Someone Who Accidentally Ventured Too Close to Politics - a Summary
My story has begun in the enlightened West, where I studied critical theory. I naively thought that feminism is where such knowledge becomes praxis, something practical, a lived experience. I took my beliefs seriously, and when back to Hungary I got down to work, producing and organising feminist tactical media. When we lifted a 30-meter banner on the building of the fundamentalist-neocon world congress with the text "you disgrace your mothers" (anyaszomorítók) the only consequence was having to agree with the police that we leave the premises voluntarily until noon. When someone wearing a bishop garb from a costume shop celebrated a ‘holy mass’ with abortion tablets (glucose pills), several reports of appeals and a civil litigation were filed. The NER state apparatus (the consumer protection bureau, in particular) has really censored this website (a fake tourist agency specialized on abortion and contraception) by reasoning that it is forbidden in Hungary to advertise abortion. I will not be a hypocrite, we were happy like a dog with two tails, and there was an event where I held a speech, stating that reproductive biology is the core of women’s oppression, don’t be fooled neither by the token women of the right, nor by identitarians, either left or right. That's when it really begun for me. Until then, the worst thing has been officials corresponding with lawyers, and being called a whore or something like that a few times on right-wing portals. Cut a two-year long story short, there were attempts to ruin me in about every possible manner. I was cyberbullied, stalked, harassed, defamed, framed, threatened, dragged through the dirt (just scroll down on this blog), at it's most grotesque someone made up whole legal processes and legal categories to threaten me with the police and even state security, and then apologised to herself in my name. The worst psycho was probably the self confessed 'translesbian' who learned about the cotton ceiling and the thousand genders from tumblr and then considered it a carte blanche for plain harassment. The mob demanded to have my phd scholarship taken away, my whole family, including my cat was talked out, allegedly her pictures stolen from my private Facebook depict an evil and aggressive being. I got more shit thrown at me for daring to disagree with SJW dogma than for a website censored for ‘promoting abortion’ or for trolling a world congress of government politicians and the leading fundamentalists of the world.
When ARTE TV shot a documentary on reproductive rights, they devoted 3 shooting days for two friends and me, wanting to hear about how we were censored by the government. The problem was that they wanted to hear nothing else. They literally wanted to put words into my mouth, they kept mentioning Viktor Orbán and asking me about him, as I desperately tried explaining that it is much more complex, and new technology and the labour market and so on... but like a schoolmaster, they kept lecturing us that the real threat comes from the right! Cut a long story short, neither I, nor Hungary feature in the final version.
Then I was commissioned to produce a text about censorship and art in Hungary, by the Dissident Blog (“Swedish PEN’s The Dissident Blog wants to present the forbidden texts—the ones that can neither be written nor published in the writers’ own countries”). They have specifically asked me to write a personal text, of my experiences of censorship, intimidation, and silencing. I wrote them the story on the above pages. Without any whatsoever notice, on the 15th of March (day of the Hungarian war of independence) the Hungarian edition was published, without my text, but instead the editor wrote an article himself. They were never interested in neither my thoughts, nor in censorship in Hungary. Just the usual, an exercise in legitimising positions: oppressor, oppressed, benevolent helping hand. Later my text was published in Hungarian, without the editor batting much of an eyelid.
The official NGO feminists might be ready to play this game, I am not. I absolutely refuse to be anyone’s puppet. I really wanted this whole feminism, but what I have found was a fake and devious representation industry engineering neoliberal relations between subject and state, and legitimising global structural dependencies. I felt my real role was to appeal to the enlightened West, in the name of given designated victims. NGO imperialism would be a more fitting name than feminism.
