It’s a safe bet that a speech from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will trigger many on the Left, and even some on the Right. His address last weekend, broaching matters of race, was no exception.
“The internationalist Left,” he claimed, “employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim—their claim—that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race.” By willfully conflating peoples and races, Orbán suggested, his political adversaries work to undermine nationalism and nations. Contrasting the “mixed-race world” of “European peoples” commingled “with those arriving from outside Europe” against “our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate,” Orbán concluded that Hungarians, like European peoples throughout history, “are willing to mix with one another,” but “do not want to become peoples of mixed race.”
For critics portraying an inherently multiracial Europe, and denying the reality and legitimacy of peoples, Hungary’s national preferences express an unnatural, even punitive act of racial discrimination. Orbán’s alternative analysis, taking peoples and nations seriously, broaches the topic of race in a manner unapproved by elite opinion-makers in Davos, London, and New York. That by itself is enough to send accusations of racism flying…
No people is more in thrall to this creed than Americans, who have been trained over decades to bristle at any talk of race that deviates from the script, even if it doesn’t mention skin color. Merely bringing up the concept, other than to grovel obsequiously, is a major offense inviting expulsion from polite society. Read more…
