A pro-government writer defends CEU
March 31st, 2017A staunch critic of liberal intellectuals explains why he opposes the worldview represented by the Soros-funded Budapest Central European University, but would deem it undemocratic to close it down.
On Mandiner, Gábor Bencsik, the publisher of Demokrata believes that a life and death struggle is underway between conservatives and liberals, but it is not their lives that are at stake: it is the lives of unborn European babies and thus of Europe’s two thousand year old civilisation. The intellectual elite that ‘grabbed Europe’s soul’ since at least the late 1960s, he explains, are ‘relentlessly fighting to destroy Europe as we have known it for two millennia’. Besides a group of politicians, but often as their surrogates, ‘groups of vigilantes called newspapers, theatres, universities and NGOs’, he continues, take an active and successful part in this endeavour, protected by their right to free speech. Nevertheless, Bencsik believes that CEU, which is one of them, must be tolerated. He even goes so far as to warn the governing forces against the ‘incalculable consequences anyone crossing the democratic Rubicon’ will face. The struggle for the future of Europe, he concludes, must be won by democratic means and with ‘belief in the wisdom of the electorate’. (For the CEU controversy, See BudaPost, March 30)