Hungary's military summer youth camps

[DBoon]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/27/mate-bartha-kontakt-photographs-hungary-military-themed-summer-children-camps

In Hungary, in the wake of the election of prime minister Viktor Orbán, a rightwing populist, there has been an increase in the number of high-school military training programmes, which the government claims will make students more patriotic. The youth training camps that Bartha has photographed have been part of ordinary life in Hungary for decades. Their existence may be more to do with reinforcing national pride in a country that, as Bartha notes, “has been part of many different empires, has been invaded many times and has lost a number of wars”.
...
Their ideology is essentially conservative and patriotic. On the Honvédsuli (Home Defence School) website, the Hungarian NGO makes clear its commitment “to teach discipline, patriotism, and camaraderie to children between 10 and 18”, in a society that they believe is becoming “slothful and disconnected”. Bartha tells me that one of the leaders is a former French Foreign Legion soldier (the other is a “family-support expert”).
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The reality is that these youngsters are being trained to shoot and kill as well as hike and forage, and, at present, the backdrop to this nationalistic character-building is a country in which the “other” is constantly demonised as the enemy, where an ultra-nationalist prime minister has described refugees as “Muslim invaders”. Here, as always, context is all and it is the shadows that lurk beyond the frame that make Máté Bartha’s images so powerful and so ominous.

[muntrv]

1. Hitler Youth.