US-funded "Non-Profit" Decries Huawei in Hungary

November 26, 2019 (Gunnar Ulson - NEO) - The battle between fading US tech giants and their Chinese rivals spans the globe. China's Huawei appears to have won the battle in its own backyard of Asia, but what about in Europe where the US still holds a large amount of leverage it is not afraid to use?

A self-described "non-profit independent journalism center in Hungary" has recently published an article titled, "Hungary’s government is quietly neck-deep in the U.S.-Huawei war."

In it, the "non-profit" Direkt36 claims:

Viktor Orban’s government has found itself in the middle of a great power conflict in 2019. Last year, a new battleground emerged in the trade war between the United States and China. Washington accused Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei of espionage on behalf of the Chinese state and of corporate espionage.

It also claims (emphasis added):

Although Hungary’s significance is relatively small in NATO and EU decision-making because of the size of the country, it still plays an important role in the European debate on Huawei. Hungary’s government regularly vetoes or blocks European decisions unfavorable to China’s political leadership, and one of Huawei’s most important European hubs is in Hungary. 

Direkt36 went as far as quoting the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent a clear message to the Hungarian government during his February 2019 visit. “Russia is not the only power that wants to erode freedom in this region. I raised with Peter [Szijjarto] today the dangers of allowing China to gain a bridgehead in Hungary,” Pompeo said, standing next to the Hungarian Foreign Minister at a press conference after their talks. “Beijing’s handshake sometimes comes with strings, strings that will leave Hungary indebted both economically and politically,” the Secretary of State said, promising that, from now on, the United States would play an active role in stopping China in the Central European region.

For the US, getting Hungary to reverse its habit of vetoing EU decisions unfavorable to China is and pressuring it to divest from companies like Huawei why it funds centers like Direkt36 to decry Hungary-China relations and Huawei's gains there.

Despite Direkt36 claiming to be some sort of independent Hungarian center for journalism, its article reads like a paid promotion for the US State Department. Virtually the entire issue of Hungarian-Chinese relations was presented through the filter of US interests, a nation located an ocean away from Europe.

Upon examining Direkt36's funding and affiliations it becomes clear why this is.

Direkt36 is not "Independent," Not "Journalists" 

On Direkt36's website alone it admits it is funded by convicted financial criminal George Soros' Open Society Foundation and run by a collection of former-BBC staff, US State Department Fulbright scholars and other products of US-EU education and indoctrination.

Direkt36 also admits it is funded by the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation and Internews.

Internews is in turn funded by Western IT and media corporations (Facebook, Google, Channel 4 and SkyNews) as well as the US government itself through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID.

Huawei is Outcompeting Western Rivals For Good Reason 

Despite Direkt36's attempts to launder US State Department talking points through its "independent journalism center," even its own article admits that across the rest of Europe Huawei is gaining ground.

Even in nations known for their expertise in telecommunications like Finland and Norway, many projects have used Huawei technology instead.

Despite Direkt36 alluding to "European intelligence services" issuing "multiple warnings that the company’s equipments pose security risks," the article is forced to admit that nations as big and as influential within the European Union as Germany trust Huawei enough to contribute "to the German 5G network buildout."

Consider the amount of money the US alone has spent funding fronts like Direkt36 or on its ongoing trade war with China including attempts to strongarm nations around the world to ban or boycott Chinese companies including (or even especially) Huawei.

Imagine if that money was instead invested in research and development toward creating and implementing telecommunication infrastructure at levels of quality and pricing that could simply compete with Huawei.

The successful products of such investments would speak for themselves both within the realm of public opinion and within policymaking circles around the globe charged with evaluating and investing in partners for infrastructure development.

How do we know this strategy would work? Chinese companies are already using it, and using it successfully. Despite heavy US pressure on nations across Southeast Asia and America's still powerful grip on global media, nearly all nations have signed agreements with Huawei save for Vietnam which is barring Huawei for its own political reasons independent of US pressure.

Despite US tech companies barring Huawei from access to essential components and even from the otherwise ubiquitous Android operating system used on smartphones around the globe, Huawei continues to adapt and gain ground.

Short of the US adopting a new strategy to deal with China's rise or its acceptance as a nation among nations rather than presiding above them, Huawei and other businesses sprouting across the developing world will continue to whittle away at US unipolarism until nothing is left.

The definition of insanity is often claimed to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. For the US, how else should we describe a foreign policy based on coercion that clearly doesn't work but is still being used regardless?

For US businesses who are interested in a constructive role in the multipolar future that is emerging, they should resist the temptation to be drawn into the US trade war and instead look for ways to circumvent and undermine it. From the basic premises underlining the current US position to the dubious means it uses to advance it, it fails to add up and offers no future to those who invest in it.

Gunnar Ulson, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

Regime Change Express Surges Toward Budapest

Daniel McAdams
LewRockwell.com
January 17, 2012

Poor Tamas Fellegi. Hungary's envoy to the International Monetary Fund had to spend last week enduring endless lectures on democracy and fiscal responsibility from the unelected head of an international financial organization that is largely funded with money stolen from the US taxpayer.

And poor Viktor Orban. Just over twenty years ago the young Hungarian had the temerity to stand up at the reburial of the hero of the 1956 uprising to demand that Soviet troops leave and that the communist regime agree to hold free and democratic elections. The communists didn't like him very much. Orban and many other anti-communists of that era were fighting unelected Moscow-based occupiers who stole his country's sovereignty and ruined its economy for ideological reasons. Now, as Hungary's prime minister, he is fighting against an unelected Brussels and Washington-based force that seeks to steal (what's left of) his country's sovereignty and ruin its economy for ideological reasons.

The Europeans — and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are bearing down on the Hungarian government, attacking its "authoritarian tendencies" and demanding that Orban restore democracy. Charles Gati, a State Department official in the administration of Clinton's husband, has gone even further, opining in the pro-opposition news weekly 160 Ora that, "there are opportunities indeed to remove this (Orbán) government — if possible in a democratic way, if not then in some other way."

Gati, who has been joined at the hip to the renamed Hungarian communist party and its governing allies from even before the regime change in 1989, now threatens a violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Hungarian government — in the name of promoting democracy! (And if you wonder whether he is serious, click on the above link and you can see that he is pictured in front of the "Regime Change Factory" flag of the CIA-affiliated Freedom House).

(Incidentally, Gati's tireless efforts on behalf of the former communists in Hungary were richly rewarded in 2009, when his friends in the Hungarian government awarded him the Commander’s Cross with the Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. Hmmm... a star?)

So what is the problem with Orban? Well the "problem" for Orban and his center-right political party Fidesz is actually not a lack of democracy, but rather too much democracy! His party was elected with an unprecedented two-thirds majority in 2010 by an electorate brought to its knees by the financial mismanagement and corruption of the long-ruling renamed communists, now called the Hungarian Socialist Party, and its junior coalition partner, the Alliance of Free Democrats, which was literally obliterated in the last election.

The Hungarian voter became outraged when a recording at a private Socialist Party meeting was made public in which then-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany admitted that his government lied to the population and "screwed up" the country.

"It lists the crimes of Communism and lifts the statute of limitations that protected the criminals of the Soviet era who despatched 600,000 Hungarians to concentration camps. Hungary’s transition to democracy is often called painless, because the Red nomenklatura saw the game was up, liquidated state assets and became the new rich. The Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party dropped one word from its title and soon regained power: Ferenc Gyurcsány, prime minister from 2006 to 2009, was the former president of the Communist Youth Organisation. In a world where nonagenarian Nazis who should have been hanged in 1945 are carried into court in oxygen tents, why is it an outrage for Hungary now to target Red murderers? Well, er, because the right commits atrocities, the left commits mistakes."

Orban's other divergences from "democracy" according to the European Commission and the US administration include using his mandate to bring the Hungarian central bank under the oversight of elected officials rather than remain the purview of highly-paid bureaucrats who more often than not do the bidding of their foreign counterparts at the expense of those who pay their salaries. It is not quite an "end the Fed" movement in Hungary but it certainly could be seen as a move to curb the seemingly limitless power of an unelected Hungarian Ben Bernanke.

As financial expert Andrea Hosso observed regarding claims of Orban "threatening the independence" of the central bank:

"How independent is the US Federal Reserve with its consecutive bouts of Quantitative Easing, or the European Central Bank with its new venture into buying up hundreds of billions of Eurozone bonds to keep the big project afloat?"

No wonder the Obama administration is irritated.

It is particularly rich to see the European Commission threatening legal action against the Hungarian government unless it "return to democracy" by overturning laws such as the above curb on the power of the central bank and a new mandatory retirement age for judges. The European Commission, that paragon of democracy, is as we know an entirely unelected body that meets and votes in secret.

Unfortunately for him in this instance, Orban's tendency to shoot from the hip can come back to haunt him. After declaring last year that no new IMF assistance was needed, Orban's government experienced what seems to some a concerted effort to bring the country to its knees -- to bow before the IMF and international finance. Bond yields soared, Moody’s downgraded the government’s debt to junk status, and the forint has lost 15% of its value. Orban sent Fellegi to Washington, tail between legs, to have his pound of flesh extracted by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde.

Not so fast, said the unelected Lagarde last week. First Hungary must change several of its domestic laws and renew its commitment to democracy. Then the price of a bailout to Hungary's creditors will be a new austerity program on its population. It seems the government is in a panic and will agree to anything for IMF assistance, but they would do well to have a look at Greece, where IMF "reform" is producing its usual results.

As if by design in these situations, the demanded austerity programs will make the ruling regime (who the West wants to change) extremely unpopular. A shocked and bewildered population will take to the streets demanding a change in regime, assisted by the generous support — and intoxicating lies — provided by the US regime change experts NED, NDI, and, IRI. Violence may ensue, sovereignty will be destroyed, and the Western-preferred malleable descendents of the old regime will sweep back into power.

Questions the Hungarian government might want to ask instead, looking at its debt obligations, are why should the current population be squeezed to death to repay the endless borrowing by the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s? Where did that money all go? To build villas in the hills of Buda, no doubt.

The great Bill Bonner suggested last year, "Why Greece Should Default and Go Broke With Dignity." He could be writing for Hungary as well.

Maybe Hungary should just tell Lagarde, José Manuel Barroso, and Hillary Clinton to "stuff it."