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If only a few believe the journalists…

…then there will probably be a coup soon, because if the people do not believe the rulers and their mouthpieces, the end of the rulers will come soon. The situation is comfortable for the functioning of the so-called democracy when there is one party or ruling group that rules and is in total conflict with the other, opposition party or with the group that aspires to power. At that time, the leading domestic media are usually on the side of the “right”, on the side of those in power, while the alternative or challenging media are on the side of the opposition. The situation is comfortable (perhaps at present in Georgia or Venezuela) for the voters/citizens, because they themselves choose who is right, i.e. where the truth is. The current situation in the USA is different: fewer and fewer people trust the media at all, regardless of whether it is the leading or alternative (independent?) media.

Source: Tippinsights

The reason for this is most likely the glaring discrepancies seen in the Democratic and Republican narratives. According to a study by the Watchdog Media Research Center, coverage of Kamala Harris was 84% positive, while that of Trump was 89% negative (statistics include CBS, NBC and ABC). The Democratic candidate also received 66% more airtime.

What is the reason for these disparities? The big corporations that are part of the current establishment want to maintain the status quo, which means, among other things, continued Democratic rule. It also means the impoverishment of the middle class, the division of society through wars of ideas, the destabilization caused by the migrant crisis, the chaos caused by tolerating riots and shoplifting while cutting funding for the police. Disunited and confused communities are much easier to control – changing such a state of affairs would not benefit the establishment.

Then there is the main tool of the leading media: the polls. The average voter has only limited access to information. What can voters use as a guide when deciding who to vote for? The polls! From a psychological point of view, people want to belong to the group of winners. This is why the power of published election polls is so great. How can we defend ourselves against this, i.e. check the reliability of these media? For example, by confronting them with the bookmakers’ bets. This business is based on pure statistics – if the bookmaker’s odds do not correspond to reality, he automatically has to incur heavy losses. If we look at today’s ABC NEWS poll results (as of 01.11.24), we see that Harris is in the lead.

Source: ABC News

Quite the opposite is the data coming in from various bookmaker sites, according to which Trump is the favorite. The chart below shows that the Republican candidate can count on an average of over 60% support, while his opponent can count on barely 40% (as at 01.11.24).

Source: Realclearpolling.com

Polls have been wrong in predicting the winner of presidential elections in the past. In 2016, during the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the polls pointed to the Democratic Party candidate – while it was the right wing that won. One reason for this “surprising” turn of events could have been the electoral system in the US, which creates the possibility that the candidate who received fewer votes from citizens, but more electoral votes, which are decisive, wins.

After examining the methodology used to create the polls disseminated by the ABC, one can conclude that the results are created in an unclear and complicated manner, despite the claim of transparency. The support beam presented to us is not an answer to the basic question “Who do you want to vote for in the presidential election?”, but to a series of questions inserted in different polls. The results are then analyzed and processed. This creates a lot of room for abuse and freedom of interpretation.

Today’s leading (media) are not free from influences and dictates. But if you believe Google’s results, take a look at the following graphic as the punchline of this article:

Theft of the evidence of the senses in broad daylight

Theft of the common sense, theft of the evidence of that your senses provide your brain with, theft of you faculties of reasoning, theft in broad daylight. What do we mean? The fact that the media’s bias is absolutely out of their own control. A simple example. The media tell you about the polls concerning the two candidates running for president, and they inform you credibly that the vote for either candidate is shared roughly fifty-fifty. Yet, in the same breath, the same media will show you a street poll in which they will ask, say, ten people about who their favourite candidate is, and all of them will turn out to be in favour of the candidate that a particular media endorse. Weird, isn’t it?

Why are the media people incapable of controlling themselves? Why are they incapable of being consistent? Is it dictated by the intense hatred of the other candidate? Is it dictated by a very low esteem that they hold their readership or their audiences in? Surely, there are a lot of the readers or viewers or listeners who will not notice this glaring bias. Surely there are a lot of the listeners or viewers who will fail to see this discrepancy. Surely, some of the viewers or readers will, but then they share the same intense hate towards one of the candidates and so they just cannot but indulge in this one-sided narrative. For all that, however, there are some media savvies who will be repelled by that kind of unfairness. There are some among the readers, the listeners, the viewers who have a capacity for reasoning, for remembering, for comparing. If they spot recurrent discrepancies, they will become sceptical about the information that they are fed by the media. There will also be some who will challenge the warped presentation of reality and they may pass their scepticism and criticism of the media onto others, thus slowly spreading the seeds of doubt, disbelief, and eventually total rejection of the official sources of information, a process that currently seems to be in full swing across the Western world.

