By: Jože Biščak
What they think of an education system in which children would be taught gender theory without the consent of their parents and incited to change their gender identity and orientation, will be decided by Hungarians in a referendum. The referendum was announced by Viktor Orbán after accusations were poured in from Brussels that they wanted to discriminate against the LGBT community with the Child Protection Act. In fact, the regulations prohibit any sex education, as the Hungarian government believes that sex education of children is a matter for parents and not left wing activists.
It is not just about Hungary. All EU countries are expected to be punished if they resist. The “war” announcement to Orbán is just a test for others who are targeted only because of their conservative worldview and because they dare to maintain that part of their sovereignty that has never been transferred to Brussels’ elites. Therefore, they are accused of attacks on minorities (sexual, racial), “independent” media, deviation from the rule of law and similar incitements. The EU’s founding documents make it clear that European culture is built on Christian foundations, with new countries joining the alliance mainly for economic reasons. What they are doing today at the Berlaymont Palace is the usurpation of power and the betrayal of a Europe of nations without precedent in the history of the old continent.
The core (whatever that means) EU countries today are far from the ideal of democracy and freedom as seen by countries that have been moaning under the dictatorship of communism for decades. This was noticed (and is still noticed) by dissidents who fled to the West from Parties and political police. One such was the (unfortunately deceased) Vladimir Bukovsky. It will be 45 years this year since a high-profile prisoner exchange took place at Zurich Airport between West and East. The Soviets took over the secretary of the Chilean Communist Party, Luis Corvalán, and a Russian dissident and writer Bukovsky, who later settled in the university city of Cambridge, stepped on Western soil. Thirty years later (2006), in an address to European parliamentarians (at the invitation of Hungarian Fidesz), he said: “Left-wing parties and the Soviet Union were strongly opposed to European integration because they perceived it as a means of blocking their socialist goals. Since 1985, they have completely changed their view. The Soviets concluded and agreed with the left parties that if they cooperated, they could hijack the entire European project and turn it upside down. Instead of a free European market, they would turn it into a federal state.”
Bukovsky is also the “father” of the EUSSR coinage, which was created by merging the abbreviations EU (European Union) and USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). In this way, he wanted to say that the bureaucratic superpower (EU) is increasingly similar to the Soviet Union and that the tyranny will only intensify. Therefore, in the last years of his life (he died in 2019), he was considered an extreme right wing populist in the Western media mainstream, although he only pointed out that the EU was slipping from an ideal of freedom into controlled and censored democracies.
Bukovsky was not the only one who fled the communist regime or felt it on his skin and then felt the same totalitarianism in the Western world and “democracies”. There is a whole list of people who have seen Western democracies as a reference to freedom, and today they are witnessing the rise of a culture of revocation and identity wars that may pull once-mighty cultures like a whirlwind to the bottom.
Professor Lei Zhang, who has felt the hardest form of Marxism in China, is concerned about the striking similarity between the actions of Mao Zedong and Western liberal elites. The Chinese party kept telling children that they should only love the communist leader and the revolution. If you disagreed, you were punished. Even in the West today, there is no more free thought when it comes to gender theory, the LGBT agenda, or critical race theory. The mode of operation is the same, Marxist dialectics has only replaced class categories with identity ones. The effects of revived communist totalitarianism must be resisted quickly, otherwise our civilisation will be so damaged that everything will have to be torn down and rebuilt.
Jože Biščak is the editor-in-chief of the weekly Demokracija, a long-term investigative journalist, and since 2020 also the president of the Slovenian Association of Patriotic Journalists and the author of three books.