I was thinking whether I should write about this or not, but as I found relevant entries in the Hungarian blogoshpere that justified this post and convinced me too.

There is a relatively young commercial cable TV channel (called Cool TV) aimed at the younger generation, showing e.g. South Park, Reno 911 so I think you get the picture. One of its Hungarian production is an animation series called “Hungarikum”. The leading characters are Hungarian historical figures, but totally displaced form their original historical context and put into contemporary situations. [Henrik’s note: Actually I think some rally surreal contemporary situation the least to say]. According to the Cool TV page introduction to the show, they describe their series: “Who expects an evening fairytale, will be very much surprised.”…”Hungarikum does not respect traditions”.

The language is regularly dirty and the scenes are more successful in making fun out of the characters, than putting them into present context to show critics about the current Hungarian society. It is not a surprise then that there are people who feel that this series is disrespectful and offensive. Let’s see what some bloggers wrote:

Both Hírbehozó and Cavinton write about the story that the Christian Democratic People’s Party [Henrik’s note: a small political party in Hungary] has even filed a suit because of one of the episode of Hungarikum they found especially insulting.

Hírbehozó comments about the people filing this suit: “The same people – as we add only quietly – anecdote with quotes from South Park during their morning coffee and have a good laugh, that the Canadians should be eliminated and that there is never mercy for Kenny.”

Cavinton comments: “it is going to turn into politics and a scandal; media political scientists and sociologists are walking from studio to studio and the number of watchers is just going to raise, which will turn into lots of revenue. And the owners of Cool TV can be happy, their plans have worked.”

Gáspárik Attila admits that he did not liked the series, but adds „Oral sex with the great figures of history is in the category of artistic freedom and in category of good feeling. Art should be free. And the regulation of good feeling is not only absent in Romania.” [pointing to the fact that Cool TV is actually registered in Romania].

(The referenced blogs are in Hungarian)

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Hungarikum

I’m a huge fan of the Global Voices project and I am highly inspired by both the people leading GV and those who contribute to it. Maximum respect to all of you!

So I would like to express my happiness and congratulations to the Global Voices team for winning the Best English Journalistic Blog award at the 2005 Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards!

Tags:
Global Voices

(Actually it is not an incident, but I though the title sounds better this way ., I’m still working on the entry I promised in the previous post so I use some other topics meanwhile, but this is still somewhat connected to that.)

About a week ago (if I recall it correctly it was the 14th of November) one of the leading Hungarian portals – Index – appeared with a rather strange homepage. All of the articles were about the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, but all were making fun out of him. Here is a screenshot from Sztahanov blog. Rumors started whether the portal was hacked or it is just a planned ironic journalist move from the editors of Index. Initially on forums one could find opinions supporting both possibilities. Either a hack from a right wing activist or the PR move of the editors. Some found it funny and other just disrespectful, which is pretty natural I guess.

I turned out the whole thing was well planned ahead. Some opinions from bloggers:

Sztahanov: “According to our reliable sources Index plans this mischief for a week now. It’s interesting that this news arrived to us from 5 different sources in about 5 minutes, almost all of this were some form of IM, only one email. So tired.
Update: even the Hungarian National Security Agency and the National Police Office Headquarters phoned Index, that they have been hacked. They have forgot to take their humor pills in the morning. Ouch!”

Egy székely Budapesten: “Smart, a very smart trick. This should be taught. I value the flexibility with which they were able to convince the management, that this is a ***** good idea (although it is possible that the idea came form the top).”

Hírbehozó: “This is what happens when the infotainment and election campaign meets and hit each other in the head.”

E-Media: “Is this a Fidesz campaign? [Henrik’s note, Fidesz is currently the big opposition party in Hungary.] Or the effort of Index to get rid of the left-liberal label? Or maybe the next try of MSZP to speak the “voice of the youth”? [Henrik’s note, MSZP is the currently governing party in Hungary.] I suspect it is the latter.”Later Pollner cynically adds after pondering on the possible positive affect on the revenues of Index: “The loss on the other side is not more than the lone credibility. Who gives a shit.”

(The referenced blogs are in English)

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Campaign

Recent statements (in relation to the deficit of the Hungarian budget) from the Hungarian Prime Minister at EU platforms received quite a buzz on both political sides. I try to stay out of politics as much as I can, but as I’ve seen many blog references to recent events I’m working on trying to summarize on what bloggers think about it.

As a warm-up for you here is an English language intro from Pestiside that shows strong emotional charge related to the topic:
“…the EU’s economics team just want Hungary to do what some of the region’s even poorer countries are doing, namely refrain from artificially pumping up its economy with loads of borrowed money that it will later have to pay back with interest. That, and shut the hell up.”

