Manifestations

I went to lunch with David, Zsuzsanna, and Christin on Friday at the CROUS at Port Royal where we had an amazing lunch for under 3 euros. It was actually more than I could eat but I fought my through it.

In any case, David and Zsuzsanna are from Hungary, a country I know pretty much nothing about. As a result of that and the upcoming election, we have gotten into some interesting conversations. David and Zsuzsanna are both for McCain in the American election. When I asked them why they basically said that it was because Republicans are generally more anti-communist and since Hungary had a revolution to get rid of communists, they were for him. There is more to it than that but, overall, that is the basic idea.

Ok, interesting I thought. I guess that's true but my impression is that there are no American politicians who are even mildly procommunist, and most, when asked are virulently anti-communist. In any case, that is their impression and I will just take it at face value.

As we talked further, I learned about the revolution (Friday was the anniversary of the revolution, btw) and how they were still worried about Hungary's current government's commitment to democracy.

When we left the restaurant, there was a manifestation(just means a political demonstration)going on out front. Now, there's basically one of these going on every week here so that is no big deal. This one actually turned out to be a demonstration for judges in France and supported by some other functionaries.Pretty sure you would never see that in America.

Anyway, at one point there was some smoke coming from the demonstration and Zsuzsanna reacted with a little bit of fear when she saw it. To me, it was nothing to be alarmed about. David and Zsuzsanna then told me about how they were part of a crowd that was attacked by the govt with tear gas two years ago on this same day. They said that there were some world leaders in town and that the government wanted things to go well on the anniversary of the revolution so they suppressed the demonstration.

Ok, all of this sounds familiar and not too out of line. But then they revealed that the current government was Socialist. That's right, the one who gassed them and against whom they were protesting because of its lack of commitment to Democracy is socialist. Now, at least to my American-centric point of view, this just throws me off. For America, it would be some group that is closer to socialists, but still not actually socialist, taking to the streets and the major party government, Democratic or Republican, would be gassing them. There is no such thing as a serious, legitimate american Socialist political party. It just doesn't exist. More on this later.

Admittedly ignorant about politics outside of America, I asked some more questions. It turns out David is really concerned about the invasion of privacy that occurred in America after September 11th. He knows about FISA and the debate and wonders how Americans could have allowed that to happen.

Further, no one can understand why you have to be registered to vote a month before the election in order to vote...in a Democracy...in maybe THE Democracy.
It turns out that everyone is automatically registered to vote in Hungary and you just show up on the day and vote. In France, pretty much the same thing after you reach 18 years old. Of course there are safeguards against fraud but the idea is to encourage people to vote, not discourage them. They had revolutions and such to get that right. Oh wait, so did we.

Anyway, he was shocked when I told him about all the legislation and legal action ostensibly aimed at "protecting democracy" by making it harder for people to vote. He was even less happy about the fact that this type of stuff is more often pursued by republicans than democrats, at least in recent historical times.

I left out for the moment how everyone was happy to suppress the minority vote in America up until...uh...uh, 2008???? I know the FBI has ACORN covered but where's the DOJ Civil Rights division when you need them? Eversole?

During this conversation it dawned on me that David and Zsuzsanna, in spite of their love of John McCain and Republicans, wouldn't even be hard core Democrats, they would be at the most left of the left wing of that party. It just happens that their love of democracy is positioned against Communism and Republicans employ more routinely a rhetoric that is more openly supportive of anti-communist principles. So, they support Republicans. But if what is problematic about communism is invasion of privacy and subversion of liberties, you are probably not really for either major political party in America as they all, with a few exceptions, abdicated their responsibility after September 11th.

This brings me to my next related post.