A media outlet exercises an enormous power over the consumers of the information. It is not easy for an average man to catch them lying. It is the media that have access to sources of information and it is the media that have all those technological gadgets with which to put news pieces together in such a way as to create the narrative that is desired by the owners of the media. Yet, from time to time, they will get lost in their own invented narrative, they will eventually expose themselves for what they really are: tools for the manipulation of public opinion. One thing that can easily throw media credibility into doubt is the internal discrepancy or the internal contradiction contained in the messages, or – in plain English – the lie that they give to themselves.

Again: why say that roughly half the country is for, while the other half is against a given candidate and then ‘corroborate’ the stats with a street query in which all or almost all pollees voice their support for one of the candidates only? One wonders what’s the intellectual framework of such journalists or those who have those journalists do their job. Can’t they control themselves? Is it that they lack basic mental faculties or is it that they hold the entirety of the consumers of information in utter contempt? They certainly regard themselves as custodians of the political and moral backbone of the citizens; they certainly assume that the vast majority of the consumers of information do not have the capacity for working out answers, for doing thorough research, for grappling with huge amounts of data. That’s understandable. One is tempted to use it and… abuse it. But why provide the readers, listeners, viewers with evident discrepancies and contradictions?

American journalism has taken a nose-dive into a bottomless pit of mendacity

Donald Trump held a big rally the other day in Madison Square Garden, the usual venue for such events. The American left scared out of their wits at the ever more real perspective of having Trump back in the White House pulled off – courtesy MSNBC – a journalistic-cum-propaganda stunt that was surreal and absurd at the same time. The shots from the rally that MSNBC presented were intertwined with the 1939 shots of a rally that had taken place in the same venue and was held by American followers of German national socialism. The message on the part of MSNBS was more than clear, primitive though it was. Still, the American left really views Americans as primitive imbeciles so they saw it fit to tell the audience how to interpret the Madison Square Garden rally with the intertwined shots from 1939 in that the telecaster invited a Ruth Ben-Ghiat and writer Anne Applebaum, whose task it was to stain Trump and to drag him through as much mud and dirt and shit and… as one could within a couple of minutes. So, Donald Trump and his followers were conflated with Nazis, racists, Hitler and Mussolini, while the two guests assured the audience again and again that the Madison Square Garden was chosen by Trump consciously and all the rhetoric and symbolism was an intentional copy of the German national-socialist rallies from the previous century.

It was all sickening. It all echoed the worst propaganda stunts from the 1920s and 1930s, of which both historian! Ruth Ben-Ghiat and author Anne Applebaum should have known. It was in the Soviet Union that political opponents were necessarily framed as fascists and foreign agents. It was in the Soviet Union that political opponents were presented to the masses of gullible and rather simple-minded people as monsters and murderers. Such things happened in the Soviet Union during the few first decades of its existence, but in later decades even the communist propagandists saw how primitive and hence ineffective such propaganda measures were, let alone what bad press about the Soviet Union they caused abroad. Sadly, present-day United States of America is copying Soviet Union from the latter’s worst years in this respect.

Let me make a guess: a stunt like this one is a nail in the coffin of the Democrats. Now even people who were not followers or advocates of Trump feel disgusted and repelled by the like s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, by the likes of Ruth Ben-Ghiat and author Anne Applebaum. The YouTube comments prove my point. Here are some of them:

– It blows my mind that this is the state of the mainstream media now.

– How are they allowed to say complete non sense like this????

– I actually can’t believe MSNBC ran with this. Many people predicted they would, and I thought it was a joke. I am genuinely shocked they weren’t kidding. United States mainstream media is pathetic.

– MSNBC…you people have really gone off the deep end. What an embarrassment you have become to journalism.

– This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard

– Right before Halloween, the real monsters have removed their masks, and let themselves be seen.

– Didn’t Bill Clinton and Al Gore have a presidential rally in MSG in 1992?

– The Democratic Party has had 2 conventions at Madison square garden so what does that mean?

