Hungary has awakened from a bad dream. Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party has been defeated. And he was beaten despite doing everything possible to rig the system against the opposition.
I'll try to explain this in a hypothetical American context.
Imagine Republicans succeeding in all their gerrymandering efforts while Trump judges strike down all Democratic efforts to do the same. But in spite of that, Democrats still win 305 seats in the US House and a total of 67 seats in the Senate in the midterms.
This was a spectacular rejection of Orbán and a kick in the butt to both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. It is a boost for NATO and the European Union and good news for Ukraine.
These results are damn close to final. Any possible minor changes won't alter the fact that Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won a supermajority and will be able to undo most of the anti-democratic shit implemented by Orbán since 2010.
Orbán has been MAGA's favorite European. Trump endorsed him on several occasions. Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and Don Jr. have made trips to Hungary to back Orbán. Now they all look like LOSERS – bigtime!
Steve Benen at MS NOW points out how Orbán's defeat is a blow to the international alt-right.
Under Orbán, Hungary had become an incubator for transforming democratic systems into authoritarian models. His sweeping defeat is a brutal setback for the broader movement. This includes his many admirers in the Republican Party and throughout much of the American right — including Trump, who enthusiastically embraced Orbán and welcomed him repeatedly to the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
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By Trump’s own admission, when he publicly touted “a strongman” system and endorsed the idea that democratic traditions needed to be overhauled, he made no effort to hide his belief that Orbán offered a model worthy of emulation.
It was a model, however, that ultimately failed, rejected by its victims.
A combination of advance diplomacy, intelligence sharing and military logistics helped put Ukraine in position to win the crucial battle of Kyiv.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Well worth the time to read. Biden gets so little credit for a lot of the significant work he has done behind the scenes in getting together an alliance with Europe nearly a year in advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For instance, who knew that back in Nov. 2021 it was the U.S. who had to convince Zelensky that the Russian threat was serious?
Biden’s leadership was masterful in this regard. Here are some excerpts from this excellent article by David Ignatius:
The first instruction that Secretary of State Antony Blinken got from President Biden was to “reset” America’s alliances and partnerships abroad so that the United States could deal with the challenges ahead. That strategy would prove decisive in combating Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
[...]
The Biden administration’s secret planning began in April 2021 when Russia massed about 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. The buildup turned out to be a feint, but Blinken and other officials discussed U.S. intelligence about Russia’s actions with leaders of Britain, France and Germany at a NATO meeting in Brussels that month. Their message was, “We need to get ourselves prepared,” a senior State Department official said.
Germany was a reluctant but essential ally, and the Biden administration made a controversial decision last summer that was probably crucial in gaining German support against Russia. Biden gave Germany a pass on an initial round of sanctions against a company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in exchange for a pledge from Chancellor Angela Merkel that if Russia invaded, Nord Stream 2 would be scrapped. When the invasion came, Merkel was gone but her successor, Olaf Scholz, kept the promise.
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This U.S. diplomacy gets high marks from Emily Haber, the German ambassador to Washington. “The wording in the joint statement [about Nord Stream] was vague, but the administration trusted the old — and later the new — chancellor to follow up on it. Which is what happened,” she told me. “A sublime form, I thought, of partnership management.”
[...]
The Ukraine threat got red-hot in October, when the United States gathered intelligence about a renewed Russian buildup on the border, along with “some detail about what Russian plans for those forces actually were,” Blinken said. This operational detail “was really the eye opener.” The Group of 20 nations were meeting at the end of October in Rome, and Biden pulled aside the leaders of Britain, France and Germany and gave them a detailed readout on the top-secret evidence.
“It was galvanizing enough that there was an agreement … to fleshing out the consequences for Russia if it went ahead with the aggression,” Blinken said.
CIA Director William J. Burns traveled to Moscow on Nov. 1 to warn President Vladimir Putin that the United States and its allies were prepared to arm Ukraine and impose crippling sanctions on Russia if he invaded. Putin apparently thought Biden wouldn’t be able to deliver.
Persuading Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to take the invasion danger seriously wasn’t easy, initially. Blinken spoke to him at the COP 21 climate summit in Glasgow in early November and provided a summary of intelligence about Russia’s plans. “I basically had the task of telling him that we thought it was likely that his country was going to be invaded,” Blinken recalled. Zelensky was skeptical, according to a State Department official.
Threatening sanctions can be an empty diplomatic ritual. But in December, Blinken and his colleagues began seriously discussing with allies what steps they would take. The initial venue was a Group of Seven foreign ministers meeting in Liverpool, England, on Dec. 11. The attendees publicly committed that there would be “massive consequences and severe costs,” Blinken remembered. As a result, he said, “when the aggression actually happened, we were able to move immediately.”
NATO military planning accelerated along with the diplomacy. Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters, the NATO commander, told me that his colleagues began preparing in December and January the “ground lines of communication” that would allow rapid shipment of arms into Ukraine. They studied entry points for supplies and other practical details. This weapons pipeline delivered Stinger and Javelin missiles before the invasion began Feb. 24 and has transferred huge numbers of heavier weapons since then.
