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Since Judit Varga’s posts have a strongly psychologizing character beyond the confessional, I will start here. Today, psychology has become the field through whose knowledge material and vocabulary we interpret our experiences and how we think regarding ourselves, the others around us, and the world – even if we never studied psychology within an institutional framework.
The fact that a lot of psychological concepts have infiltrated public thinking in recent decades, and people’s awareness and sensitivity have increased, is an important step forward. At the same time, our cognitive functioning is still characterized by:
we are hard-wired to accept stories – and if a scenario is activated in our mind, even based on bits of information that our attention somehow catches in the online space, or that are deliberately thrown in front of us, it often leads to simplifications and wrong conclusions.
One such narrative is, for example, what it’s like to be gay in hiding. We learned that it is a state of suffering, since the person cannot be self-identified, alienated from himself and his environment, and even though he would like honest communication, his fear, his sense of shame fed from the outside, his financial dependence, and/or the problems affecting his physical integrity held back by risks. Unfortunately, this is often the case. But we tend to forget that there are also layers to coming out: someone can happily live the life of gay/bisexual men in a way that is known, condoned and even accepted by his political community, while outwardly, in public, he shows himself as a conservative heterosexual family man.
Due to centralized communication and party discipline, no one divulges their secret, and others keep quiet regarding it because they wrongly overuse the moral rule, which is valid in many situations, that it is unethical to force others to come out.
This is how it happened that József Szájer, a founding member of Fidesz – although many people had long known regarding his same-sex attraction – ended up falling from a gutter. In the specific case, of course, the fact that he broke the curfew, tried to run away from the police, and had drugs in his bag gave rise to the suspicion of the crime. The fact that he participated in a gay sex party might be his heart’s-right, his private matter, if the episode did not shed light on the endless hypocrisy of the NER and the deceitfulness of the ideology used to maintain power.
Do I feel sorry for József Szájer because he lived as a hiding gay/bisexual man for many years? Can Szájer, the private person, be treated separately from Szájer, the politician? Is it possible or should it be excluded from the fact that he actively participated in the construction and operation of the system in exchange for various advantages, and in 2011, as the chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee, he himself wrote into the Basic Law that “the basis of the family relationship is marriage and the parent-child relationship”even that “mother is female, father is male”? That you yourself have caused so much harm to LGBTQ people, contributing to their exclusion from the concept of family?
No, I cannot sympathize with József Szájer, my empathy is selective. I reserve it for my fellow LGBTQ people who have been let down and crippled by this government. Those who cannot change their documents, whose existence is doubted, who cannot marry, cannot adopt, whose books are foiled.
But let’s take another narrative, that of being an abused woman. We learned that domestic violence can happen anywhere, even among upper-middle-class people in senior positions, that many, even unconscious, factors together keep someone in an abusive relationship, and that it is very difficult to tell such a story in public because of the trauma and shame. , therefore the rate of false accusations is low, so we immediately side with the victim. This is often the case.
“Everything I’ve had to go through in the past 16 years comes back to mind” – writes in his Facebook post Judit Varga, who married her ex-husband, Péter Magyar, arbitrarily “suffering from severe narcissistic personality disorder”diagnoses as “very talented abuser”and positions himself as a victim. He blames the blackmail allegedly committed by the Magyar, while he himself constantly threatens (“I can go on.”), and the details of its blackmail, elegantly slip over the concrete content of the audio recording. However, he suggests: “How interesting that now that by them [»a balos nőjogi szervezetek« által] it turns out that a hated Fidesz minister was a victim, their empathy suddenly becomes selective. Their silence screamed…but I would also talk regarding this to the profession later.” The profession, which the experts of the women’s rights organizations do not belong to. (I wonder who Varga is thinking of here. Emő Bagdy? Melinda Hal? MCC psychologists?)
I have similar questions as in the case of Szájer. Judit Varga was the minister who was called “politically hysterical” in 2019 rated it the debate surrounding the enactment of the Istanbul Convention (to be signed by 37 countries by 2023 and also ratified by the EU), and also stated “the situation of women is in the best condition in Hungary, there is no need to choose between family and work, the government also takes action once morest domestic violence. All protections are given in victim assistance, social and family policy.”
And now, following her post regarding her own victimhood at 9:41 a.m., at 5:10 p.m., she takes issue with the lack of empathy shown to her and the lack of supportive reactions from women’s rights organizations.
Do I feel sorry for Judit Varga because, according to her, she lived as an abused woman for many years? Can Varga, the private person, be treated separately from Varga, the politician? Is it possible or should it be attributed to the fact that he actively participated in the construction and operation of the system in exchange for various benefits? How did she, as one of the few female government members, and later as the only female minister, take on the symbolic role of “the token woman”, to be the beauty patch for Fidesz’s anti-women and anti-minority policies in many ways?
No, I cannot sympathize with Judit Varga, my empathy is selective. I reserve it for the women who have been let down and crippled by this government. Those whose difficulties have been denied, who even today have to choose between family and work in many situations, who plunge into home care and caring for their elderly loved ones, because they cannot hope for meaningful help from anywhere. Those who try to save money as teachers, nurses, social workers, who constantly worry regarding their children’s education and future. Or as a zero step on where and under what conditions they can give birth to them. And so on.
Judit Varga expressed in his post, is proud to have been Minister of Justice in the government led by Viktor Orbán, and to be a member of Fidesz. That of Fidesz, in which Zsolt Bayer’s statement according to them, they have known for roughly ten years how Péter Magyar treated his wife, and yet they did not intervene (effectively).
It belongs to Fidesz, whose prime minister is Gergely Gulyás In a 23-second video he also responded to Varga’s report and said: “A family dispute with a bullied wife has nothing to do with public life”. It is true that the Prime Minister does not deal with women’s issues either, as he said with a smile back in 2017.
In any case, strong buzzwords – “Hungarian psychothriller”, “talented abuser”, “victim of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder” – have been thrown into the online space, the government media will amplify them well, and the scenarios will start in the heads.
In addition, we can relate to the scenes of a bad or abusive marriage much more easily than to a complicated criminal case, even if it is the biggest corruption scandal of recent years.
I wonder how many people can recall exactly who György Schadl or Pál Völner is, and why the proceedings once morest them cast a bad light on the government as well? Or that in the audio recording recorded by Magyar, Judit Varga – by her own admission, out of fear – says that the Rogáns manipulated prosecutorial documents, that the government warned Secretary of State Pál Völner before the suspicion, and that Péter Polt is not in control of the situation, which is in principle is it regarding influencing an independent prosecutor’s office?
I do not know the details of the abuse of Judith Varga. I don’t know how the painful experiences you reported fit into a more classic victim-perpetrator dynamic. Nor that everyone limited his autonomy in his life and political career, and still limits it to this day.
But it is true that well-timed communication regarding victimhood does not absolve one from the responsibility of previous actions, nor does it erase the legitimate indignation felt by others because of them. Especially since Varga has not hinted at the controversial nature of the situation, let alone given an explanation or apologized. Let’s say the latter is not usual anyway, even if we see big turnovers.
Milanovich Domi
