The historian Mária Schmidt sees increasing freedom deficits in Western Europe and the USA.
The director of the Terror House Museum was a guest on a program on the state-run Kossuth Radio, which is hosted once a month by Culture Minister János Csák. The minister’s starting point was that the West had lost its balance: the freedom of the individual now takes precedence over the order and freedom of the community.
Several bastions have long since fallen
The historian recalled the communist decades in which Hungarians longed for the freedoms that existed in the West. “And then we regained our freedom, while the West completely lost its.” Today in the West, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press and academic freedom are restricted.
“Essentially all the freedoms that are needed to freely discuss common issues with each other,” summarized Schmidt. “The freedom deficits are gradually reaching extreme proportions; the bastions of academic life and the media have long since fallen in the West.”
“You’re not even listening”
As an example of the disappearing culture of debate, she cited the war in Ukraine, in which the Western elite does not want to engage in debate. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly argued in the EU Council that a plan B must be drawn up. “They don’t even listen to it, they don’t understand what Plan B is all regarding, because they only favor one solution in all things.”
Alibi politicians and egomaniacs
The historian sees the root of all these problems in the rejection of faith. Today, new “sanctuaries” such as “sacred consumption” and the pressure to perform determine a hectic life in which superficial influencers dictate the topics, while the true meaning of life, the family, is pushed into the background. “Denying God went hand in hand with the appreciation of the individual, the ego dominates everything, everyone thinks that the world is only regarding them.”
At the same time, the Western elite no longer hears the voice of ordinary people and, in its false self-image, even denies that it is the elite. On the one hand, Mária Schmidt sees more and more “gray, characterless token politicians without ideas and vision” in the elites of the USA and Western Europe who are afraid of saying something wrong. On the other hand, there are more and more politicians on an ego trip who look down on people whose problems they don’t share.
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