Pointing out hypocrisy in this day an age is a lazy form of investigative (fact checking? eww) journalism, so I’ll keep it short. I added a counter to the title expecting more to come.1
What I’m about to point out is important not because I’m such an astute observer that it needs recognition, but because it was instantly and widely recognized by the Hungarian online masses without any guidance: it’s an indicator of our general awareness of the hypocrisy on this matter.
We still have the liberty that the US public had until cca. 2017, after which pointing out The Emperor’s New Clothes was deemed a Russian bot attack or hate speech or both, violating ever-changing community guidelines and guaranteeing elimination from the public. The US today is a lot more quiet when blatant hypocrisy is blasted out by their elites, few dares to carefully object, woe to the brave and unaware.
So what made Hungarians spit and shout a defiant fuck you this week?
Last Summer
Hungary and Germany had football matches, one in Budapest, one in Munich, and the stadium in Germany was lit up in rainbow to protest nothing really that wasn’t their business to begin with. Munich’s stadium actually wasn’t lit up though, the UEFA said no to that particular action, but it’s Mandela-effected into our collective consciousness as definitely happened. In reality:
Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter said: ‘I find it shameful that UEFA forbids us to send a sign for cosmopolitanism, tolerance, respect and solidarity with the people of the LGBT community.’
His intervention came as plans were unveiled to put up rainbow-coloured flags at its town hall and illuminate a huge wind turbine close to the stadium, as well as the city’s 291-metre (955-foot) Olympic Tower.2
So why do we misremember the actual stadium that was NOT lit up?
Other stadiums across Germany displayed rainbow lights, including Berlin’s iconic Olympic Stadium, as well as Bundesliga stadiums in Cologne, Frankfurt and Wolfsburg.
German newspapers, such as the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, displayed rainbows on their front pages, while Bavarian industrial giants such as Siemens and BMW also decked themselves in rainbow colours on Twitter.
The Germans got worked up about something in unison, on command, that they wouldn’t have given a shit about just 10 years ago.
There was the usual 2-minutes-of-hate on Google News if you looked up Hungary for a day or two that could have been written by a neural network, I won’t even bother to search for examples, you can imagine. One member of the Hungarian national team, who has to play for a German club, made a “please comrade shoot me last” plead in support, implicitly condemning his own country.
To top the usual hard/soft elite assault off: last summer also included unambiguous police harassment of the visiting Hungarian fans. The guests, coming to the host country, meeting state encouraged hostility - something Hungary as a host would never do, was okayed by the German authorities. If there’s a country where the police is accountable to the higher ups, it’s Germany, and it was fine by them.
That week, last summer, all the Germans were on the same page in this LMBTQ-grandstanding against our tiny black sheep of a colony.
These moral übermensch were the same Germans by and large that were around in 2011, joking about things back then, in public, that in 2021 would strictly be Verboten. (Imagine blunt gay jokes that are not just offensive but objectively bad, these are Krauts, after all.) They have changed over the years, as they conformed to the cattle prodding of the Zeitgeist dictated and exported by the US.
We weren’t surprised by their playbook: compliance has a predictability, no stunt that these brave Germans pulled had any innovation to it. Fuck it, there’s probably an IEEE standard on how to do it properly already.
Hans, get the Rainbowflaggewehrfer! - came the command from the higher ups, and Hans did.
The Germans can turn a nation around on command in such unison that the Bismarck failing to zig-zag its way out of fire with its comparatively light, 50000 ton weight in 1941 is puzzling in retrospect.
Sure, the Bismarck had a damaged rudder, but so has today’s Germany a few screws loose, yet the latter performed well when it came to demonstrate that they are faithful followers of post-2013 US cultural innovations, with the whole crew performing commendably on the day of the battle.
To be fair to the Kriegsmarine, the Bismarck had to face the concentrated might of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, while Germany in 2021 only had to face an uppity colony, with the Allies’ mighty cultural-industrial-complex lend-leasing support in the back, and holding the biggest megaphone to declare the victor afterwards. Good Germany, here’s a treat!
A battleship is not a democracy: the crew has to work in unison towards the common goal, it can only go in one direction at a time, and if it goes, it goes hard. This was our impression of Germany as a whole on all levels that week: no voice of dissent, no plurality of opinion - if Germany is a marketplace of ideas, all the stands offered that week were cans of Spam in a rainbow packaging. Offer being a euphemism to scolding harassment to buy in.
So the match happened, the week of hate and superiority signalling happened, Hungary got reprimanded, Hungarians learned the same lesson yet again.
Since then the Germans went even further, electing a government that promised to remove any breaks that the Merkel era still kept on the continental clown car.
Hungary also had elections, voting to keep things the same as they’ve been. Then came
This Week
Germany, just like most of Western Europe, is caught in a social media shitstorm over past business deals with Russia, and so they had to start to apologetically moralize about energy. It’s a difficult problem since there’s little liberal democratic energy available on the global market, whatever there is is already oversold and was expensive to begin with.
So, the traffic light coalition’s leader, chancellor Scholz made an announcement this week to celebrate yet another step out of the Russian energy trap that Germany lured itself into in the past:
Qatar will play a central roll in Germany's strategy to diversify away from Russian gas, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Friday.
"The energy security issue plays an important role for us. Germany will develop its infrastructure to be in a position to import liquefied gas by ship," Scholz told journalists at a joint news conference with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Berlin.
"It's a big step and Qatar plays an important roll in our strategy," Scholz added.3
Nice. Out of context, Hungarians are fine with this: it’s Germany’s business where they get their energy from and how much they pay for it. It’s not like trade is inherently ethical, I’m typing this on a MacBook made by exploited Asian labor, and if there’s a company with margins that would allow these to be produced in Switzerland, it’s Apple.
If there’s something even Apple couldn’t do is to make the Swiss Alps produce oil: you get oil and gas from where it is available in the ground. It’s first and foremost a question of geology, whatever country happens to be above it is just incidental. A social construct, as they say.
Hungarians are also fine with Qatar: we do not wish to dictate who they do business with and how they live their lives over there. Apparently, when it comes to LGBT-rights in Qatar, this is their stance:
Male homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, with a punishment of up to three years in prison and a fine and the possibility of death penalty for Muslims under sharia law
Out of context, we’re fine with Germany, Qatar, and any deals between them. None of our business.
In the context of last summer however, this announcement is hypocrisy that makes the average, culture war aware Hungarian’s blood boil. It is our business, and you, Germans, have made it this way.
The audacity of our nosy, moralizing, uppity colonial masters to employ a double standard when it suits them won’t be helping getting our consent for a unified action on any issue, especially if the action expects sacrifice from us and it’s wrapped in paternalizing scold as a bonus.
We will say no, and it won’t be because of our usual stubbornness or spite, it will be because of righteous indignation fuelled by such hypocrisy.
Germany this week proved the most ardent Hungarian cynics of the West right, yet again.
