By Melik Kaylan
The change of government in Hungary has revived hopes not only in the country itself, but also in other states, and not only in the political part. The populist-authoritarian model embodied by Orbán seemed invincible. Factors such as the oligarchic economy, the media monopoly, the corruption of institutions, the bribery of the electorate, and so on have contributed to this feeling. In other states, such as Russia, Turkey, Georgia and Belarus, their leaders have been in power for more than two decades. What differentiated Hungary's case is its presence in the EU, with the European structure preventing Orbán from fully occupying the state.
The EU imposed a "reality check". By demanding specific rules for the democratic legitimacy of a politician, he kept reality "measurable" and limited within certain limits. This was a vital factor, since since the first days of the rise of Putinism, the attack on reliable information has escalated and spread across all continents, to the point where there is enormous uncertainty about any important issue. Think: what we know or don't know about the situation in Hormuz. Or about the situation of immigrants in Europe. Or about the situation in Syria. Or about the basics of the stock market.
Putin's Russia was the first to launch this kind of multifaceted attack that causes confusion within a country. Before Putin, the Soviet system took a one-dimensional approach to information, according to the party's official line. Soviet citizens sought the truth by finding ingenious ways to access the West's pluralistic approach, which was based on freedom of speech. Putin started a revolution, allowing many television stations to exist, forcing them to broadcast a series of fake news of false and contradictory views. This phenomenon is excellently documented in Peter Pomeranstev's classic 2014 book, "Nothing is true and everything is possible", which is about Russian disinformation and propaganda.
The new approach caused confusion and fear among citizens about events in the world and threats to their country, with such intensity that they chose apathy and trust in a strong leader. It was not just an attack on information, but on the nature of reality itself – the ability to arrive at an unshakable truth or grasp it. Since then, the confusion has spread worldwide with the help of the internet, infecting all countries - to varying degrees - at least those with open access to the world. Here's a story about a Russian disinformation operation called "Storm 1516," which has garnered hundreds of millions of views under different names on social media. The Bloomberg article is titled "The Most Powerful Weapon in Russia's Disinformation War."
In a country like Japan, where trust in the media remains high, these kinds of actions have little impact. On the contrary, they have a more destructive effect on societies with the free flow of information, such as those of the West. This influence had become a target of the Russian FSB when it began "exporting" populist authoritarian systems in the 2010s – to prove that pluralist democracy with systems of free expression cannot survive.
This fragmented information is, of course, a fundamental undermining of a central principle of Western civilization, that of empiricism, the common basis of a scientific, objective method for determining truth. An absolute verification of reality against myth and confusion. The irony is that the attack on empirical knowledge began with the Left and its insistence on "narratives" instead of truths. Another irony is that this is done in the name of saving Western civilization.
Author Yuval Noah Harari has a YouTube lecture partly on this topic, titled "Why Advanced Societies Succumb to Mass Deception," to which he also adds the immediate dangers of artificial intelligence to the corruption of information sources – and indeed to the very nature of knowledge. All these threats to the collective consciousness, to the basics of knowledge, to family, to community and national identity, were the fears invoked by authoritarian leaders to gain support for their regimes: they promised to stop the uncontrollable changes of modern life just to keep power in their hands.
Orbán succeeded in this effort at a level that seemed insurmountable. But first he created chaos. In 2016, a Hungarian intellectual argued that Orbán was creating one incendiary crisis after another without resolving any of them. In the meantime, he was getting rich and consolidating his power.
Orbán successfully pursued this scenario for years, creating an electorate that had lost its bearings, uncertain of reality and vulnerable to last-minute election gimmicks. It had also contributed to the creation of a "populist international" regimes that financed each other to keep their leaders' parties in power, all using similar techniques, both inside and outside their borders. For example, the migration crisis plaguing the West is a crisis that the Kremlin's policy has deliberately contributed to its escalation, reinforcing populist nationalism in Western countries that it wishes to destabilize. With the help of international funds made available by such parties and bots that enhance their "psychological interventions", regimes succeed in "invasions". In addition, to create financial resources, they form oligarch elites that absorb all financial resources. So Orbán impoverished Hungary.
Several exemplary policies were used. The attack on institutions: institutional controls act as potential enforcers of reality, especially the judiciary, so it must be inundated with endless affairs and corrupted by ministers appointed for this purpose. The intelligence services and the military are treated in the same way. The isolation of the country: it is important for the economy to operate with monopolies; To achieve this, international trade is prevented, while borders are strengthened to prevent the invasion of external actors that will disrupt the constructed reality at home. Internal discord is a common tactic for many reasons, but mainly to divide the electorate into two almost equal camps, where the part loyal to the regime always wins by a narrow margin. It is not difficult to do this when all institutional independence has been eroded.
False flags, provocations, emergencies, and even wars or fear of war intensify as elections approach. As soon as the elections are over, the controlled media are filled with opposition figures who fervently analyze the reasons for their defeat. Above all, the goal of discord is to distort what the people think is happening, what they think they are seeing.
Often these protocols achieve their goals for many years, but eventually they run out and suddenly reality is revealed. In part, the public becomes aware of disinformation patterns and rejects them. In Russia, where it all began, citizens were wandering in a bubble impenetrable by the war in Ukraine, but recent internet outages and Ukraine's attacks on oil facilities inside Russia amount to "reality revealed". The gradual erosion of Putin's power at home due to the war has led to the abandonment of Moscow's allies abroad. Undoubtedly, the weakening of the Kremlin's influence abroad served as an realization, a verification of reality, of Orbán's ambitions. Without this treaty, Orbán would probably still be in power.
Forbes