U.S. intelligence provided Ukraine with a preview of Putin’s battle plan. Though Russia had surrounded Ukraine with 150,000 troops, Putin’s real strategy was a lightning, decapitating strike on Kyiv by a relatively small group of elite special forces. The Russians planned to seize Antonov Airport in Hostomel, west of the capital, and then use it to quickly pump troops into Kyiv.
The Ukrainians knew the Russians were coming. Burns had secretly traveled to Kyiv in January to brief Zelensky on the Russian plan, according to two knowledgeable officials. The Ukrainians used the U.S. intelligence to devastate the attacking force at Hostomel, in what may turn out to be the decisive battle of the war. “The Russians had no Plan B,” explained Marek Menkiszak, a Polish intelligence analyst with the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw.
Menkiszak explained...: “The Russians trapped themselves. … It was not meant to be a full-scale war but a special operation” that would topple Zelensky’s government and install a pliant, pro-Moscow regime.
Through the buildup to war, Biden.... had a clear-eyed view of the evolving strategic terrain. Early on, for example, Biden concluded that the best way to derail Putin’s hope for dividing NATO would be the accession of two strong new members, Finland and Sweden.
Biden wooed Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. He called him in December and then in January to talk about the Russian threat, Blinken said. Biden then invited Niinisto to visit the White House in March, and while they were sitting in the Oval Office, Biden suggested they call Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, reaching her late at night. By May, the two were visiting the White House together, celebrating their countries’ plans to join NATO.
The Biden administration’s organization of this coalition to support Ukraine may look simple in retrospect. But it was a complicated coordination of diplomatic, military and intelligence resources that pulled together dozens of nations at what may prove to be a hinge point in modern history. Putin thought he could roll through Biden and the West to an easy victory in Kyiv. The Russian leader made a catastrophic mistake in overvaluing his own strength and underestimating the resolve of Biden and his team.
[emphasis added]
Anyone who thinks that Trump would have been willing to and capable of playing the three-dimensional chess that Biden played with Russia is just fooling themselves.
Given that the US was concerned about Russia and Ukraine as early as April 2021, it makes we wonder now if that was part of Biden’s equation in deciding to honor the previous administration’s commitment to pull out of Afghanistan. He realized that staying beyond August (which was still months later than the original May withdrawal date) would perhaps involve getting bogged down again in Afghanistan and spending billions more on a corrupt government that would never be able to function on its own. He knew that the military resources (at least in terms of weapons) might be better used in Europe. Just a thought.
Jackie Kremer, Head of Library Academic Partnerships & Assessment, Fairfield University
The Oxford English Dictionary (ÔED) selected “post-truth” as its 2016 Word of the Year, beating out such words as alt-right, coulrophobia (an extreme or irrational fear of clowns) and Latinx (a gender-neutral Latino or Latina) as words that showed dramatic increased usage in 2016. The ÔED defines post-truth as “‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’” Now let’s think about this term for a minute: Does “post-truth” accurately reflect the zeitgeist of our times or is its spike in usage an election year fad? I venture the opinion that it is the former and that post-truth thinking will shape our society for many years to come. I am not alone in my opinion. For example, see William Davies’s “The Age of Post-Truth Politics” and David Ignatius’s “In Today’s World, The Truth Is Losing.” This issue poses significant challenges for those of us in higher education. How do we educate our students to be global citizens and agents of change if our culture no longer views the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion as a worthwhile pursuit and even questions the existence of objective fact?
In our new information ecosystem, we see social media as the dominant force in news distribution. We now have the ability to filter our sources to reflect our own points of view, crowding out previous traditional authoritative sources and allowing many of us to create our own echo chambers. This new ecosystem is the perfect environment for “fake news.” Here I am not talking about satirical news, but instead referring to news that is intentionally fabricated to make money or advance a particular ideology. See BBC’s story The Saga of 'Pizzagate': The Fake Story That Shows How Conspiracy Theories Spread as an example.
With so much information swamping us, how can we tell what is true? These websites may be useful starting points:
1. For political fact checking, try Politifact, Factcheck.org and Fact Checker from The Washington Post.
2. To check suspicious internet stories, go to snopes.com. Snopes.com has been debunking rumors since 1995.
But these tools cannot replace critical thinking. We can do more to develop our own media literacy and information literacy skills and to teach those skills to our students. For years, academic libraries have been using the CRAPP test, teaching students to critically look at the information in terms of five criteria: currency, relevancy, authority, accuracy and purpose/point of view. This critical examination process helps us to suss out fake news from legitimate and to decide for ourselves what is fact or opinion.
I invite you to learn more at DiMenna-Nyselius Library’s Critically Evaluating Information Guide. Lastly, the University’s mission statement emphasizes a “common commitment to truth and justice.” I invite you to read the University’s mission and reflect on your unique role in accomplishing it.
“Tuesday was a dark day for the United States. President Donald Trump and his administration embraced Russia as a peace partner without demanding that it pay any price for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. And then, in a statement that turned morality upside down, the president blamed Ukraine for causing the war.”
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post.
The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius was an impulse buy in a Better World Books haul. He was a new to me author and I am grateful for the impulse purchase. This is definitely a thinking man’s thriller, low on action but high on intrigue.
Story opens with a start-up computer company, in where else but Seattle, being contacted by a high level CIA executive who proceeds to “buy” the company and turn…
