The Dictator Wants Us Sleeping
After 10 yrs of authoritarian rule by Orban, being involved in politics is not important to Hungarians. A dictatorship puts a country to sleep.
I will try to keep my substacks short. Because in 8th grade I was given the assignment to write the farewell speech for Father Kellerher who was leaving the diocese and my Catholic school in NY and not a single Ursaline nun could get me to stop talking. I had asked them to read it before I got up there but, “you go along, I’m sure it’s fine.” After twenty five minutes, seventh and eighth grade girls were weeping over the depth of our communal grief over Father Kelleher’s promotion to a better position. I remember the boys school, who also attended, looked nonplussed.
When Trump got elected it was a shock. But I realize now, we will all live another day, despite the departure of our own beloved sense of order and what we took for granted.
A dictator wants you asleep at the wheel; paralyzed in fear and grateful he will take on the burden of thinking for us.
I have actually fallen asleep while driving a few times. First time, “Omg, it won’t happen again.” It did. I lived to tell about it and so did everyone else who was on the road in upstate NY at 4 am.
Americans who don’t vote are asleep at this shared wheel. Voters drive democracy and Republicans know it. Hence all the deliberate voting gerrymandering (also done in Hungary) reducing Democrat voting rolls etc. A repeat of money from hell supplied by the supra wealthy, feeds worker bees standing above the Punch and Judy show (a children’s show where they actually punch each other at least what I saw in Italy one time,) pulling the opinion strings of voters, while the Supreme Court nitpicks at the American Constitution.
This nitpicking at our shared Constitution is somehow supposed to make us feel safe enough to give birth to the children they want for the work force and to keep low paying jobs filled for their consumer pleasure.
But suppose, as David Pepper reminds us in his book, Saving Democracy: a user’s manual for every American, that what happened in 2020, when a staggering eighty million people were not involved in politics (I assume voting) is also a “staggering” number of people driving while sleeping? All on the road enjoying or surviving in Democracy at the same time?
To begin to describe what affect a dictator has long term on a country of people, it’s necessary to go somewhat deeply into the experience of an authoritarian illusion of democracy; the Hungarian people. To do that, who better to listen to than a woman who in the 1980’s became an activist and who has remained in observance of the gradual authoritarian process from her outside perch as well as from her direct participation in the Hungarian government.
Before quoting from Szuzsanna Szelenyi’s new book about Hungary and scaring everyone half to death about the influence the dictator Victor Orban has on American Republicans, (I’ll write another substack about it,) here is another meaty observation for context, from David Pepper’s observation on American voters.
“…we’re seeing the emergence of two separate Americas. Not red versus blue. But one that’s politically involved and one that’s not involved. How big is the latter? Again remember the staggering number of 80 million out of 331.9 million people in the United States, in 2020. And in 2022, JD Vance won an Ohio Debate seat with 23.9 percent of Ohio’s eligible population voting for him. Mike DeWine won his governor’s seat in a blow-out, but only garnered 28 percent of the population’s vote.”
Check out Pepper’s pie chart the bottom of page 89.
Ms. Szelenyi got involved in politics as a young teenage woman. That was about the same time I took my life changing trip behind the Iron Curtain with my husband and Jewish mother-in-law from Vienna to Budapest.
We had our young kids with us. It was part of a vacation/ trip to include a Vienna cemetery to put a headstone on my mother-in-law’s baby daughter who had died after the war in a Displaced Person’s camp in Hallein,Austria; a former Nazi Officer’s compound that not strangely, no one in the area could remember having ever existed. Ever. And they were sure about it. (another substack to write about all that.) Hallein is a town in north-central Austria on the Salzach River just south of Salzburg. “It’s known today for saltworks, churches, antiquities, and Franz Gruber who composed Silent Night Holy Night and lived there.” Google does not mention the Nazi officer camp either.
The utmost coincidence! The guest farm we stayed at outside Hallein; the owner distinctly remembered Mania’s husband who had also done black market to survive after the war. It was a warm memory for him. I will tell you though, as soon as another guest couple heard Mania’s accent, there was no good morning for us. There was a look of contempt. As if to think, “look, they missed one and she reproduced.”
And I believe those were Mania’s words.
