Hungary does not intend to give up the pages of its history, tear down monuments from past eras and kneel at the first call as a sign of repentance, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on the occasion of the Days of Hungarian Culture celebrations in a speech broadcast on M1 television.
Orban delivered his speech in Satmarcek, a town in the north-east of the country, where 200 years ago poet Ferenc Kölcei wrote the words to the national anthem.
“The hymn reminds us that we Hungarians, like all Christians who understand sin and forgiveness, have good reasons to repent. We Hungarians are not sinless. We have many mistakes and shortcomings. The only question is what to do with this confession “said the Prime Minister, whose speech was broadcast on M1 TV.
“Should we kneel in the middle of the football field? Or tear down statues of our great ancestors? Should we deny and erase our millennia-old culture? Or should we allow self-styled, unpatriotic and liberal censors to mock our history?”, asked the Hungarian Prime Minister.
According to him, the words of the national anthem say otherwise. Although the anthem is written in the form of a prayer and begins with the words “God bless the Magyars!”, it is sung “not on your knees, with your head down, but standing upright, firm, strong, with your head held high,” Orbán emphasized.
The prime minister expressed his belief that, despite their shortcomings, Hungarians deserve “the right to a future”, as well as the right to determine for themselves how to live in their own land and what moral values to follow.
“The Ottomans wanted to tell us who is a true believer, the Habsburgs – who is a good Christian, the Germans – who we can live with and who we can’t. The Soviet Union wanted to make us become world proletarians, and the Brussels bureaucrats want us to become liberal citizens of the world and to refuse to do the things we are used to and which they think are out of fashion,” Orbán said.
However, the Hungarians intend to solve their country’s problems themselves, he emphasized. “We say who can come here and who can stay here, who can live with us and who can’t, and we want to determine how our lives can be related to those of our neighbors,” said the prime minister, as way confirmed its intention to maintain a firm barrier to illegal immigration in Hungary.
