Some Dictator Viktor Orban Was
Thanks to the Hungarian election, the new definition of a dictator is “someone who holds an election without cheating and steps down and congratulates his opponent when defeated, despite evidence that the opponent cheated”.
Defeats I could take. In actual democracies, defeats come and go and don’t fundamentally alter my freedom.
But an entire western world where those who take vast measures without any public support for them, those who ignore every election result and every referendum result they don’t like, those who pursue their political opponents through the courts on imaginary charges, those who steal and rig elections themselves, those who criminalise ordinary everyday activities and choices, those who push pure propaganda into schools and onto every TV screen, those who create unelected institutions to limit political choice and individual free will, those who lie constantly and criminalise truthful statement, those who send the police to arrest people for opinions, those who worship unaccountable bureaucracies that intrude on every aspect of life, those who demand immediate re votes or reversals if people ever pick something different, those who have and continue to reverse every basic freedom and choice I was born with……
Get to call me and people I like with similar views to me authoritarians while they GLOAT in our suppression……
That’s the bit that really grates.
It’s the combination of them doing everything they can to make it impossible for my views to ever be enacted and my leaders to get into or remain in power, changing the rules as they go along and diverting vast sums in the process too to purely partisan ends and their own enrichment at my expense, while telling me this criminalisation of everything that isn’t them is defending democracy.
It’s knowing that every time one of their puppets is in power they get to radically transform society with no democratic limit on their actions and do whatever they want no matter how unpopular, whereas if we we ever get past the rigging and the cheating and the corruption we are just faced with more rigging and cheating and corruption so nothing good can ever be done and nothing evil can ever be reversed.
And then have them smugly and joyously proclaim that this is the settlement that everyone decent agrees on and that only ‘Far Right’ deplorables object to.
That’s what elevates our losses anywhere in the western world into existential threats and what turns their constant propaganda into an assault on objective reality itself because all it is ever composed of is lies, cant, hypocrisy, total moral and factual inversion and a support for evil ideas and evil things which constantly tells us how absolutely bloody GOOD it is.
We live in a version of the Potemkin village. The fake village of idyllic Marxist happiness constructed by the Soviets to dupe useful idiots from the West, a film set beneath which lurked mass murder and horror. Only in the modern version what is happening is that those of malign intent have another hundred years of training in lies and madness. So it’s more of a Potemkin City. And it’s a media projected image, a flickering hologram, saying All is Well projected onto the ruins of a once great civilisation. In the hologram, those breaking the stones that remain, those smashing down the last walls of sense and decency and objective reality, those engaged in the great deconstruction of western life, history and safety, are according to the hologram, builders and renovators.
The deliverers of ruin call themselves the agents of hope, and the worst authoritarians with the least respect for democracy and liberty call themselves the defenders of both.
