In an obituary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, published in July 1914, the most famous Viennese satirist of his time, Karl Kraus, called Austria “the laboratory of the Apocalypse.” A hundred and ten years later, in July 2024, a series of events provided evidence that this designation now belongs to the Western world headed by the United States.
Not unlike the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy that birthed both Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud, today’s West has unleashed many devastating neuroses on the world, as manifested by the nauseating spectacle in Paris at the opening of the Olympic Games. Just as Kraus called Austria’s Habsburg Empire in its twilight the “empire on which the sun never rises” and mocked it for being “desperate, but not serious,” so America’s benighted “collective West” seems equally complacent about its own pending collapse.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán provided a compelling summary of the West’s problems on July 27 in a speech in Tusnad, Romania. If Western civilization does survive, his two-hour, 11,000-word oration will be remembered as a great speech by a great statesman. It deserves scrutiny before we consider the specific events of the past summer that prove him right.
Addressing an ethnic Hungarian audience in the Romanian region of Transylvania, Orbán started by noting the fierce criticism directed by the senior apparat of the European Union at his efforts to initiate negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, and especially his visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The EU founding treaty says that “the Union’s aim is peace,” Orbán noted, yet in Brussels “they say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace.” He continued:
[We] are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that it will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war … Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that, in Newspeak, peace is war and war is peace.
Orbán stressed that current Western values, allegedly universal, are resolutely rejected by an ever-increasing number of countries around the world. Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, he opined, because LGBTQ ideology has become the key to the propagation of Western values.
The war itself, Orbán said, “is our red pill … European policy-making has collapsed.” The EU is unconditionally following the U.S. Democrats’ foreign policy agenda, even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive.
“We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged,” he said. “Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property—which was obviously carried out under U.S. direction—go unchallenged … This is nothing but an act of submission.”
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