Well, this might not be the only opinion out there, so in the next entry I’ll point to opinions from Hungarian blogs.

(The referenced blog is in English)

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EU

Sorry for this long silent period, but I had some personal difficulties. I’ll be back with stories soon this week. Stay tuned

So it seems the dreaded CIA interrogation camps the earlier news articles wrote about are/were not in Hungary (speculation seems to point toward Poland or Romania). Great, let’s hope that Hungary is really out of this mess.

But here is another mystery for you. Pocakos is writing about the plane N168D. You can read about this plane referred to as CIA charter flight in the New Your Times. [Henrik’s note: According to news that plane is proven to have landed at Budapest airport at least twice in the last years. Also you can find evidence of landing at Planepictures.net]
Pocakos goes further and found the public registration data of the plane in a Federal Aviation Administration Registry. An article from Denmark is also linked, where the “opposition party demands an explanation from the transport minister as to why an aircraft used by the CIA to transport suspected terrorists around the world landed in Copenhagen”.
He also found pieces about similar CIA plane stories, some are referred to as Guantanamo Bay Express and it also has its own Wikipedia entry.

The strange thing is – as Pocakos also point this out- that a leading Hungarian daily newspaper (Népszabadság) on the 3rd of November wrote that there is no plane with such registartion number as N168D, but one day later that actually there is (without referring to the previous day mess up).
Pocakos writes: “Admitting the fact of landing would not mean that there would be terrorist internment camps in Hungary. But the denial of the existence of this plane makes this “harmless” incident rather shady.”

(The referenced blog is in Hungarian)

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CIA
N168D

Two posts in English from a blog called Northern Irish Magyar [Henrik’s note Magyar=Hungarian in Hungarian].

The first story is titled “The real tragedy of 1956” and captures a rarely empathized perspective of the 1956 revolution.
Paul writes: “The greatest tragedy of 1956 is that Hungary lost a complete generation of its brightest and most spirited young people when a quarter of a million escaped after the Uprising to countries such as US, Britain, Sweden, Austria and West Germany. It’s maybe a harsh thing to say, but the country is still suffering from the fact that the youngsters who were left behind tended to be either the apolitical mediocre or Communist lackeys.”

The second is about BBC’s action to turn off some of its foreign language editions. Unfortunately the Hungarian edition is among these. Paul commets:
“When we went travelling, my shortwave radio followed. We used to pretend to bewildered backpackers, that the goobledy gook spouting out from the radio was actually Uzbek, that we were political dissidents on the run and no, we wouldn’t mind if they bought us poor refugees a beer. In Israel, the better half was delighted to meet an old Hungarian shopkeeper, who not surprisingly had decided to leave his mother country immediately after the Second World War. The next day they were sitting together, listening to a folk music performance from Erdely. I’m a pretty cynical sod, but even I was moved to see his tearful reaction.”

(The referenced blog is in English)

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BBC
1956

Today I want to share with you two post that from a certain point of view will be a treat for you . Why? Because the referenced articles – on which the following blog entries reflect on – are in English! So it’s great for me too as I don’t have to give pages of translation on the background and you might also get a feeling on how these bloggers reflect on some news about Hungary.

First, Hírbehozó is writing about the news articles discussing the possibility of secret CIA terrorist prison and interrogation facility in Eastern Europe. He points to a related Washington Post article, an AP report and a Reuters piece too. Also a speculation of the Brisbane Courier Mail even names Hungary among a few other countries in relation to the fight against terrorism. None of the sources explicitly state where the caps are.
Reuters later issued a new report with the information that both Russia and Bulgaria has denied that there would be such facility in their country.
Meanwhile Hungarian government officials so far has only commented:
“We don’t know about anything like that.”
“There is no such information that would prove the truth of this press information”.
Hírbehozó asks: “So what the hack does this political talk really means?”
[Henrik’s note: as these articles are quite recent I would not be surprised to see some more responses in the coming days.]

The second entry is from Pocakos, who points to Asian news sources for information on a recently finalized appr. $600million investment decision of Hankook Tire in Hungary. The Hungarian Minister of Economy also gave an interview to the Korea Herald, where he claimed the lack of red tape burden in Hungary as one of the success factors.
And although Pocakos seems to be happy for the deal (which I guess is well in place), I think the title of the entry with a question mark is somewhat telling of what he is surprised about in the statement of the Minister: “Bureaucracy-free Hungary (?)”

(The referenced blogs are in Hungarian, but the linked news articles are in English)

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News