During all of this, my so-called ‘comrades’ (official feminists embedded in the local NGO networks) only cared about the image of the movement, which I allegedly threatened by not taking all of this as a saint and a martyr. These people are obsessed with their own (alleged) moral high ground, and this is based on following a very strict (and grotesque) code of conduct regulating speech and behaviour. And yet these same people fight tooth and nail to climb the hierarchy ladder of their trash heap, which is considered passable behaviour, as long as they talk very slowly, in syllables, and display enough hand wringing and fake compassion. This is basically what they assume to be the moral high ground, a jovial attitude and a passive aggressive petit-bourgeois habitus. I could not care any less about any moral high ground, never did, and will never do. I drank my youth through with local punks, they had way more common sense, more decency and more intellect than all these so-called feminists, or together all of them. I also felt more safe with them, and I feel safer about anywhere than in the viper’s nest which is Hungarian feminism. Most of these “feminists” are either failed, or wannabe career politicians, many are bona fide psychopaths, and as with any corrupt social movement, the rest are the kiss-up-kick-down types, authoritarian followers, weak authoritarians, or just random people who usually don't stay for too long, or whose engagement entails liking a few things on social media. A few stories: I remember one of the biggest hand wringers from about ten years ago. She sat at a pub table, and laughingly recited a story about how she flushed her hamster down the toilet, who tried to climb back. Nowadays she claims to lead a movement against violence. A prominent leftist admitted that he is “amused by squalor”. Once a 'feminist' 'leftist' mob drove someone to suicide, and then they staged an exhibition about how “homophobia kills” in order to put the blame collectively on Hungarian society. They are ready to tar anyone with anything in order to claim victimhood for themselves. Nowadays ‘abuser’ ‘oppressor’ is the new ‘fascists’ as ‘fascist’ really has lost all meaning. For example, once a so-called feminist slandered an innocent man with sexual violence to do away with 3 other woman, including me. They are like a pack of jackals, and they think if they use the right words you can’t smell the blood on their breath. They are the kind of people who fall over each other to give a cup of tea to a homeless man, but constantly pick on their friends and family. I have never seen a social milieu so thoroughly vicious, vile and rotten. Basically its an extension of Hungarian party politics, so no surprise. Yet they assume they are above, and better than everyone else, that they embody and represent universal moral values, and they have the right to judge, to condemn, to give orders and persecute. They are up on a pedestal, because they raise themselves on a pedestal. I stress that I still consider actual feminism meaningful. These dynamics have more to do with the general “left-liberal” environment of which the local feminist movement is part of: their absolute condescension, their moralising, lecturing, civilising attitudes, and their absolute blindness to their own hypocrisy. To cite someone else's account:
“Only recently I held a small dinner party at my flat in Budapest to which I invited several old friends, amongst them one former intellectual dissident, and also my immediate neighbours, who happen to work in the kitchens of a local hospital. Afterwards, my former intellectual dissident friend complained to me about my bad taste in inviting these two 'proles' as she called them. What was more, she had to sit next to them all evening and this had been a most unpleasant experience for her. And this was someone who had spent the previous 20 years fighting for 'democracy'! On other occasions I have encountered intellectuals who would consider themselves progressive or even left-wing, but who have argued that the less educated members of society cannot be trusted with the freedoms of speech and assembly.”
The glaring hypocrisy was for me probably the most hard to stomach. All these people are up in arms about how the government oppresses women by outsourcing reproductive labour under the rhetoric of the feminine principle? Good, that’s what a feminist movement should do. But then suddenly these same people are accepting the objective reality of “innate gender” “inherent femininity” “female soul”, so the re-branded feminine principle becomes not only a matter of fact, but the pinnacle of progressivism! Also it is a basic tenet of sociology that no-one is born with any identity, as it is a social construct. These same people are ready to organise a protest against any kind of exploitation, but when an 18 years old girl leaves state care, and she is driven to Zürich, and ten men a day jerk into her face that is a job like any other. For years these leftist groups deemed Jobbik, the right wing party fascists, nazis, the crux of civilisation, and then suddenly these same leftist groups (supporting a tactical ballot, of course in the name of moral goodness) started mobilising people to vote for Jobbik, should it be their local opposition party with the most chance of winning. Regardless of one’s personal beliefs on these matters, these are glaring contradictions, and when you refuse to parrot whatever is the official line (I speak from experience) you unleash the pure narcissistic anger of these people, as they feel their status threatened, which is inherently tied to the westernist, modernist notions of progress, as they aim to be the vanguard, the harbingers of such progress. If you refuse to toe the line, you are deemed immoral, even inhuman, and yet the goalposts of morality are constantly shifting.