– ’m actually shocked that they posted such a horrible shocking video this is really disgusting and the mainstream media just really goes to a lower level

– Hearing MSNBC speak like this I am starting the think Trump may of won the last Election.

Are you gone completely off rail? What? Not a single american will have this nonsense. You just secured Trumps victory.

– Interesting… I guess you forgot to mention that those that attended the 1939 rally… “WERE ALL DEMOCRATS!!!”

– What a load of garbage. This is why I don’t watch mainstream media.

– Disgusting reporting. These people are despicable.

– I love to see msdnc and the rest of MSM continue to destroy any creditability they may have left. Thank you guys for speeding up your own downfall as more and more people around the world tune in to podcasts like Joe Rogan to get their news.

The BBC asks, Putin replies

At the close of the BRICS summit, held this year, October 22-24, in Kazan, Russia, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, as is his habit, took questions from journalists. One of them was asked by a BBC correspondent. The BBC journalist asked the Russian leader whether he did not see a discrepancy between what Russia aims at – which is its own and international security and stability and justice – and what Russia reaps as a result of its policies – which is having Ukrainian drones over its own territory or having Russian towns shelled by Ukrainian artillery. The same journalist also asked whether Vladimir Putin could confirm that the British secret services report that the Kremlin was behind social unrest in the United Kingdom. Putin’s reply was manifold and exhaustive:

① Yes, Russia was not shelled prior to 2022, but before that date Russia had experienced something much worse. Russia was ignored by the West, which attempted to assign to Russia a status of a semi-independent country, a mere provider of resources. Prior to 2022 Russia was doomed to become the West’s dependency. Obviously, under such circumstances the country could not hope to prosper, to develop, to even exist in the long run. The West did not respect Russia’s interests, Russia’s tradition, anything Russian.

② As for justice, continued Russia’s president, the West does all in its power to exploit the world under various pretexts. One of them was the time of the pandemic during which both the United States and the European Union printed billions of their respective currencies with which they bought up huge amounts of foodstuffs and caused worldwide inflation. By flooding the world’s markets with billions of additional dollars and euros, the West was in a position to consume much more than it produced, much more than the rest of the world. The other pretext is of course ecology. The West demands that energy produced on fossil fuels be reduced, which is done in the name of protecting the planet’s climate. That might be a noble purpose, but the point is that African and some Asian countries cannot afford to do away with fossil fuels. To do so, that is, to use modern technologies of energy production, they would need to get credit, which the West only offers with very high interest. For all practical purposes such an approach on the part of the West is turning former African colonies into modern-type colonies. Is that justice that the BBC journalist meant?

Was it just not to respect Russia’s demand that Ukraine not become a NATO member? Was it just on the part of the West to enter into agreements with Russia with the intention of breaking them? Was it just not only to turn Russia’s underbelly – Ukraine – into anti-Russia, but to even build military bases there? Was it just to carry out the coup d’etat in Ukraine? These are glaring acts of injustice and Russia wants to and will change them.

③ As for the claim of the British secret services that Russia allegedly sows discord in British society and is behind street unrest, President Putin said that the social upheaval observed in the West is a direct result of the policies of Western governments which deteriorated economic conditions in their countries due to sanctions and giving up on Russia’s cheap resources. What does Russia have to do with all this, asked the Russian leader.

Interesting points were raised. It may well be that Russians are instigating unrest in Western societies. Does that come as a surprise? One would be flabbergasted if Russia did not try to pay the West in kind. Indeed, the retaliation might be even more painful.

As for the inflation and robbing the globe of its produce and resources by printing money: well, that’s precisely why BRICS countries cooperate and are trying to create a parallel financial system. They have long been victims of financial machinations, and they have long realized the mechanism of being robbed by inflation brought about by foreign powers. If India’s or Brazil’s central banks issue much more money than warranted, the resultant inflation hits them directly, some other countries indirectly, and still some others not at all. If, however. The United States generates far more dollars than is reasonable, the resultant inflation hits the whole globe instantaneously and directly simply because the dollar is the global international currency. Thus, the United States solves its economic problems and burdens the rest of the world in the process. This is, by the way, the point that President Putin has raised many times during his speeches or interviews.

