Viktor Orban

comelately

Wild Horses
Sure - how many English nationalists make a point of avoiding curry, pizza, (American) hamburgers, (Sephardic) fish and chips, Dutch/Belgian/German lager, etc.? Not too many, I expect.

I am reminded of a joke from The New Statesmen - some Frenchie points out 'The English do not have a cuisine. They have brown sauce'. The English breakfast is pretty much the only thing they can hang their hat on, and the people of Ireland and Scotland would snort at that.

Budapest does have a lot of food, including overpriced 'Best Goulash soup in Town' for the tourists (well obv they're not open, those places aren't exactly going to do a roaring takeaway trade). But as much as I actually like Hungarian food, it's hardly special: my gf made a very nice potatoes with sausage in tomato sauce but I found a pretty much identical Spanish recipe online (it even featured dill).
 

version

Well-known member
:crylarf:

I just saw it on the front page of Reddit and thought it was worth posting. I do glance at Reuters headlines a few times a day though. It's almost unconscious at this point.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
http://abouthungary.hu/speeches-and...e-president-of-the-hungarian-academy-of-arts/

It is customary to say that culture is a battlefield. Today, when we look west, we see this and react with horror. But here in Hungary, and especially for György Fekete, this struggle means something different. It is a struggle we never fight against others, but always for ourselves. We Hungarians want an alliance between national commitment and autonomous artistic aspirations – as he expressed it in the credo of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. György Fekete understood that in our culture in this part of the world, truth, beauty and goodness have formed an alliance in opposition to the forces of evil and massive disruption. Blessed is the country which has had such sons, which has them, and which will have them. It is our task to raise thought, will, work and works to their fitting place. Indeed it is our task to do even more: to carry them forward in institutions in a worthy form and order, so that the cultural achievements of the Hungarians can be built ever higher – up towards the sky. The life of György Fekete reminds us that Hungarian culture is the creative and sustaining force without which it is impossible not only to survive, but even to live. And perhaps it would not even be worth living. But if we root ourselves in it, if we take nourishment from it, if we draw inspiration from it, if we allow it to unfold, we will not only survive, but we will regain – and even enrich – everything that those before us have left us.

One thing I will say about Orban is that he actually has a notion of high(ish) culture being central to the Hungarian way of being.

Boris Johnson has stated his favourite book is The Iliad, which he would have studied at University. I understand he read TinTin in hospital.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's all over Twitter. Teenage reactionaries posting pictures of some Cellini gold-work or a gothic cathedral.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Possibly, but for the most part in Britain you get called a cultural elitist if you dare suggest that binge-drinking down the pub isn't at least equal to anything else. The pub is the cathedral.

Not that I'm against the pub, but it's somewhat transcendental place in the British culture (for example, it's where the po-po go in Life On Mars once they've done their time in purgatory) is I think slightly unique.
 

luka

Well-known member
High culture, and I say this as a very famous and serious poet, has become a token of allegiance to a 'European Identity'
 

luka

Well-known member
It's about Our Glorious Heritage, something we should probably be prepared to die for, or at least kill for.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's contrasted with modernism on the one hand (communist, godless, probably Jewish) and mass culture on the other (capitalist, godless, probably Jewish)
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I’m an underrated politico-cultural analyst.

Read my new work, coming soon: Lipstick Lesbians and the Authoritarian Impulse: Hungary in Europe
 
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