US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman and his husband.
Biden’s Ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, is a particularly odious specimen in a long line of obnoxious US residents of Szabadság tér since the end of Hungary’s subjection to Soviet control in 1989.
Before him, Soap Opera producer and Obama glamor-queen moneybags Coleen Bell warned Hungarians in 2016 to get on board with the destruction of Syria or face the wrath of DC.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s own father, Donald, did the Clinton Administration’s bidding – which was to promote with the entire weight of the US government the return of the communists – when he was US Ambassador to Hungary in the 1990s. I remember it well as editorial page editor of the largest English language newspaper in Central Europe, in Budapest: fielding calls from the US Embassy demanding that I tone down criticisms of “former” communists in my weekly editorials.
The US wanted an obedient Hungary, not an independent and democratic Hungary. Kind of like what the Soviet Union wanted.
Washington’s overt meddling and manipulation of Hungary’s internal politics has been ongoing from the beginning of the post-Cold War era, when the long-discredited Mark Palmer decided that his seat on the Ambassadorial throne in Budapest entitled him to live like Smaug upon all the gold of St. Steven’s ancient kingdom. Then-Secretary of State James Baker gave Palmer 24 hours to vacate his position as US Ambassador due to the disgusting corruption. Things haven’t improved much since then.
The State Department has repeatedly meddled in the Hungarian elections, trying without success to undermine and overthrow the popular Fidesz-led government. And Washington has habitually interfered in Hungary’s domestic media market, subsidizing all manner of anti-Fidesz outlets – in the name of “independent” media.
It’s OK when we do it, but even a hoax cooked up by the Hillary campaign that Russia might be trying to influence the US elections led the US establishment to spend six-years-and-counting in paroxysms of panic over the “reds under our beds.”
“Tin soldiers and Putin’s coming…”
The whole thing was a dirty lie, but still it managed to cripple our country.
Many of us otherwise admiring the willingness of Fidesz to stand up for Hungary’s own national interest in the face of incessant US manipulations have been slightly frustrated by the extreme patience and go-slow approach of Budapest toward its wannabe new overlords in DC.
But all of that has suddenly changed.
A Hungary that has openly embraced its 1,100 year old Christian values and has, similarly to Russia, banned the aggressive promotion of homosexuality to children in schools, unsurprisingly found itself in the cross-hairs of a Biden Administration that smirks approvingly at the open sexualization of children by men dressed as women.
So what better way to get back at Hungary than for Biden’s handlers to send a man married to another man – with two children – to parade around Hungary as the face of America?
Since then, Ambassador Pressman has been endlessly hectoring Hungary to “get with the program” of the NATO/US war on Russia and has been relentless in attacking Hungary’s attempts to remain neutral in the conflict.
No doubt the neoccon ideologue Pressman has no clue that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians were without consent placed outside the borders of Hungary in the lop-sided diktat after WWI and that those ethnic Hungarians have been aggressively pursued by Zelensky’s regime to feed into the meat grinder of eastern Ukraine.
It’s a win-win for Ukraine: how to get rid of your minorities “problem”? Send them immediately to the front lines to be slaughtered.
It should not be a surprise that Hungary disapproves of this policy of Ukraine ethnically-cleansing its territories of Hungarians, gypsies, and other “troublesome” minorities. So why would they endorse such a policy as laid out by Pressman and his masters in Washington?
But Pressman pressed on, demanding that Hungary abandon its own national interests in the service of neocon Washington and Brussels’ interests.
Then it happened. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó finally pushed back. Hard. Responding to Pressman’s meddling in Hungarian internal affairs, he released a statement:
It’s completely irrelevant what he or any other ambassador thinks about domestic political developments in Hungary, because they have nothing to do with it. So, we ask for more respect for Hungarians.
But the thick-headed Pressman didn’t take the hint, responding:
Respectfully, we do not consider Russia’s attempt to unilaterally redraw the borders of Europe as just a ‘domestic political development in Hungary.’
[That’s rich coming from a US government that has repeatedly used military force in unprovoked wars throughout the Middle East and that has redrawn the borders of Serbia by force after illegally bombing the country to smithereens and salting the earth with depleted uranium munitions.]
Pressman’s snark led Szijjártó to lock and load, firing off a blistering rebuke to Washington’s meddling flunky:
Regarding statements of the US Ambassador to Budapest I would like to say the following: It is irrelevant – absolutely irrelevant – what he or any other Ambassador thinks about domestic political developments in Hungary because it has nothing to do with him. It’s not for him to interfere in Hungary’s internal affairs, and if he wishes to use his stay in Hungary to criticize the actions of a government elected by a clear majority of the Hungarian people and legitimized by the Hungarian people, he will have a very difficult job in working effectively to improve cooperation between the two countries.
Because when we welcome ambassadors we mean it literally. We welcome Ambassadors, people who we believe are sent by their host country to work on improving and developing relations between the two countries on the basis of mutual respect.
We do not accept governors or procurators sent here to say how we should live our lives. That era is over.
Hungary is a sovereign country. No one from the outside can tell us how to live. It is therefore irrelevant what a citizen of another country – even an ambassador – thinks about the internal political processes in Hungary, and it is up to the Hungarian people to decide whether the government is working well or not, whether they are satisfied with it or not.
In the forthcoming Parliamentary elections, this will be expressed, as been expressed quite clearly in recent years, even though efforts have been made to inspire and even finance contrary decisions from other parts of the world. Perhaps even from where the Ambassador comes from.
So we ask for more respect for the Hungarians, even from the Ambassador.
This is a new era in Hungarian-US relations. And I would argue that it is healthy for both Hungary and the United States.
And why am I pleased that Hungary has pushed back? American patriotism. I want the neocons, and all their works and all their pomps, to be smacked down and fully discredited forever. Washington’s aggressive foreign policy does not serve America’s interest, but rather the special interest of the military-industrial complex and all the cottage industries built up around it – including Congress, the media, and the think tanks/NGOs. It’s all a racket that undermines our safety, destroys the economy, and rots our moral fiber.
What should Hungary do? Of course I would like to see Budapest accelerate its push-back against Washington’s meddling, but there is no doubt Orban is in a tricky situation. Openly embracing Russia makes little sense at the moment, but slowly building anti-war coalitions based on a clear-headed understanding of history is not a bad idea.
When the smoke clears, Ukraine will have miserably lost. More than 200,000 Ukrainian men will have been slaughtered for a result that could have been achieved in April 2022 with the loss of scant that. Washington’s neocons always can be counted on to come up with the stupidest ideas. Ideas that are guaranteed to lose. And they could not care less about 200K dead Ukrainians. You gotta break a few eggs. They need to be stopped, and we all owe the Hungarian foreign minister a “thanks” for putting that process in motion.
