couple playing with other people's money and other people's lives. (If it's any consolation to the Ukrainians, Mr Kagan plays just as fast-and-loose with American blood and treasure.) However, when this first European war between two demographically diminished nations eventually ends, it will be generations - if ever - before Ukraine recovers culturally and economically from the loss of so much of its desperately needed manpower. As the Hungarian PM observes:
Brussels is also offended at our describing what they are doing as a pro-war policy. They say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace. Central Europeans like us are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that the state will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war... Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that in "Newspeak" peace is war and war is peace.
It is interesting to contrast the west's tone on Gaza with that on Ukraine. With the former, there are more high-level calls for "ceasefires" on the average business day than there have been re the latter in the last two years. This is despite the fact that for most western nations the Ukraine war has been a disaster. Mr Orbán:
There are three big issues on the table today. The first is the war – or more precisely, an unexpected side-effect of the war. This is the fact that the war reveals the reality in which we live. This reality was not visible and could not be described earlier, but it has been illuminated by the blazing light of missiles fired in the war...
The war is our red pill: it is what we have been given, it is what we must swallow.
I mentioned on Monday the rejection by some eighty-five per cent of the planet of the Nuland-Kagan position on Ukraine. So the war has had the effect of accelerating the rise of the post-American world. The Prime Minister's take:
In years gone by we had got used to the United States declaring its main challenger or opponent to be China; yet now we see it waging a proxy war against Russia. And China is constantly accused of covertly supporting Russia. If this is the case, then we need to answer the question of why it is sensible to corral two such large countries together into a hostile camp. This question has yet to be answered in any meaningful way.
If you're minded to wage a "proxy war" against Russia, you should at least give a thought as to whether you can win it. According to the received wisdom of the spring of 2022, Putin should have been in his grave for two years. Old-school sabre-rattling:
We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.
We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.
But now we have proxy war with proxy jingoism:
We don't want to proxy-fight but by Jingo if we do
We've got the asset freezes, we've got the PornHub withdrawal, we've got the oligarch yacht-seizures too.
We've fought the Bear before, and while we're globalists true
The Russians shall not have ...er, Kharkiv, is it?
Didn't quite work out like that. Orbán again:
I remember being at European Council meetings – the prime ministers' summits – when, with all sorts of gestures, Europe's great leaders rather hubristically claimed that the sanctions against Russia and the exclusion of Russia from the so-called SWIFT system, the international financial clearing system, would bring Russia to its knees. They would bring the Russian economy to its knees, and through that the Russian political elite... The Russian financial system is not collapsing. They have developed the ability to adapt, and after 2014 we fell victim to this, because we used to export a significant proportion of Hungarian food produce to Russia. We could not continue to do so because of the sanctions, the Russians modernised their agriculture, and today we are talking about one of the world's largest food export markets; this is a country that used to have to rely on imports. So the way that Russia is described to us – as a rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy – is false. In fact we are talking about a country that displays technical and economic resilience – and perhaps also societal resilience...
Whereas "Europe"...
European policy-making has collapsed. Europe has given up defending its own interests: all that Europe is doing today is unconditionally following the foreign policy line of the US Democrats – even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions we have imposed are damaging fundamental European interests: they are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive. We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context...
The Prime Minister is quite correct, although he is the first western head of government to say so explicitly. That's why the official investigations by Sweden and Denmark simply closed up shop after eighteen months without publishing any conclusions on who was responsible. If you give the most cursory glance to what the Deep State's alphabet-soup agencies do to their allies, why would you be surprised by what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania?
European policy-making has also collapsed since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war because the core of the European power system was the Paris–Berlin axis, which used to be inescapable... The scale of this change – of bypassing the German–French axis – can truly be grasped by older people if they perhaps think back twenty years, when the Americans attacked Iraq and called on the European countries to join in. We, for example, joined in as a member of Nato. At the time Schröder, the then German chancellor, and Chirac, the then French president, were joined by President Putin of Russia at a joint press conference called in opposition to the Iraq war. At that time there was still an independent Franco–German logic when approaching European interests.
Not now. The PM has some sport with the humiliations inflicted by Washington on the German chancellor:
When, to the astonishment of Hungarians, one sees the German chancellor announcing that he is only sending helmets to the war, and then a week later he announces that he is in fact sending weapons, do not think that the man has lost his mind. Then when the same German chancellor announces that there may be sanctions, but that they must not cover energy, and then two weeks later he himself is at the head of the sanctions policy, do not think that the man has lost his mind. On the contrary, he is very much in his right mind. He is well aware that the Americans and the liberal opinion-forming vehicles they influence – universities, think tanks, research institutes, the media – are using public opinion to punish Franco–German policy that is not in line with American interests.
Indeed, the more irrelevant America becomes in the wider world (in the BRICS nations et al) the more its remaining friends are reduced to third-rate client-states - or, actually, court eunuchs. One consequence of this has been to turn Russia and China into defter wielders of "soft power" than the side that invented the concept:
Western values – which were the essence of so-called "soft power" – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the "backward" category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan.
Hmm. What do those countries have in common? Well, they still need America. See previous on "queering the Donbass" and Pride Month in Kabul. Elsewhere:
The world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin's strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia's strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.
You might think that this is because American levers of soft power are all super-principled on the LGBTQWERTY stuff. But, in fact, not so - not when it comes to, say, kissing up to the Politburo. Me three years ago:
The big picture is that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States blew its unipolar moment and has chosen to surrender the world, after half-a-millennium, to post-western dominance. Whatever the truth of Biden's charge that the money-no-object Afghan National Army went over to the other side, there is no question that key elements of American national power have gone over to China's side: the Chamber of Commerce, Hollywood, the NBA, not to mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology's protectors at the CDC and NIH; oh, and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, at least two of whom have checked out with respect to anything to do with China...
Beijing has won without firing a shot, which is the way to do it.
That is why the meat-grinder of the Ukraine war is not only an appalling human catastrophe but also a very obsolescent one.
We will have more from Mr Orbán's speech in the days ahead.
~I thank you for all your supportive comments these last grisly months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead, and I look forward to your company this weekend for Mark Steyn on the Town.
