Marking the Day of Hungarian Culture, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that if there is a virtue that deserves the reward of survival, “it is adherence to ourselves”.
“This is why we once again cannot be entrapped by the sirens telling us to be on the right side of history,” the prime minister said. He added that this is the reason why Hungary refuses to get involved in a bloody war and demands a ceasefire, talks and peace. Hungarians have learned that “the right and wrong sides of history will be determined by the major powers that eventually prevail, and they don’t in the least bit care what is good or bad for Hungarians,” he added. “We must stay on the Hungarian side of history even in the most complicated and most difficult situations,” PM Orbán said.
He said that though Hungary was a landlocked country, it was “an island”. Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin 1,100 years ago and were surrounded by foreign peoples, he said. They founded a state and established a Hungarian way of life “which we have stuck to for more than 1,100 years”, he said. Hungarians speak a language no one else can understand and “navigate their country amid the European waves” with a way of thinking no one else can follow, Orbán said.
“We decide who can enter the country and who can stay here; who can live with us and who can’t, and we also want to be the ones to determine the connections of our life with our neighbours,” the prime minister said. “We’re not better or worse, just different,” he said. “And this difference comes from Hungarian culture.”
“We are the Hungarians, who are not and will not be inferior to other peoples, and in our own special nature we are at least as good and respectable a people as any other,” the prime minister said. “Everything else concerns only God.” “We will see who will be left standing in another two hundred years, and which peoples will be screened out by the Lord of history,” he said.