In an obituary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, published in July 1914, the most famous Viennese satirist of his time, Karl Kraus, called Austria “the laboratory of the Apocalypse.” A hundred and ten years later, in July 2024, a series of events provided evidence that this designation now belongs to the Western world headed by the United States. 

Not unlike the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy that birthed both Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud, today’s West has unleashed many devastating neuroses on the world, as manifested by the nauseating spectacle in Paris at the opening of the Olympic Games. Just as Kraus called Austria’s Habsburg Empire in its twilight the “empire on which the sun never rises” and mocked it for being “desperate, but not serious,” so America’s benighted “collective West” seems equally complacent about its own pending collapse.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán provided a compelling summary of the West’s problems on July 27 in a speech in Tusnad, Romania. If Western civilization does survive, his two-hour, 11,000-word oration will be remembered as a great speech by a great statesman. It deserves scrutiny before we consider the specific events of the past summer that prove him right.

Addressing an ethnic Hungarian audience in the Romanian region of Transylvania, Orbán started by noting the fierce criticism directed by the senior apparat of the European Union at his efforts to initiate negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, and especially his visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The EU founding treaty says that “the Union’s aim is peace,” Orbán noted, yet in Brussels “they say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace.” He continued:

[We] are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that it will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war … Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that, in Newspeak, peace is war and war is peace.

Orbán stressed that current Western values, allegedly universal, are resolutely rejected by an ever-increasing number of countries around the world. Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, he opined, because LGBTQ ideology has become the key to the propagation of Western values. 

The war itself, Orbán said, “is our red pill … European policy-making has collapsed.” The EU is unconditionally following the U.S. Democrats’ foreign policy agenda, even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive.

“We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged,” he said. “Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property—which was obviously carried out under U.S. direction—go unchallenged … This is nothing but an act of submission.”

The result is “the spiritual solitude of the West,” Orbán said. The West had behaved as a role model for the world, promoting liberal democracy and a green economic policy. But over the last two years there has been a 180-degree reversal in the West’s reputation. The Western demand for the world to stand against Russia has been defied. That even India, the most populous democracy, is on the Russian side is “astonishing,” Orbán said. That a NATO member, Turkey, refuses to accept Western demands, and that the Muslim world sees Russia not as an enemy but as a partner, is equally unexpected.

The main problem, according to Orbán, is the internal disintegration of the West. Its behavior is irrational because its elites deny the nation-state. Yet the nation-state is not a legal abstraction or construct. It is rooted in particular cultures, he said; it is the manifestation of a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth, and it creates shared moral imperatives based on consensus. The nation-state is not a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century, Orbán added, because “nation-states have a biblical basis, since they belong to the order of creation.” He continued:

In Scripture, we read that at the end of time there will be judgment not only of individuals but also of nations … But, in complete contrast, Westerners … deny the existence of a shared culture and a shared morality based on it … They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal internationalist conception of space.

In Eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing one another, while Western Europe is letting in hundreds of thousands of migrants from foreign civilizations. The Western elites are oblivious to this absurdity, Orbán said.

Meanwhile, there is growing resistance within Western societies to migration, to genderism, to war, and to globalism, he said.

The elites are condemning the people for drifting towards the right. The feelings and ideas of the people are labeled as xenophobia, homophobia, and nationalism … We have an elite that does not want to represent the people and is proud of not wanting to represent them; and we have the people, who are not represented. 

According to Orbán, the West’s problems stem from the fact that its leading nation, the United States, is in an internal struggle over its core identity. Donald Trump’s goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state and raise them back to the status of a nation-state. That is why the stakes in the U.S. election are so enormous, Orbán said:

This is why they want to prevent Donald Trump from running in the election. This is why they want to put him in jail. This is why they want to take away his assets. And if that does not work, this is why they want to kill him. And let there be no doubt that what happened may not be the last attempt in this campaign.

Both in America and in Europe, according to Orbán, we are living with the fruits of the “grand illusion of the 1960s”—the belief that the individual would be freer after the dissolution of any kind of collective bond. It has since become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and within a community. In the West, bonds have been successively discarded: the metaphysical bonds with God; the national bonds with the homeland; and natural bonds with the family. But for the Hungarian statesman, the secret of greatness is to serve something greater than oneself:

There are not many of these: your God, your country and your family. But if instead you focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity. And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness.

Europe has two options. The first is what Orbán calls “the open-air museum,” a Europe absorbed by the U.S. and incapable of developing autonomously. The second option is strategic autonomy, which would include a European military alliance separate from the U.S., European energy self-sufficiency (which is impossible without nuclear energy), and a new reconciliation with Russia. This means, he contended, that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project:

In both cases—the open-air museum or if we join the competition—we must be prepared for the fact that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO or the European Union … Ukraine will return to the position of a buffer state. If it is lucky, this will come with international security guarantees, which will be enshrined in a U.S.–Russia agreement, in which we Europeans may be able to participate.

In future generations, Orbán concluded, just like in our own time, there will essentially be only two positions: liberals and nationalists.

There will be liberal, slim-fit, avocado-latte, allergen-free, self-satisfied politicians on one side, and on the other side there will be streetwise youngsters of nationalist mindset, with both feet firmly on the ground. Therefore we need to start recruiting young people—now, and for us. The opposition is constantly being mobilized by the liberal Zeitgeist. Their recruitment happens automatically … But the national camp will only come out at the sound of a trumpet and can only rally under a flag that has been raised high.

The Hungarian nation is fortunate to have at its helm a man with such clarity of vision and purpose. Orbán is that rarest of species: a conservative intellectual steeped in Christian faith who is also a talented and successful political operative. In the weeks immediately preceding his speech, five major events proved his diagnosis of the Western malaise right.

First, the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 27 was the most openly blasphemous anti-Christian manifestation in history. For three hours, phantasmagorical scenes followed one another at a frenetic pace, including a repulsive nude blue man on a giant plate. The crude queer mockery of the Last Supper was a grandiloquent celebration of the France rooted in the Jacobin Terror—of that authentically evil “Anti-France” awash in Christian blood—which fit seamlessly into the U.S.-made straitjacket of wokedom and queerdom.

It was a veritable satanic orgy free from all limits, yet strangely dull in its calculated effort to hurt, to shock, and to offend. On the plus side, it has revealed the collective West to the rest, in all its degenerate grotesqueness.

Second, on July 30, Tamás Menczer, spokesman for Orbán’s ruling Fidesz-Christian Democrats, said that Brussels wants to “flood” Hungary with migrants, “but it will not succeed.” A European Court ruling imposing a 200 million euro ($219 million) fine on Hungary—on the ground that the Hungarian migrant system does not meet EU regulations—was “politically motivated,” he added.  

Of course it was. Hungary, which took over the EU’s rotating presidency on July 1, had already said it would not pay a huge fine imposed by the Luxembourg-based court for allegedly violating EU asylum rules. In June, the court fined Hungary and imposed a daily 1 million euro penalty for not carrying out its 2020 ruling that it must obey Brussels-dictated procedures for asylum seekers. Budapest only allows asylum seekers to submit their application at Hungarian embassies abroad, and does not allow asylum seekers to leave detention centers while their cases are considered.

Third, on July 16, the German government banned the “right-wing extremist” German magazine Compact, accusing it of whipping up “unspeakable” hatred and undermining the country’s constitutional democracy. In what she called a “hard blow” against the far right, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser ordered dawn raids on four properties linked to the magazine, which is ideologically close to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

Faeser said her ban against a “key mouthpiece for the right-wing extremist scene” was proof that the government was “taking action against the intellectual arsonists who want to incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and defeat our democratic state.”

This crackdown was prompted by a recent Compact cover that proclaimed “Germany of the Germans.”

Faeser’s statement following the raids on the magazine was short: “Our message is very clear—we will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs to Germany and who does not.” 

Fourth, on July 17, the board of the German Journalists Association (DJV), a professional union, announced that its members will no longer interview politicians of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), “regardless of its electoral standing at the state level.” That reveals a strange attitude about the role of the media immediately before the state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, where the AfD is the most popular political party. 

DJV members—which include most of German’s working journalists—are now forbidden from covering events held by “anti-constitutional organizations and organizations close to them.”

DJV Federal Chairman Mika Beuster justified this unprecedented decision by asserting that “the AfD is trying to destroy discourse.” That is a stunning claim indeed: The journalists’ union has decided to counter the alleged intent of the third-largest party in the Federal Republic to stifle discourse by ruling out discourse altogether. 

More than 27,000 journalists belong to the DJV, including editors and reporters from most German daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, as well as photographers and thousands of professionals in broadcast television and online formats. None were consulted about this decision, but all will be obliged to comply with the ban on interviewing AfD politicians or risk being stripped of their union membership.

Lastly, this year Germany is celebrating the 75th anniversary of its constitution, which guarantees “freedom of the press and freedom of reporting.” It also states, “There is no censorship.” What a nice sentiment. Just like how the EU Charter says the primary purpose of the Union is “peace.”

It would be in the American interest if, 50 years from now, the name of Viktor Orbán is memorialized on street signs, squares, schools, and public buildings all over the United States and Europe. That would mean that the West has survived the cancer within. ◆