The Humgarian Dictator is visting Trump in the WH............

[riversedge]

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The Atlantic
‏Verified account @TheAtlantic

The Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán has systematically undermined the institutions that might challenge his authority. One, however, has stood defiant: a university founded by George Soros. @FranklinFoer reports:




Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect

As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.


Illustration by Paul Spella; Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty; Jorge Silva; Bernadett Szabo / Reuters; Shutterstock

Franklin Foer June 2019 Issue Politics


On a relentlessly gray Budapest morning, Michael Ignatieff took me to the rooftop of Central European University’s main building. The newly erected edifice is all glass, sharp angles, exposed steel, and polished wood. Its roof had been landscaped with billowing grasses and fitted with iron benches, as if a section of New York City’s High Line had been transported to Hungary. “This is probably my favorite place on the campus,” Ignatieff told me. He wore a newsboy cap in the winter chill; his reading glasses, which he’d absentmindedly neglected to remove, were wedged on the very end of his nose. The broad Danube and the architectural remnants of the city’s imperial past were splayed out in front of us.

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Ignatieff, an intellectual who made an unsuccessful bid to become prime minister of Canada, has spent much of his career studying the fragility of human rights and the irresistible impulse toward nationalism. When he became CEU’s rector in 2016, however, he didn’t believe the job would catapult him to the front lines of the fight for liberalism. He imagined it would be more like a pleasant homecoming. Hungary is the native land of his wife, Zsuzsanna; he had come to know the place intimately on regular visits to her family. “I’m of a certain age,” he said. “I thought, That’s a nice way to top it off.”

He pointed to nearby government buildings. In one of them, the authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had, less than a year after Ignatieff’s arrival, devised a plan to evict CEU from Hungary. The university is widely considered the country’s most prestigious graduate school—it’s been a training ground for presidents, diplomats, and even members of Orbán’s own inner circle. But that inner circle had turned against the institution that had nurtured it and now sought to chase the school from the country’s borders. As Ignatieff explained this to me, he shook his head. “This was not supposed to happen here,” he said.

Read: A 2014 interview with CEU’s president about international education

Hungary once had some of the best universities in postcommunist Europe. But Orbán’s government has systematically crushed them. His functionaries have descended on public universities, controlling them tightly. Research funding, once determined by an independent body of academics, is now primarily dispensed by an Orbán loyalist. When I arrived in Budapest, a pro-government website had just called on students to submit the names of professors who espoused “unasked-for left-wing political opinions.” A regime-friendly weekly published an “enemies list” that included the names of dozens of academics, “mercenaries” purportedly working on behalf of a foreign cabal.........................................

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[johannsyah]

1. I smell corruption and riot

in the next five years

[procon]

2. Another Trump role model?

He's reshaping the image of America. Given what Bush did before him, I don't know if we will ever recover from the ignominity of this self aggrandizing Trump presidency.

[Peacetrain]

3. So incredibly sad...NT

[Kid Berwyn]

4. Victor Orban is a NAZI

Far-right, Nazi apologist views going mainstream in much of Central Europe

In many places, the shift rightward has included rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators and a rise in anti-Semitic and anti-minority statements by officials

By VANESSA GERA and DUSAN STOJANOVIC
Times of Israel, 3 April 2018, 6:19 pm 9

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — Poland’s prime minister claims Jews took part in their own destruction in the Holocaust. His Hungarian counterpart declares that the “color” of Europeans should not mix with that of Africans and Arabs. And the Croatian president has thanked Argentina for welcoming notorious pro-Nazi war criminals after World War II.

Ever since WWII, such views were taboo in Europe, confined to the far-right fringes. Today they are openly expressed by mainstream political leaders in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, part of a global populist surge in the face of globalization and mass migration.

In many places, the shift to the right has included the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators, often fighters or groups celebrated as anti-communists or defenders of national liberation. In Hungary and Poland, governments are also eroding the independence of courts and media, leading human rights groups to warn that democracy is threatened in parts of a region that threw off Moscow-backed dictatorships in 1989.

Some analysts say Russia is covertly helping extremist groups in order to destabilize Western liberal democracies. While that claim is difficult to prove with concrete evidence, it is clear that the growth of radical groups has pushed moderate conservative parties to veer to the right to hold onto votes.

Continues...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-nazi-apologist-views-going-mainstream-in-much-of-central-europe/

[mopinko]

5. pallin around w terrorists.

like always.