Orban condemns critical comments from abroad as “destructive”
Budapest, December 15 (MTI) – Addressing a conference on Monday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that “words spoken out of context” had a destructive effect when they involved accusations of dictatorship concerning another country.
At the conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Timisoara (Temesvar) revolution held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Orban said such accusations were by someone who had not lived amid similar circumstances to a dictatorship and yet had summoned up the “phantom image of a dictator”.
Orban was referring to remarks made in Washington by American Senator John McCain, who insisted that Hungary is “a nation that is on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to a neo-fascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin.”
The prime minister said that in 1989 “a flame was kindled whose light shone not only on Transylvania but on the whole of Romania and Hungary, bathing the Europe of the time in light, too.”
“A quarter of a century later, however, this light, which lit up the darkness of dictatorship, is sometimes barely visible … Twenty-five years after the December events, many to our east are unwilling to accept that the revolution started out from a Reformed Church parish, from a Hungarian community, bringing freedom equally to Hungarians, Romanians, to Szekler people and to Saxons.”
Citing Laszlo Tokes, the Reformed Church pastor who in 1989 sparked the revolution, Orban said words “spoken in the proper place have the creative powers of the gospel … But words spoken out of place have the power to destruct.”
“We did not enter the house of democracy through the same door as others. We had our own entrance. This house, the temple of democracy, is distinctive from the building of a megalomaniac dictator precisely because it is possible to enter it through several doors,” he said. “Freedom must be lived not in the direction of unbridled selfishness; rather freedom should serve the public good,” the prime minister added.
When the Romanian authorities tried to evict Tokes from his church in the city of Timisoara, the resulting protests triggered the Romanian Revolution, which overthrew the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.
Photo: MTI –
Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters
