Non-Democrat Prime Minister of Hungary demands “freedom of expression” for him
Earlier, when insulting words about my self (“corrupted,” “villain,” “traitor” and so on) were posted under my article on the Facebook or on the Aravot.am website, I was deleting them and in the case of the Facebook, I was blocking the one who were writing something like that. Now, I do not do that way and I ask the moderators not to do it in my case (of course, if they do not contain sexual profane language), because, as I have written once, the insult actually is an imploring cry for help by a person who has problems and complexes, and perhaps, these phrases have a therapeutic effect for those who write such things. I heartily rejoice when I can be helpful in such cases (I am writing this without any irony).
But in the rest of the cases, the moderators are obligated to delete the insulting comments from aravot.am (technically speaking, do not publish), and here, start the discontents, “And where is the freedom of expression?” For instances, we have a reader who writes next to his name, or rather, next to his different names the word “YSU” in brackets (probably, to seem more “solid”), and when his insults are not published, he complains about the “censorship”.
I recalled this associated with an interesting incident happened recently. Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, in response to the brutal murder in his country, expressed an idea that it is worth restoring the issue of the capital penalty on the agenda. In response, the EU officials reminded that the capital punishment is banned in the EU member countries by the Article 2 of the Charter of this organization adopted in 2001, while in Hungary, the capital punishment is abolished in 1991, after the fall of the communism. In your opinion, what is Orbán’s counterargument? He viewed this reminder as an infringement on the freedom of expression. “I don’t want to live in the Middle Ages where there are taboo subjects that we cannot talk about,” said Prime Minister of Hungary…
Hungary, to remind you, is the country that under Orbán’s regime actually granted freedom for a bribe to the Azerbaijani murderer Ramil Safarov. We cannot say that the current prime minister of Hungary is a very big democrat. When his party, the “Fidesz,” returned to power in 2010, Orbán amended the Electoral Code in favor of him, controlled over the judiciary, made the extreme nationalism the cornerstone of his policy and significantly restricted the freedom of expression. By the international organizations’ scoring, in 2010-2014, Greece and Hungary are among the European countries that record the biggest regress on freedom press.
Generally, I have noticed one pattern: those who are strongly intolerant over the freedom of expression for others are the ones who usually demand freedom of expression for them. For example, the partisan media that do not deviate a single centimeter from the party “main line” and are exceptionally busy with their party’s “brutal” campaign, from time to time, “demand accounts” from the media, where the spectrum of represented views is much wider.
… Søren Kierkegaard was confused, “All people demand freedom of expression as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” The 19th-century Danish philosopher was perhaps overly optimistic speaking about “all people”.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