Ms. Szelenyi became a fully participating member of the Hungarian parliament and in her book, beautifully documents as an activist and as a participant in government, that authoritarianism effectively creates an entire society of non-participating citizens. Citizens fully asleep at the wheel.
A quote from the book by Ms. Szelenyi, “Decades of political unfreedom…An important study in 2009 showed that twenty years after the regime change, civil liberties and political freedoms were less important to the Hungarian public, and Hungarian citizens had less confidence in one another and in political institutions than those in other Central European countries…Half of Hungarians prioritized stability, conformity and maintaining the status quo, and expected the state to provide a solution to their problems…In 2010, a typical young person would speak about politics only to family and close friends, and not more than 9% of them participated in an NGO, and only 5%-7% of them took part in public life.”
NGO’s were under attack in Orban’s new Hungary. Eventually people came their defense but the damage had already been done. NGOs were no longer trusted as entities helping Hungarians. They had become “other.” And dangerous.
So now, “Hungarian youth do not participate in civil disobedience, strikes or protests like their European peers.” Hungarians had been through WWII, the killing of Jews, deportation of Jews, rescue by Communists who blackmailed informers of the Nazi era to inform once again, and now Orban was deliberately watching and controlling a disabled democracy to keep power.
The creation of fear in people had this self fulfilling role! It manifested.
From Szelenyi’s book again, “Fears can easily become ingrained in the identity of people, and lead to the depoliticization of society.”
________
Budapest has always fascinated me.
Chilling for me to read only recently that when we had driven over the Margaret Bridge in the 80’s, late that one fall night, with my mother-in-law, we were passing over the bones and DNA of Jews slaughtered on the bank of the Danube, shot purposefully in the lower part of the neck so they would pitch forward directly into the icy water and be carried away from the city.
I’m glad I didn’t know that. I would have been even more unnerved than I was from the boat ride down from Vienna with about 50 people who had perfected the art of the “normal face.” A face so normal and clothes so subdued, and ironed, that there was nothing possibly wrong with this picture, sitting in that boat except for 5 Americans in the back who smiled too much. Laughed too much. Until they didn’t. And even the children suddenly began to whisper if they talked at all.
Her four brothers called her (my-mother-in law) Mania. She alone survived the war. At 19, the Nazis came to the house and took her family out of their home during dinner, lined them up against the wall and shot all of them, except Mania, telling her to remember what had just happened. This was in Poland. I love my mother-in-law. She gave the sense of how normal living in trauma can be.
________
What I want to say now to the author of the Smithsonian Magazine article in which I found out about “the 2011 discovery of human remains during construction work on the Margaret Bridge,” Is I’m sorry for your loss Charles Fenyvesi. For the loss of your youngest sister Lbolya, who had a newborn baby. Who was brought to the edge of the Danube and shot.
What hit me profoundly, for about the millionth time, is how the information his sister was one of the Jews shot arrived in his article without fanfare. Mania used to do that. Something would remind her of an atrocity and off she’d go telling the story. That was her way.
I’m wiser now than I was as a child greeting my mother’s new smiling Ukrainian friend in New York who practiced English in our apartment. Seeing numbers on people’s arms was not new to me as a kid. Seeing them laugh and smile and know how to laugh and smile with numbers on their arm. I did not know or care much. It never came up. But that was my first exposure to the decision to live; to gather up one’s life force and live with memory.
________
As soon as we got to the hotel on Margaret Island, I took off my new robin egg floral Laura Ashley dress with it’s sweetheart neckline and put on every beige thing I could find. What I could not affect, apparently, to dire consequences later, was the face normalcy, so beautifully described by the brave (reporter and photographer/writer in Ukraine) Zarina Zabrinski on one of PREVAIL podcasts, poignantly interviewed by the writer Greg Olear.
When I heard Zarina describe this “normal” face that was so normal it absolutely indicated everything was just perfect and acceptable and quite all right in the present moment, it confirmed for me that someone knew, in 2022, what this trip in 1980 had been like. I could write about it, as it was. I did not have to write about it any longer as fiction because no one would believe me. I didn’t have to bring a reader along to make sure they understood how it really was.
This story and our present dilemma with democracy will be continued, in some way, another time, on this Substack; ThePractice. I write about this in small liberating but difficult doses.