“Depend upon it sir, when a man sees the wolf at the door and knows he is to be devoured in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully — well, unless he’s a woke.” Samuel Johnson (updated).
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quick! hoist the rainbow flag!
The EU has imposed sanctions on its conservative members for refusing to follow its woke agenda
It is hard to believe in the middle of the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, but the European Parliament voted last week to slap millions of dollars in economic sanctions on the former Communist countries, including freezing pandemic loans, as punishment for refusing to go along with so-called EU “values.”
Their sin is to have conservative populist governments that rejected open border and LGBTQ policies imposed by Brussels. Like Florida and Texas, Poland and Hungary have passed laws banning schools from indoctrinating young children on gender ideology and sexual orientation. And the nations refused to allow illegal migrants from the Middle East overrun their borders after Germany’s Angela Merkel unilaterally ushered millions of mainly young Muslim men into Europe in 2015 during the Syrian crisis.
“Taxpayers’ money needs to be protected against those who undermine the EU’s values,” the European Parliament declared in a press release on Thursday.
Coming just three weeks before Hungary’s conservative nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban asks voters for a fifth term, the EU intervention is nothing less than election interference, says his chief political adviser, Bolasz Orban (no relation).
Bolasz Orban, 36, says Hungary’s government has been under “ridiculous pressure for years” from Brussels because of its conservative, family-first policies.
“Liberal policies became very popular in some of the Brussels institutions, especially in the European Parliament,” Bolasz Orban said on the phone from Budapest Sunday.
“Those politicians, the majority are leftists, liberal, green progressives. Politically, they are on a different side. The problem is they think about European cooperation from an ideological point of view when it never was originally about ideological homogeneity [but] economic prosperity.”
On border security, energy policy, education, and family values, he says, Brussels’ liberal overlords are trying to impose their will on Hungary’s democratically-elected government.
“We are warm-heartedly welcoming the Ukrainian refugees,” says Orban, pointing out that Hungary has accepted “about 400,000” refugees since the Russian invasion, a significant burden on a country of 10 million people.
But Hungary wants to retain the right to distinguish between illegal migrants from half a world away and refugees fleeing a war zone next door.
Brussels overreach
The EU is trying to “destroy all the legal mechanisms which are necessary to secure our borders, the structures we invented, the fence, the physical borders and legal mechanisms . . . They want to make it impossible [to stop] illegal migrants.”
Similarly, the EU is trying to force Hungary to overturn laws passed by its parliament which ban the indoctrination of children in the finer points of gender fluidity.
“They say it goes against homosexuality and sexual minorities. That’s a lie. Hungary is a free country. Everyone can do whatever he or she wants after the age of 18 but we are protecting our children and saving them from gender propaganda starting in kindergarten and they are attacking that.”
On energy, Hungary has come under pressure from Germany and Austria to close its nuclear power plants, which provide almost half its electricity and help keep Hungary’s greenhouse-gas emissions among the lowest in Europe. Without nuclear power, Hungary would be even more dependent on Russian gas, which provides 80% of household heating.
Priorities. And surreptitious solidarity with Russia, I suspect.
