Eastern European Politics

Its the Polish Government basically throwing chaff up because of the shit they are is doing.

"Hey, you know, your judicial reform is a bit undemoc..." "GERMANY! WORLD WAR 2! REPARATIONS! NAZIS!"

That and its probably a good populist argument.

The fact that they do that while their government is basically working on a Gleichschaltung sickens me.

And please note that while Poland may scream about the evils of WW 2, they still refuse to take up any refugee's from the EU (and thus is one of the reasons Italy is loosing control of the situation).

edited 2nd Aug '17 10:34:54 AM by 3of4

I am currently writing an University paper on the Treaty of Warsaw (1970) and the German–Polish Border Treaty (1990) between Poland and the FRG, and from what I know, those claims have zero chance of being enforced. In fact, it would go against Polish interests to enforce them, because that could reopen the question of restitution for the Germans who were expelled from the former German territories Poland, something no Polish government could want.

So as you wrote, this is just the usual populistic nonsense.

edited 2nd Aug '17 11:36:26 AM by Zarastro

And a Wall at the border to Mexico has zero chances of being effective.

We're in a Post-Sense World in so many ways.

A wall can still be build unilaterally. Enforcing reparations worth 50bn€ is more difficult.

They don't need to enforce them, but imagine the legal mess they can make at the courts for domestic consumption

Poland vows to keep logging ancient forest despite EU court ruling

The European Bison was actually extinct in the wild before it was reintroduced. :/

edited 3rd Aug '17 1:23:37 AM by 3of4

I again ask the obvious question: What sense is there in pissing off both the east and the west? And very specifically Germany and Russia? Poland is no push over, but they can't survice being placed between a hammer and an anvil in terms of sheer geopolitical power.

The current Polish government has the survival skills of a lemming.

The current Polish government is convinced that both Russia and Germany are inherently hostile towards Poland, and offending them gives him support by his voters. Kaczynski doesn't care for Poland's international standing, he has a very poor grasp on international relations anyway. He knows that Poland will be in trouble with the EU down the line, and since the EU is in his eyes a tool of German power, he is already setting the tone.

I don't know... I get the feeling he's doing the same Orbán does: steps on toes because he knows they'll raise a fuss but won't actually DO anything about it because nobody wants the bad PR of crushing a sovereign state due to not liking their policies and attitude. That shit is fine to do in the Middle East, but Europe? The very cradle of oh-so-fucking-awesome-I-could-jizz-myself democracy? No way, no how. They wouldn't dare.

And these two pricks know that very well.

edited 4th Aug '17 2:12:35 PM by amitakartok

Actually, Poland is atm in danger of loosing voting rights in the EU over their behavior....soo...

This specific sanction requires unanimous vote by every other member state and Orbán declared that he will veto it. So, no.

Orban says a lot, but let's see if he sticks to it in a few months.

Find the leaderships foreign assets and freeze all of them.

I don't suppose the EU could get around that by putting Poland and Hungary on the block in a single vote...

I know that I've suggested that idea in this thread before, I can't remember the answer though.

So Kaczynski has suggested that the last monthly anniversary of the Smolensk crash will be hosted in April '18; for a grand total of 96 months (the number of victims). He also expressed a hopeful notion that "we will learn the truth by then". Either he must have realized that this is getting dumb or he's planning something really bad for that time.

It is getting dumb, because each progressive monthly anniversary costs more to field and takes more policemen to act as security. To wit, last monthlyversary required 2000 policemen for about 2.5 thousand people and about 500 people from the countermanifestation. First monthlyversaries only had 50 or so policemen standing guard.

In other news, there's conflict between the Defense Ministry and the President. Prez announced that on 15th (Polish Army's Day) there will not be any new general nominations, particularly those recommended by Macierewicz (the head of Defense) himself. PIS assures that its camp is not facing a civil war, merely some animosities to work out, but then again, there was also the veto of the two judicial reforms a while back. Opinion is that the President is finally starting to try and score some brownie points with non-PIS electorate.

Well, that's a new degree of dumb.

Recently we've had some nasty storms coming through Poland; plenty of destroyed forests, a lot of casualties. Still clearing out the results in three voivodeships.

