Rede von Ungarns Premierminister Viktor Orbán, 23.7.2022 (engl. Übersetzung)
The world has changed a great deal since the last time we met. In 2019 we were part of a very optimistic and hopeful camp, but the decade that has now opened up before us is clearly going to be a decade of dangers, of uncertainty and wars – as is well illustrated by the scenes here. Be just as polite as the Budapest police were with the junkies on the bridges. So we have entered an age of dangers, and the pillars of Western civilisation, once thought unshakable, are cracking. I will mention three such tremors causing those cracks. We used to think we were living under the protective canopy of science, but then we were hit by a certain COVID. We thought that there could never be war in Europe again, but now there is a war in a country neighbouring Hungary. And we thought that the Cold War could never return, but now many world leaders are working on reorganising our lives into a world of power blocs.
When one observes the world, what is most striking is that the data suggests that it is an increasingly better place; and yet we feel the opposite to be true. Life expectancy has reached seventy years of age, and in Europe it is eighty. In the past thirty years child mortality has fallen by a third. In 1950 the world malnutrition level stood at 50 per cent, while now it is at 15 per cent. In 1950 the proportion of the world’s population living in poverty was 70 per cent, and in 2020 it was only 15 per cent. Across the world, the literacy rate has risen to 90 per cent. In 1950 the average working week was 52 hours long, but this has fallen to 40 hours per week today, with leisure time increasing from 30 hours to 40 hours. I could continue the list at length. And yet the general feeling is that the world is steadily deteriorating. The news, the tone of the news, is getting ever darker. And there is a kind of doomsday view of the future that is growing in strength. The question is this: Is it possible that millions of people simply misunderstand what is happening to them? My answer to this phenomenon is that this winter of our discontent is a fundamentally Western attitude to life, which stems from the fact that Western civilisation is losing its power, its performance, its authority, its capacity to act. This is an argument that the západniks – that is to say, the natural born Westernisers – tend to sneer at: they say that it is boring, that Spengler wrote that the West was in decline yet it is still here, and that whenever we can we send our children to universities in the West, not the East. “So there is no great problem here.” But the reality is that a hundred years ago, when there was talk of the decline of the West, they were referring to spiritual and demographic decline. What we are seeing today, however, is the decline of the Western world’s power and material resources.
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