Hungary is not a “thorn in the European body” because it is renitent
“Western newspapers have published a number of unfair articles about Hungary,” said Boris Kálnoky in an earlier interview. The internationally well-known journalist left a successful correspondent career with the German newspaper Die Welt to “do something interesting in Hungary, as a Hungarian” – as he put it. As head of the MCC Media School, he feels his mission is to teach quality journalism. At the invitation of the headquarters of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Miskolc, he spoke about this at the Borsod county seat to the North.
The name Kálnoky also indicates that he is of Hungarian descent and has lived in many places before, including the Netherlands, France, the United States and Germany.
“My brother and I started going to Szeklerland in the 80’s, where my family came from, and we were greeted there as if we had always belonged there,” Boris Kálnoky recalled. – It has had a big impact on our lives, we have become more and more concerned with our origins, our history. I was attracted to the Hungarian culture and mentality, so we finally moved home, my brother to Transylvania, I to Hungary – he said with excellent Hungarianness.
He teaches journalism now, he says the Hungarian press also has weaknesses, and the rules are simple.
– My students and I are not analyzing European politics, we are learning to be a journalist, the first rule of which is humility before the facts, which must be followed, preferably without bias. If you don’t like the facts, so be it. Then, with the help of an expert with one or two positions, an interviewee should put together a picture that is as objective as possible. We always need to know that we have an opinion of our own, but we don’t have to write that down in our reporting. The latter is a weak point of the Hungarian press, there is little reporting where it is not possible to find out what the author’s opinion is about things, he concluded.
Hungary as seen from here
“It is gratifying that there is now a government that has realized that ‘thinking with a Hungarian mind,'” he summed up his political experience. – When we talk about a condemnation party to us Hungarians in Brussels and several political politicians, and of course the majority of the media, sometimes I feel that this situation should be compared to what happened when great nation-states were born throughout history. Let’s look at France, Germany, Italy or even England. It has always been violent, often military violence, but cultural violence anyway. I feel that we are at the beginning of a process where significant political factors and actors want to create a European state, and that will not go without violence. This will not be military violence, but political violence. These forces are now going to war against actors who do not want to go in that direction. In this case, against Hungary. Hungary, on the other hand, is in a very European situation, not that this small country is so “spiked in the European body” that Viktor Orbán himself has such a weight in European society. His words are heard everywhere, even by ordinary people and politicians. There’s someone here who states what a lot of people think, so it’s so confusing to them.
The answer to the question about our previous historical role is that he thinks that Hungary has always defended itself.
– Perhaps we do not have to say that we did this in a selfless way, but thanks to that we have defended Europe many times, and the instinct in us Hungarians is that the world is full of dangers and we need protection against it. When we think about it, we rarely found an ally in this fight, we were alone many times. Therefore, perhaps the Hungarians are one of the people who see the situation most clearly and that there are difficult decisions.