Prime Minister Viktor Orban compared Hungary’s membership in the European Union to more than four decades of Soviet occupation of his country during a speech on Monday commemorating the anniversary of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet revolution.
Speaking to a select group of guests in the city of Veszprem, Orban accused the EU of seeking to strip Hungary of its identity by imposing a model of liberal democracy that he said Hungarians reject. “Brussels, the de facto capital of the EU, employs methods against Hungary that hearken back to the days of Soviet domination by Moscow”, he said.
“Today, things pop up that remind us of the Soviet times. Yes, it happens that history repeats itself”, Orban said at the event. “Fortunately, what once was tragedy is now a comedy at best. Fortunately, Brussels is not Moscow. Moscow was a tragedy. Brussels is just a bad contemporary parody”.
The October 23rd national holiday commemorates the beginning of a 1956 popular uprising against Soviet repression that began in Hungary’s capital, Budapest and spread across the country.
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After Hungary’s Stalinist leader was successfully ousted and Soviet troops were forced out of the capital, a directive from Moscow sent the Red Army back into Budapest and brutally suppressed the revolution, killing as many as 3,000 civilians and destroying much of the city.
In recent years Orban he has used the occasion to draw parallels between the EU’s attempts to bring Hungary into compliance with its rules and the repression the country faced under Soviet occupation in the 20th century.
“We had to dance to the tune that Moscow whistled”, Orban said of Hungary’s days in the Eastern Bloc. “Brussels whistles too, but we dance as we want to, and if we don’t want to, then we don’t dance!”
Source: yahoo