Also these ‘leftists’ have their own connections to the state establishment, for example a foreign media favourite ‘community center’ (much, much derided by the locals, usually empty as a drum) is run by a man whose wife’s father is the main adviser of Orbán. I would not care the least bit, but with such family connections, it is glaringly dishonest to portray yourself as the underdog persecuted by the state. Or there is the “edgy” anti-establishment artist who runs a sugardaddy (pimp) website with government money in it. My last straw with these people came when together with two colleagues we tried reporting a case of serial plagiarism. We found out that the token “feminist” woman (add instult to injury, also aspiring expert in cultural theory!) of the local leftist circles plagiarized pretty much everything, for example she ran which was basically a translated Jacobin column at a local leftist site. We translated back a twenty min conference speech of hers from google books, pretty much word by word, and contacted the conference organizers, who told us where to shove our pdf, but we got more positive response from others. Cut a long story short, I was bullied out of a so-called research group (embedded into the leftist and feminist networks) for this. Yes, I was bullied out of a research group for plagiarism, precisely for reporting someone else’s plagiarism! I was told they have lost their trust in me, I am threatening, harassing, and generally an unsafe person! They wrote a letter about me behind my back, which obviously got back to me. It featured gems like how I “make derogatory remarks about men” and how I told one of these feminists to “rot in hell”, and now she feels threatened! They had the audacity to use the Orbán Viktor card! Now I am personally responsible for them becoming victims! I should feel very ashamed of myself! That’s when I chucked in the feminist and leftist towel, and I only regret not doing it much sooner. This story has it all: how everyone and everything is a tool in their quest for power, how no one cares neither for truth, for culture, for knowledge, nothing else but power, how they stoop to any lows in their power games. These people claim to be victims (in fact they stomp on each other and tear at each other in order to be victims) who are persecuted for their views, their sartorial choices, their sexual preferences (as if anyone would care, I certainly do not) but in reality people hate them because they are vicious psychos and bullies, and because they stifle any whatsoever chance at grassroots organising, and provide the government with perfect fodder for the culture war. I naively thought let’s try, I do it until I can, and then spill the beans and run. What happened is that they listened to me as if I was a radio show about strange animals or something, and then resumed their power games, and when I refused to stop bothering them they tried to tear me down. I realised the secret is that there is absolutely no secret, people show who they are, and you just have to believe them. They do what they do, because this is what they are capable of. But I did not expect to encounter such pure evil and psychopathy, which truly shook me to the core. They also miscalculated themselves, as I don’t care about power. I am immune to power games, not corruptible by what they could offer me, and I just laugh at their authoritarian posturing. Such kiss-up-kick-down types can’t do much with someone who follows ideas. At the core of this are geopolitical interests, and the local people who serve them are rewarded with an illusion of power and some sense of symbolic distinction. You could earn more money at any multinational corporation, IT, even the state sector, and nowadays its a general shortage of labour. On the human level this is about the ego, and their trick is that they attack your ego, which you have to defend, so you are stuck at ego-matters, but if you have enough and let them have their way, and throw your ego to these jackal hordes you go mad, you fall apart.
It still hurts me to think that I (and many like me) naively wasted the best years of our lives forging a platform for petty political entrepreneurs and much derided lobbies scraping the bottom of the barrel for scraps of symbolic legitimacy. But at some point I stopped caring. Why keep trying to squeeze water out of rock? Also life is simply too short to waste it on the internet. It is just a tiny slice of reality, and much more important things lie beyond it.
I did not write this to defend myself, as I don’t have to, and I only have ever apologised to myself, any again only apologise to myself - for ever having been involved with such people.
I want to move on with my life, and the political stakes inherent in this story- how NGO networks stifle grassroots organising, how discourse is futile when interests are at stake- however infuriating, are not my issue to deal with, as I am not a politician. I choose to not engage with this story on a political register anymore, so no, I won't give an interview, I am not aspiring for any media career, no and thank you. Yes, I was contacted by the right-wing media, and I told them no as well. Also I know precisely these language games, when people are evaluated whether their beliefs are sufficiently progressive, so whether they are worthy to engage with. I know both the games, the right answers, and also the kinds of people who play them, and stopped caring about any of the above. After seeing what liberal progression entails, I stopped caring whether I am deemed progressive enough. Also I can't see how whether I am a morally good or bad person is any stranger's business, and why should I be made publicly accountable on the matter. People's character is not for the internet to judge, especially not based on how eager are they to align themselves with the tenets of failing liberal hegemony.
On the other hand, this life experience made me completely re-evaluate what, and how I think about culture, and how I want to engage with culture, and further strengthened my belief that words don't matter, feelings matter- which is pretty much the conclusion of my phd as well, after which I plan to quit, and move to the countryside. I have seen enough, and way too much.
(a scientific text on the above matters)
