Jozsef Antall is turning in his grave

 

The Hungarian Atlantic Council (HAC) established the so called „Jozsef Antall Prize” in September 2023, and decided to award it for the first time to Prof. Dr. E. Szilveszter Vizi (Honorary President of the HAC), Ms Anna Felkai, (‘Vice-President’) and Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO. No doubt, the recipients deserve it, although it should be noted that contrary to press reports, Anna Felkai was at that time no longer HAC’s Vice-President. She resigned her post after President Gyorgy Csoti had put aside a letter addressed to him via the executive vice president, without answering it. At the 2023 February meeting of the Executive Board, he refused to put the issues raised in the letter on the agenda, and removed the vice-presidents' remarks on the subject from the minutes. For Ms Felkai, the recognition she has received may have been a 'consolation prize' to silence her, because earlier she had harshly criticized the new Secretary of the HAC, who had taken over the correspondence and other executive duties from her (which she had been doing free of charge for about 10 years). Spearheading those tasks was the management of tenders, i.e. acquiring financial support from various government agencies. Mr. Gyarmati undertook those tasks on a commission basis.

On 13 January 2024, Mr. Gyorgy Csoti proudly reported on HAC’s and his own Facebook page that NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg was officially awarded the Jozsef Antall Award in Brussels on the previous day and on this occasion Mr. Stoltenberg sent a thankful video message to the HAC.

 The web link to the video message from the NATO Secretary General was probably viewed by all the 34 „likers” and 57 followers of the page. It is worth to mention that Mr. Csoti omitted the video link from his own Facebook page (he posted only a still snapshot from it), but instead of the video, he is offering his own article which had been published in the daily paper Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation), a governement sponsored media outlet.

The article referred to may be considered as a counterpoint to Stoltenberg's video message. If someone were to translate it for the NATO Secretary General and show it to him, he would probably refuse to accept the award and return it to the HAC. Here are some reasons for that:

In his three-and-a-half-minute video message, the NATO Secretary General thanked the President (of HAC) for the award, praised the merits of Jozsef Antall and the activities of the Hungarian armed forces within NATO’s military organization, especially with regard to its contribution to the peace missions. He also referred to the challenges of our time, firstly the Russian aggression against Ukraine, and lastly – i.e. also with emphasis - the (ideological) attacks against the democratic systems of NATO countries. Finaly, he stressed the importance of unity and solidarity among member states and welcomed Finland's accession to NATO, expressing his conviction that Sweden would soon become a member of the Alliance.

On the other hand, even the title of Csoti's article in Magyar Nemzet ("We are hoping for a Republican victory") is self-revealing in itself, and its content also self-betraying, however much he may claim to be committed to NATO. First of all, let us note that although the article was allegedly written on the occasion of the presentation of the Jozsef Antall Prize (according to the HAC’s Facebook page), there is not a single mention of the name of Jozsef Antall (or of Stoltenberg) or of the prize. There is also no mention of the contribution of the Hungarian armed forces to NATO's defense capabilities, and no mention of peace missions or NATO enlargement.  Not a word about Finland or Sweden. Instead, there is self-aggrandisement: in the first lines, the author proudly recalls that he was one of the 13 people who founded the Hungarian Atlantic Council. The aim was 'to promote Hungary's membership of NATO and to make the transatlantic idea widely accepted in Hungarian society'. He recalls with satisfaction that "in 1997, in a referendum, the country's population supported membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by 85 per cent", and regrets that "today, the Hungarian opinion is not so unanimous. The former enthusiasm has waned".

But what could be the reason for that? – Explorator asks and clarifies the question: As far as we know, the support for Hungary’s NATO and EU membership is still high, so it is better to ask: What could be the reason of the HAC reaching out to fewer and fewer people with its message (whatever it is)? For example, the organization's Facebook page, as I mentioned, has 34 likers and 57 followers (obviously with a significant overlap between the two), while the security policy expert Csaba Káncz, who is critical of the HAC (but at the same time a genuine Atlanticist), has over 20 000 followers!

 It is not known how many active HAC members there are, but photos of their last general meeting shows that their number certainly not exceeds the quantity of their followers on Facebook.

 Perhaps interest is waning because the HAC has made invitation by the Board the exclusive requirement for membership, rather than openness to the general public, so it is essentially functioning as  a closed club. Or because outsiders are not allowed to inspect the minutes of board meetings even if they request it, only if they beg the Budapest Prosecutor General's Office to intervene on their behalf, as it has certainly happened at least once, although the right to inspect the minutes is required by the law on civilian societies (and the HAC statutes). Or perhaps because, based on some of last year's minutes available (many thanks to the prosecutor's office for its intervention), it appears that the HAC is overstretching itself beyond its financial means and is embarking on risky projects that it cannot carry out without a large and stable state funding. Or perhaps it is because some of the statements in the board minutes reflect the HAC's existential crisis and its intellectual ambiguity about its own goals and role in society. Perhaps it is because the minutes omit many important points, vice-presidential comments, agenda proposals and opinions that the President does not want the membership to know. Or because in the last 2-3 years alone, several experienced, respected, knowledgeable "core members" of HAC have left the association or resigned as vice-presidents. All of them have worked for decades with conviction and without financial reward to further the association's goals (and if they had stayed, HAC would have fewer financial problems and a more integral vision of the future). One of the self-exiled members is a former Foreign Minister and HAC President; another held a senior position in the Hungarian Defense Forces, a third in the Ministry of Defense. Or we can mention the lawyer who, unlike the current acting legal representative, undertook to handle the affairs of the association free of charge. What did they, the members and vice-presidents who left and/or resigned, not like about the HAC's organizational life and social activities, or about the attitude of the President, what forced them to resign? All of them were admirers and guardians of the intellectual heritage of Jozsef Antall.