Where are you from? – an offensive question

We are witnessing an assault of abnormality in the Western world to wit that you must ask which of the many pronouns your interlocutor wishes to be addressed with, but you must not ask about where he comes from! To put it otherwise, you are not supposed to be ashamed of the fact that you are evidently unhinged if you think that you are xi or ze, but you are supposed to feel ashamed of the country you or your ancestors were born in. How is that possible that such abnormality took root?

We have long been conditioned by the powers that be that we should not ask anybody about his religion. Why? Because that’s a private matter of each individual, they say. So what? Is not your name or other details concerning your family and your profession private matters of yours? Why should a question about what you believe in be banned? Why should a question about what country you are from be forbidden? Why should a question about your nationality be prohibited? Are these pieces of information shameful? Am I asking my interlocutor about whether he has syphilis? About whether she has HIV? What’s so shameful about anybody’s ethnicity? Hey, we are supposed to believe that all types of heritage are equally valuable; more, we are all told that people from cultures other than European even surpass our – European – cultural achievements. So what’s the matter? All those people of Asian or African heritage ought to be proud of where they or their parents or their ancestors are from; more, they ought to be pleased whenever they are asked about their ethnicity, their faith, their origin.

As it is, everything that we are fed are lies. On the one hand we are told that newcomers contribute enormously to European culture bringing in their own heritage, on the other – God forbid asking them about the country of their origin! Obviously, some ethnicities are perceived by the individuals themselves as shameful. How otherwise? Indeed, if you are asked about your profession and you happen to be a doctor or an engineer, you are more than pleased to give your interlocutor this item of information about yourself. You feel proud and you know that your interlocutor is going to admire you, to envy you, or to hold you in high esteem. Conversely, if you happen to be employed as someone who cleans offices or collects trash, you certainly prefer not to be asked about what you do for a living, and you certainly want to avoid any talk about professions. If such a talk is unavoidable, you resort to using fancy words to (re)name your profession, like you say you are a cleaning lady – as if ladies have ever been associated with doing the cleaning!

Much the same is true about ethnicity, about nationality, about heritage. No one feels ashamed of saying I am American, French, British or Japanese. Somehow people from a large number of countries or nations feel ashamed when asked about their origin. It is not that we make them feel ashamed: they themselves feel so. That only shows the inferiority complex that they have developed and suffer from. Yet, banning questions about someone’s country of origin is not going to help individuals with that inferiority complex. If it is not their speech that betrays them, it certainly is their looks. Children of naturalised foreigners may speak the language of the adopted nation just as native speakers, but their biology – that is their looks – are not going to change unless – of course, unless – consecutive generations of arrivals keep intermarrying with the host race, which in turn is ethnic suicide, is it not?

Gef 87: Through the Looking-Glass, and What we Find There

What would you say if you learnt that Gibraltar is of the national security interest for the United Kingdom, while it is not of the national security of Spain? What would you think if you read that France could not feel secure if Russia occupied Latvia, but Russia should feel secure if Ukraine is a member of NATO? What would your reaction be if you were told that Turkey needs to control Lebanon or else Ankara will feel insecure? Don’t such claims sound absurd?

And yet that’s what the United States is not ashamed of proclaiming, namely, that without having control over Taiwan it is going to feel threatened by China.

What would you say if you read that Denmark is surprised by the fact that Germany’s army is much more numerous? What would you think if you were told that Bulgaria points to the numerical superiority of Turkey’s troops? Are these facts strange, given that the population of Germany or Turkey is much larger than that of Denmark or Bulgaria? Yet, that’s what surprises serious American political and military analysts who point to the large size of the army of the Middle Kingdom as if the size of China’s population were no factor in it at all.

Such are some of the statements that you can find while reading yet another treatise issued by the notorious Research And Development (RAND) think-tank, a treatise that Gefira 87 has delved into. This many-pages boring document echoes the same claims that Washington has been repeating for decades. Nothing new in terms of American take on the world, but a fascinating insight into the psyche of the world’s hegemon, the hegemon who is not ashamed of proclaiming to the whole globe that he is entitled to exercise the exclusive right to rule it over, to boss it over, and to bully others if they happen to hold a different opinion. An insight into a narcissist’s soul, a soul of the narcissist who has accustomed himself to playing the main role and cannot bear other protagonists anywhere in sight; a narcissist who is ready to set the world ablaze in order to maintain its dominant position.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #87is available now

The hegemon’s psyche in the hegemon’s own words
Chinese tiger and Russian roaring lion
America’s inefficiency
Gold oder…?

