Hungary's PM Condemns Critical Comments From Abroad As “Destructive”

  • 16 Dec 2014 8:00 AM
Hungary's PM Condemns Critical Comments From Abroad As “Destructive”
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that “words spoken out of context” had a destructive effect when they involved accusations of dictatorship concerning another country. At a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Timisoara (Temesvar) revolution held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Orbán 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”.

Orbán 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...” Citing László Tőkés, the Reformed Church pastor who in 1989 sparked the revolution, Orbán 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,” Orbán said. “Freedom must be lived not in the direction of unbridled selfishness; rather freedom should serve the public good,” he added.

Source www.hungarymatters.hu

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