VIKTOR ORBAN PUSHES THE HUNGARIAN NATION INTO A SUB-HUMAN EXISTENCE

A manhunt against a university is a manhunt against the institution of knowledge. The universities are knowledge builders and institutionalized knowledge mediators.

Adam and Eve picked the apple from the Tree of Knowledge upon a diabolical inspiration, sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But this was the way we became Homo Sapiens, didn’t we? Even according to the Bible. The biblical Adam - as the national drama of Hungary, The Tragedy of Man depicts him as well - strove for a better world, for a better society, becoming the symbolic hero, who is autonomous and struggling for human existence according to the very Christian culture.

The use of state power against knowledge and against the transmission of knowledge by legal means is nothing but a dark intention to push back the local population into subhuman, animal existence, which leads to self-annihilation. "When the light of knowledge will shine from every window of the house," wrote the nineteenth century poet Sándor Petőfi, who translated Shakespeare into Hungarian himself – and was among the first who did something against state censorship.

Knowledge in itself has not caused any harm to any nation. Crushing knowledge in the home country of Ignác Semmelweis is nothing but treason, and a crime against the nation.

I know what I'm saying. I spent my whole life with working on Hungarian literature and culture in general, to preserve and enhance the institutional system of mediating culture for further generations. I followed in this the earlier members of my family, such as Ervin Szabó, who laid the foundations of the public library network of Budapest, or even Michael Polanyi, who established The Society for Freedom in Science – an NGO, a civil association, as one would put it today – as a criticism of the Stalinist state administration as of 1940.

As of course Orbán Viktor and his vassals also hide their notions as legislation. They also removed me in a perfectly legitimate manner from higher education – yet one is to remember that Hitler and Stalin considered their respective systems as ”Rechtsaat” as well, or even the Kádár government pretended to follow the rule of law.

Legal actions against scientific activities have the traditions of their own, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei could say something about this themselves.

However, the post-Trianon Hungary, possesses scarce treasures besides the capital of her human talents.

This is now what the Orbán government destroys in three steps.

At first, it followed with passive cynicism that hundreds of thousands of talented young people immigrated to Western Europe, and failed to do steps to provide them and their children education and training to retain their Hungarian identity.

The second step was to centralize the public schools of the country in a manner of the cold war communist Rákosi era into a single state institution, which further damaged the autonomy of the otherwise university and college educated teachers through bureaucratic means and disciplines.

Finally, the accreditation rights of academic programs were taken away from the Hungarian Board of Higher Educational Accreditation and overruled by the Ministry responsible for Higher Education. This was the starting point of undermining the academic and educational autonomy of the universities in Hungary. The present steps and legislation against the Central European University is a clear attempt of the intention of beheading social science research and education in the country.

Orbán Viktor has set himself to cut out one of the trees of knowledge in Hungary, that of international scientific thinking of the 20-21^st centuries. Then - as it is said in The Tragedy of Man – to protect and guide the Hungarians as "woolly animals."