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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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The next obvious culture war front has been opened by the Hungarian government. After importing the immigration, race, gender topics, they have to keep up with American CW discourse on abortion too. It's the hip new thing to discuss since the overturning of Roe. The state-of-the-art polarizing issue, proven to work in America.

Hungary enshrines 'fetal heartbeat' abortion law

Under the new law, doctors must also issue a report that records that the pregnant woman was presented "with the factor indicating the functioning of fetal vital functions in a clearly identifiable manner."

This has been a long time request by the far right Our Homeland Movement, but apparently such laws exist also in the US.

I don't care about abortion. I don't think Orban cares about it either. It's purely about sowing division and polarization. Orban is happy to push the exact buttons that will trigger the left, in a predictable way. But what's the point? I can see two things: an attempt at distraction from the exploding inflation and utility price hikes, in violation of their election promises, or it's about pandering to Republicans (see CPAC, Tucker Carlson) in hopes of not-sure-what, by doing things that are legible to Americans. It's not like Americans would understand the significance of the local CW stuff, so it has to be photogenic sexy up to date topics of the day for the American right to care.

I hope gun control/freedom won't be the next thing coming up. Because now almost all other American CW fronts have been imported.

Immigration and race aren't imported -- the European Union (which Hungary is a member of) had enough problems with both a full year before the Trump campaign made them the salient discussion topics in the US.

Seven years ago there were a few months when it was indeed an important topic that hundreds of thousands of migrants wanted to pass through Hungary.

I can understand that it's an important topic in Western Europe, but in Hungary it's imported and larped.

I hope gun control/freedom won't be the next thing coming up. Because now almost all other American CW fronts have been imported.

What are gun laws like in Hungary? When I think of Hungary and guns, I think of old stuff, like the F.E.G. factory from the dual-monarchy days, or the Kiraly 43M submachine gun.

I looked them up on the English language net. What a sad story. Armed forces apparently didn't like the AMD-65 so instead they produced the AK-63 which is just another AKM clone. Major export markets to Afghanistan (Taliban), Iraq (Saddam), Nicaragua (Sandinistas) and Croatia (during the Yugoslav war) ended up closed off from various sanctions right around when Hungary joined the EU. Supposedly they mostly do HVAC while the Hungarian Defense Forces started buying Czech rifles.

So, out of curiosity, I looked at the r / hungary subreddit, which is yet another very obvious example of leftist platform capture through the actions of biased admins, meaning that it can be counted on to provide a good summary of the generated oppositional outrage. I was a bit surprised by the narrative that there's apparently an ongoing local epidemic of helpless women getting brutally raped and impregnated by, I don't know, hairy alt-right incel gamer programmers or something (we're supposed to assume they are all White, of course), therefore this new law will mean that hordes of women already deeply and tragically scarred by the psychological trauma of incel rape will, if they elect to undergo abortion, be forced by Nazi shitheads to undergo the additional trauma of having to listen to heartbeat of the rapist's "baby" (clump of cells, or something), which is, like, super terrible.

...huh? What? What % of female rape victims even get pregnant?

Is this theory also imported from US culture warriors? I really want to know.

...huh? What? What % of female rape victims even get pregnant?

Despite being 0.13% pregnancies, rape pregnancies constitute for 50% anti-anti-abortion arguments!

I just checked a few threads and can't see such stuff on /r/hungary. Even for that sub, what you describe would be quite fringe .

(we're supposed to assume they are all White, of course)

According to Wikipedia the demographics of Hungary are 83% ethnic Hungarian, 15% undeclared, 3% Romani and trace amounts of others.

Most of the "undeclared" are Romani, and their proportion is even higher among the younger cohort. Statistics can be misleading.

Also for what it's worth the overwhelming majority of Hungarian immigrants to the Czech Republic that I met when I lived there were Gypsies

If Orban just copy-pastes American conservative rhetoric to Hungary, it is expected that opposition will pursue a similar strategy: not indigenous leftism, but an American imported one unadjusted for local conditions.

Do leftists in Hungary take American frames for opposing Orban, or do they go at it from a more indigenous cultural frame?

Knowing a bit of the Hungarian Right-Wing Intellighenzia, I really hoped that they would have worked hard to not attract the Eye of Sauron (the US)

It is one thing to cultivate relationship with the American right-wing, another one to become the focus of the attention of the global liberal commentariat. At this point Hungary is receiving an enormous and not proportional to her size attention by Bruxelles, and I would not like to see also attention from Washington.

Better to have a lot of abortion and to have more space to cultivate pro-family and anti-immigration sentiments than fighting a stupid CW on a topic that in Europe is almost settled.

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