But now, the minister of Internal Affairs and Administration Błaszczak said that the reason these catastrophes happened in one of those is... local government's representatives, affiliated with so-called "total opposition" (i.e everybody not-PIS and Cookies once in a blue moon). Which is funny because quite a few of these local politicians are unaffiliated or even PIS-leaning, and sad because we've reached a point where natural disasters are the result of the political opponent's meddling.

edited 23rd Aug '17 2:12:00 AM by FergardStratoavis

So I hear that the nutjobs in charge of Poland are now hollering something about making Germany fork over reparations for WW2 because the Polish government that explicitly forfeited any claims to such in 1953 wasn't a legitimate government due to Soviet influence.

Never mind that international law declares current post-Soviet eastern European governments to be direct continuations of their Soviet-era predecessors in all political matters and that Poland reiterated this statement in 2004...

There was also something about the rightist party Propaganda Machine saying that Hitler was a pro-euthanasia, pro-abortion, vegan, animal-loving druggie, ergo obviously a leftist. Like holy crap, even Fidesz' own propaganda isn't this bad.

edited 30th Aug '17 10:33:42 AM by amitakartok

Wait, didn't we already pay reparations to Poland anyway?

Technically...what actually happened is that the Soviet Union waived reparations for Poland (since then East Germany would have been forced to pay, too) in 1953 and in exchange Germany accepted the so called Oder-Neisse line. Basically Poland got land from Germany instead of outright reparations, but in turn lost land in the east (they basically just moved Poland further to the West and yes, it was a mess, with countless displaced people). In addition, the agreements signed during the Reunification also had the purpose to kind of let Germany off the hook in this regard...there is some technicality that reparations have to be bound to a peace treaty so they simply said that the agreement isn't a peace treaty, making the whole matter kind of void. This isn't to say though that Germany didn't pay anything at all. 1.3 billion DM were paid for Poles who paid into the pension system during Nazi occupation in the 1970s, and after the wall went down Poland and Germany founded an organization in order to finally reimburse Holocaust victims - most countries got money for that decades earlier, but since Poland was under Soviet control, it got the short shaft there too, despite having a high number of victims. Anyway, Germany paid 4.7 billion zl.

Germany will never accept the notion that it still owes money...even if it wanted to, it can't because that would result in more or less every country in East and South-Europe lining up in order to get money out of Germany (Italy of all states once tried by pointing to their Holocaust victims, despite being allied with Germany during WWII). One has to consider thought that while legally Germany owes Poland nothing (remember, it already gave up a huge territory to Poland and if Poland wants reimbursement for the territory stolen from it in the East, it has to talk to Russia, not Germany), the material compensations Germany gave to Poland is worth something around 500 billion EUR.

Basically the whole "Germany owes us something" always comes up when politician want to get agreement about an issue people feel shafted over. And it doesn't really matter how many Germany has paid or will pay because no matter what, it will never be enough. In a way it won't, because you can't really put a price on a life. But there are some things one has to just accept. I mean, should Germany start insisting on Reparations from France for the damage Napoleon did?

It's a classic play by far-right. "NSDAP stands for National Socialism, ergo it was a leftist party and Hitler was a socialist".

Too many people believe this, which is all the more disheartening. Anyway, as I've said in European Politics thread, the call for reparations is just hot air.

edited 30th Aug '17 12:08:28 PM by FergardStratoavis

In the past months, Orbán and co. have lost several lawsuits aimed at finding out how much cash they're funneling into football teams and such under the guise of tax discounts (that is, giving accomplices' companies tax discounts so that they can spend that cash on greasing the right hands). In one case, they tried to refuse Transparency International by claiming that such tax information is confidential, but the judge ruled that confidential or not, it's also public funds, which the law states are legal to be asked and received information about. The ministries in question appealed the ruling, so the ball is in the Supreme Court right now.

Except Orbán and co. now tried to hide a small passage within a batch legislation proposal that overrides this by declaring that tax information confidentiality now applies to public funds as well, ergo these companies can now legally refuse to come clean about how much cash they hand out and to whom. Except as TI points out, the constitution explicitly declares access to public interest information as a basic right not even tax confidentiality can override, so the proposal as it is is unconstitutional and in breach of freedom of information laws because it would make tax secrets more confidential than state secrets (because the law defining what counts as a state secret declares the time after which state secrets become public, but tax secrets remain classified forever).

According to the National Office of Privacy and Information Freedom, the proposal's wording as it is is "legal nonsense" because if a law states that something is public, another law cannot override it by stating that it is illegal.