Alice Weidel – Sahra Wagenknecht

A few days ago Die Welt held a TV duel between Alice Weidel, one of the leaders of the Alternative fur Deutschland, and Sahra Wagenknecht from her own political movement: Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. All Germany is said to have been excited about the event and commented on it afterwards. The moderator – i.e. “a person whose job is to make sure that a discussion or a debate is fair” (an Oxford dictionary definition of the meaning of the word) – did his best to make the debate hard to follow and unpleasant to listen to with all his frequent interruptions and an evident bias against Alice Weidel. But then nothing new under the sun: such debates are held not to help the viewers to form an opinion, but to convince them who is the bad and who is the good guy. But we digress.

There were five topics: 1) Israel, 2) Ukraine, 3) economy, 4) the United States, and 5) immigration. We are not going to cover all the topics nor evaluate which of the women appeared better: all this has been discussed by many media outlets, and the consumers of those media will mostly adopt the evaluation offered to them by the journalists rather than rely on their own senses, but then there you have it.

What we are going to do here is to say a few words about the topic of immigration or rather about what was not said during the duel. Alice Weidel represented that political movement that would like to reduce, stop or even reverse immigration, while Sahra Wagenknecht, although speaking also in favour of reducing or controlling the influx of settlers, was more reserved and – typically for any leftist politician – defended the “rights of the poor people.” What the two women said about immigration was nothing new, as already mentioned. Yet, one invariably wonders why the party that is against uncontrolled immigration or against immigration at all does not roll out the simplest arguments to support their political stance. These are the following:

① A nation – in this case Germans – has the right not to want to see strangers in their own country, just as an individual or a family has the right to have his home for himself, for his family.

② “New” Germans are false Germans or are Germany’s fair-weather friends (if they are friends at all, which in many cases is evidently not true): they have left their own nations in need and have adopted a new national identity only because of material gains. That means that once Germany finds itself in serious trouble they are going to leave for a country with “fair weather.”

③ The argument that Germany needs skilled workers and educated people (we disregard the fact that it is mostly unsklilled and uneducated people that arrive) is another term for exploitation of other nations, of other countries; rather than colonizing a Third World country and despoiling it of its material resources, Germany is going to despoil Third World countries of their best human resources (assuming still that it is the skilled and the educated that immigrate to Germany), thus making it hard or impossible for those countries to ever elevate themselves economically, which is going to generate new waves of “poor” people who will decide to leave for Europe.

④ No political party raises the demographic problem: why not encourage native Germans to have children and thus provide labour for the economy (again assuming that it is labour that the importers of humans are after)?

⑤ The idea that a tiny country like Germany can save the world from poverty and war and exploitation by accommodating even a few million people is ridiculous at best and downright foolish at worst; Africa’s population is booming and exceeding a billion while the economic and political problems are multiplying: there will never be an end to wars or economic crises. Besides, an attempt to save the global population (billions of people) by a tiny Germany (or other European country) is as absurd as the idea of saving the planet in that the same tiny Germany shuts down its power houses operating on coal or uranium.

⑥ We cannot talk about a German nation the moment there are millions of Poles, Turks, Serbs, Croats, Afghans, and members of the many Africans tribes; we cannot talk about German culture or heritage the moment there is a myriad of faiths and creeds, a myriad of cultural codes inside the country, apparently mixed as if in a cauldron, actually living in parallel worlds.

⑦ If Germany feels threatened by Russia (or any other state for that matter) as it is often said, then it needs a patriotic, cohesive society. Is there anyone so gullible as to think that a Nigerian or an Afghan is going to fight for Germany? Is that the reason why this Nigerian or that Afghan has left his own country in need and settled in an affluent Germany? Have all those Turks and Poles and Croats and, and, and come to Germany to fight for it and risk their lives?

⑧ No one dares to point to mental or – if you will – psychological differences between the human biological types, differences that are congenital. Congenital differences cannot be changed, and as such they will always cause unsolvable societal tensions that will erupt in deep divisions and – ultimately – civil war.

These are valid arguments against immigration.

Orbán’s speech in European Union

On 9 October 2024, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a speech in the EU Parliament, occasioned by Hungary’s current half-year presidency. He addressed his words to the European government misleadingly being sold off as a commission and the European president, also misleadingly being referred to by some other tricky title. The Hungarian Prime Minister, known for his common sense and a courageous political stance, threw a gauntlet to Ursula von der Leyen’s stiff face, to wit that the European Union must change, and that Hungarian presidency would be dedicated to this task.