 All this does not even occur to Mr. Gyorgy Csoti, who instead states in his article for Magyar Nemzet that the reason for the decline in enthusiasm) "is primarily to be found in the United States' regional role and its maneuvers in world politics". Then comes the analysis that Csóti, as "still active chairman" of the Hungarian Atlantic Council, feels obliged to do something "against this background", i.e. to "take stock of the current situation". The historical overview, which spans the last hundred years, is a sketchy one, which comments on the strategic turns in US foreign and military policy (deciding what is 'acceptable', 'positive' and 'commendable', what is 'wrong' and 'unfair' from the point of view of the 'transatlantic idea'). It is crowned by a summary and conclusions. On the one hand, it states that the US involvement in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is 'not positive, to say the least' and that “the relationship with Russia needs to be reviewed, the basic idea being that Moscow cannot be an enemy for the transatlantic area, but only a partner in security and economic matters. It is also a lesson of history that the great bear cannot be defeated by military means... Furthermore, the woke, LGBTQ etc. craze must end" as well as the pursuit of selfish economic interests and the application of double standards. He stresses that the US also has a European culture (“We share a common history and religious roots) and therefore the US must "continue to be a global partner in the fight against the economic and social exclusion", and that the US therefore has "a huge responsibility to choose the future course of the world's history, because maintaining the status quo (the present ‘world order’) will lead to certain destruction".

After all this, he concludes that "The year 2024, the year of elections, could provide a good basis for the realization of the vision outlined above. A victory for the Republican Party in Washington with Trump, and a victory for the pro-sovereignty forces in Brussels, would mark the beginning of a new era. We ask for the wisdom of the electorate."

As a wise voter and a national security expert, I can gently say that the President of the Hungarian Atlantic Council is in fact grossly interfering in US domestic affairs with this not positive (to say the least), disingenuous writing, which is already part of the Fidesz government's global election campaign, full of half-truths and outright lies. He is deifying Trump, bashing the Democrats and spouting the Orban narrative, hoping that in 2024 both the US and the EU will be taken over by the populist far right. In essence, he is declaring a 'crusade' against the EU and NATO, against Euro-Atlantic values.

Has Secretary Gyarmati (of the HAC) raised these issues on behalf of President Csoti during his meetings in NATO Headquarters on the occasion of the award-giving event? Is the NATO Secretary General worthy to receive the Antall Joseph Prize from the HAC after he contradicted the best friend of Mr. Csoti by giving a "strong response to Donald Trump's threat to leave NATO"? By the way, perhaps to the disappointment of the HAC President and its Secretary, as Mr. Stoltenberg has pointed out in Davos, even Trump would not withdraw from NATO. He is not campaigning on this, and with the threat quoted (made in 2020) he has successfully woken up the European member states to the importance of greater and more proportionate burden-sharing (increasing military budgets). Mr. Stoltenberg, unlike Mr. Csóti, tries to convince the American and European allies that Russia should not win the war against Ukraine. So here too it goes against the expectations of the Hungarian government party (Fidesz). Shouldn't the HAC's Antall József Prize be renamed, let’s say, the Viktor Orban Prize, and awarded to someone else?
It is not that the defense of ‘sovereignty’ is not important (if we understand this word correctly), nor that our country, Hungary does not have the right to express its dissenting opinion on important issues in the leading bodies of the Alliance. As I may have said on other occasions, expressing dissent is not treason. But military espionage against the Allies is, and in this respect the odds are against the Hungarian Atlantic Council. In the past year, the President and the Secretary of the HAC have done their utmost to ensure that the appeals, comments, suggestions and criticisms from ‘third parties’ exposing the efforts of the Russian secret services to improve their position in this country and to increase their influence in Hungary through their intelligence and propaganda activities, have not reached the membership of the HAC (and that of its youth organization, YATA Hungary). By contrast, the Russian narrative of the war against Ukraine did find its way to the organization's senior leadership. What could be behind this is a mistery (or secret).

So this is what HAC has become: from a non-partisan organization expressing a broad social consensus, whose mission was to educate the Hungarian public and mobilize them in favor of Atlantic values, it has become an anti-democratic, anti-Atlantic, Russian propaganda mouthpiece of a shadow-secret service: an Orbán-worshipping, rent-seeking, grant-hunting putty band, operating as a closed joint-stock company, whose chairman received a non-refundable grant of HUF 537 million for the refurbishment of his own lake-side luxury hotel in Hévíz. This is how it wants to be credibly independent of political parties, while, as the minutes show, it is lamenting the fact that the HAC's original mission loses sense, because the government is more parsimonious than before and is finding it harder to give tens of millions of forints to promote NATO across the Carpathian Basin.

Why and where exactly should Hungarians promote NATO in the Carpathian Basin? Perhaps it is in the neighboring NATO member states, or in Austria, or in Ukraine, or in Serbia that we should spread the Orbanist concept of NATO? It is no coincidence that almost all the (former) core members of the HAC who have preserved the Atlantic spirit have been expelled, with former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Geza Jeszenszky in the lead. In their place, the organization's leadership was filled with Fidesz ministers, state secretaries, party soldiers and a young titan educated at the National University of Public Service (at the same time, an employee of the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office, a Ministry which also controls the civil secret services and the propaganda machine). The young hopeful seems to have been ingeniously recruited into the network of the Russian-allied shadow secret service with the knowledge and tacit consent of his bosses, although he himself may not have noticed. Such government cadres and the professionals who provide national security protection for them at this level, are trained at our National Public Service University

You can read about all this in the previous posts and in the ones to come.

A little belatedly, Happy New Year from Explorator, aka Morcimaci (GrampyBear).