Are Hungarian courts/judges reasonably independent and apolitical?

They don't bend backwards to suck up to the govt, if that's what you're asking.

A while back, a referendum proposal about extending the expiration of corruption crimes to 12 years was submitted to the national election committee. They OK'd it but someone appealed it on the grounds that the question isn't clear, so it was passed up to the Supreme Court and they just OK'd it as well with no further grounds for appeal.

edited 5th Sep '17 7:01:33 AM by amitakartok

So I just found out about Romanian orphanages.

Holy shit.

Been a while since I posted, but there really aren't any especially noteworthy news from Hungary that doesn't consist of the usual shit-slinging between Fidesz and the opposition.

The anniversary of the '56 revolution is on Monday. There were calls for a joint protest by all leftist opposition parties and all but Momentum agreed to it - but when Momentum officially stated they're not coming, five more cancelled their participation as well and the event was cancelled by the organizers on the grounds that with a full half of the opposition not participating, it would be pointless to attempt to present the appearance of a unified front.

Speaking of which, Momentum recently lost their biggest financial backer who went on record condemning Momentum's decision of going it alone without coalition with anyone else as a clear indicator that Momentum don't actually want Fidesz removed from power but are content with merely grabbing assembly seats.

Probably the most amusing piece of news is that one of F Idesz' Christian Democrat lapdogs recently stated that Soros is Satan and at the very least his plan is satanic. And now Orbán is stating that the EP is beginning the execution of the plan... which the very commissioner Fidesz sent to the EP has repeatedly gone on record stating it doesn't exist and never existed, only for Orbán to go on record saying that he knows better because yes, it does exist. LMP has recently submitted a public information request about the existence of the plan, but received no reply, so they officially accused Fidesz of misappropriation of public funds for spending double-digit billions on a propaganda campaign about something that doesn't exist in order to direct attention away from the country's actual problems.

And misdirect it does, with the recent polls showing that Fidesz' support has doubled in the 60+ age group.

Also, Fidesz are now resorting to Orwellian methods for erasing association with disgraced former colleagues. Namely, the mayor of Hatvan had recently broken ties with them; Fidesz responded by covering a recent public event where he showed up with several Fidesz members with a photo he's digitally erased from.

Oh, and one more funny thing. Last year, the '56 memorial event included posters of photos taken of some revolutionaries back then, plastered all over Budapest. Thing is, they misidentified one of the photos as a guy named Dózsa, when in truth it was a completely different person by the name of Pruck and the Life magazine in the US published the same image back in '56 with Pruck's name as well. Except the Memorial Committee not only refused to admit they screwed up, they:

• Claimed it cannot be Pruck because the guy was a convict (that is, did two years in prison in the sixties for theft and vandalism), publicly humiliating his family (he's already dead). Pruck's daugher responded by suing them for defamation.
• Launched personal attack after personal attack on anyone showing proof that they screwed up, including the anthropologists who compared the image with Dózsa and ruled it cannot be him because the ear's shape is completely different. At the forefront of the attackers was the chief of the Committee, a professional historian herself.
• In court, the defense attorney representing the Committee first asked for a court-sanctioned translation of the two-sentence image caption of the Life article that identifies Pruck by name. He then suggested the use of face recognition software and for the final touch, directly asked Pruck's daughter to her face whether she actually remembers her father, though he backed off on that last one when the judge questioned whether he's indeed alleging that the plaintiff doesn't remember her own father.
• The court summoned as witness the historian who identified the image as Dózsa and whom the Committee thoroughly tried to scapegoat. Once the judge released him from his contractual obligation of confidentiality, he revealed that they never asked him to do any research, his boss simply sent him the image and a claim from Dózsa that it's him and asked him if the caption's fine like this or not. After seeing evidence to the contrary, he agreed that it's Pruck - except his superiors then told him he has three events booked to state it's Dózsa but when he said he'll go but he'll tell the truth that it's Pruck, they cancelled the events and ordered research to find proof it was Dózsa. Every time another piece of evidence came up that it's Pruck, the Comittee ordered research to prove it's Dózsa and find dirt on Pruck.
• Oh, and the defense asked the attorney general for her opinion (she once anonymously condemned the historian as duplicitous for having once been the Deputy Head of the Political Office of the Training Central of the People's Army of Hungary) and brought it up in court, to which the judge asked since when the hell the attorney general is involved in cases like this.