Viktor Orbán pointed to the decline in European economy and named the causes: the green transition and the fact that Europe had cut itself off from Russian oil and gas. The green transition was not feasible for the foreseeable future while lack of the cheap energy resources caused the prices of electricity to shoot through the roof.

The hottest topic that the Hungarian Prime Minister touched was immigration. Viktor Orbán has been known for years for his stance against irresponsibly letting in millions of people from outside the continent. As we remember, he had a protective fence built along Hungary’s southern border, and has never slavishly bowed to the EU’s policy of importing settlers from other continents. The Hungarian Prime Minister demanded that Europe be protected by all member states. Evidently in an attempt to win the leftists members of the European Union’s parliament to his argumentation, he said immigration caused a rise in anti-Semitism, violence against women and homophobia – the three points that the left is so sensitive about. Forlorn hopes. Viktor Orbán is regarded with contempt by the European leftists managers who would gladly throw him in Dantesque inferno quite close to Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko or – for that matter – General Franco or Benito Mussolini. The Hungarian Prime Minister never shied away from explosive topics and never catered to the woke narrative, nor was he afraid of any backlash. Viktor Orbán was unapologetically himself, which cause much huffing and puffing among the leftist parliamentarians.

One may admire Viktor Orbán’s courage and at the same time wonder at his naiveté: does he not know that immigration is wanted, desired, planned? No argumentation against it – be it reasonable or emotional – will ever work.

The Hungarian Prime Minister also advocated Serbia’s membership in the European Union, absent which the continent and especially the Balkans, as he said, would never be politically stable.

Everything and anything that he said was enough to rough a few feathers among the left-minded European do-gooders, but to make them even angrier, towards the end of his speech he said that Hungarians “strive for a Europe that fears God” [emphasis added]. Gee…
No wonder then that the Ursula von der Leyen, the Union’s president, sitting in the director’s chair and watching whether the politically correct script is followed, exploded and said a couple of bitter words aimed at Viktor Orbán.

In an attempt to shame Viktor Orbán and especially to win the audience, Ursula von der Leyen compared Ukraine’s resistance in its war with Russia to the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (a comparison Viktor Orbán vehemently objected to in his response later on as unsubstantiated), and the head of the European Commission had even the cheek to say that Ukraine defended its sovereignty as if sovereignty of particular national states was the value that the European Union cared for! This is insolence pure also in the face of the fact that “Brussels takes Hungary to court over its controversial ‘national sovereignty’ law” because this legislation is in breach of the EU law”!

In a slightly emotional response Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán concluded that the European parliament was not interested in a serious discussion of the problems that he had presented, but, sadly, only in levelling accusations at Hungary. This being so, Viktor Orbán did not feel restrained by courtesy and fired away what he really wanted to say to the audience in the first place, to wit that the European Union’s parliament was known for attacking right-leaning and patriotic politicians or deputies. Viktor Orbán said – this time openly – that the Union had recklessly entered to Ukrainian conflict and grossly miscalculated, but, rather than thinking about talks, about diplomacy, it continued to prolong its failed policy, with no regard for the thousands people who dying every week in the east.

Then the Hungarian Prime Minister hit the nail on the head, exposing the European Union’s hypocrisy as he said that many Western countries were “trading covertly with the Russians through Asia, bypassing the sanctions.” He went on to say that “the European Union exports a billion dollars more a month to certain Central Asian countries than it did before the Russia–Ukraine war. (…) This is how German, French and Spanish companies avoid sanctions. (…) Since the outbreak of the war, you Western countries have actually bought 8.5 billion dollars’ worth of Russian oil from Turkish or Indian refineries. (…) In 2023 you Westerners bought 44 per cent more Russian oil than a year earlier. The tax revenue your companies paid into Russia’s budget was 1.7 billion dollars. And you’re accusing us of friendship with Russia?”

A voice of defiance, indeed. The reception that the Hungarian Prime Minister received from the left-minded majority of the parliament was hostile to say the least. Add to this no or little support from other central European countries like Poland or Czechia, terrified of saying the wrong word and you have the picture: a lone sheriff in a den of wreckers of Europe.

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