University Founded By George Soros 'Forced Out' Of Hungary

[appalachiablue]

Source: The Guardian

By Shaun Walker, 9:35 EDT. Central European University plans to move to Vienna next year after moves against it by Hungarian government.

A university founded by the philanthropist George Soros has announced it has been forced out of Hungary by the government of Viktor Orbn. Central European University, which teaches in English, has gained a reputation as one of the best universities in central and eastern Europe since it was founded in the early 1990s.

CEU's rector and president, Michael Ignatieff, a former Canadian politician, told journalists on Thursday that as of next year many of its operations would be moved from Budapest to Vienna. "We cannot operate legally in Hungary as a free US-accredited institution. We're being forced out of a country that's been our home for 26 years," Ignatieff said.

"We have repeatedly indicated our openness to find a solution that guarantees our institutional integrity and academic freedom. We have waited as long as we possibly can. Unfortunately, we have been forced into this decision by the unwillingness of the Hungarian government to offer an acceptable solution."

Orbn's Fidesz party has run a number of campaigns against the supposed threat to Hungary and Europe posed by Soros, accusing him of funding a "Soros plan" to erase national identities and increase migration flows to Europe. - More...

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/25/university-founded-by-george-soros-forced-out-of-hungary

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George Soros (L), Viktor Orban (R)

This year Orban's Fidesz party won a 2/3 majority in the Hungarian parliament after their 'Stop Soros' campaign that included advertisements and signs denigrating the US financier and philanthropist.
Hungary's nationalist government claimed its actions against CEU are procedural and it is targeting the graduate- level university because it awards both US and Hungarian degrees. CEU says it has done everything it can to comply with the new Hungarian legislation, including opening an affiliate campus in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_University. Central European University, CEU is a graduate-level, private university accredited in Hungary and the U.S., located in Budapest and funded by billionaire George Soros. The university offers degrees in the humanities, social sciences, law, public policy, business management, environmental science, and mathematics. As of 2017, CEU has 1,448 students from 117 countries and 723 faculty members from more than 40 countries, making it one of the world's most international universities. In academic rankings, CEU has appeared among best 100 universities in the world in social sciences and as the leading university in the region of Central Eastern Europe.

A central tenet of the university's philosophy is the promotion of open societies. The University was founded in 1991 in response to the fall of the Socialist Bloc. The founding vision was to create a university dedicated to examining the contemporary challenges of "open societies" and democratization. The initial aim was to create a Western-modeled yet distinctly Central European institution that would foster inter-regional cooperation and educate a new corps of regional leaders to help usher in democratic transitions across the region.

In its second decade, CEU broadened its focus from regional to global, with a special emphasis on democracy promotion and human rights around the world. CEU has extended its outreach and financial aid programs to certain areas of the developing world. The university began the region's first master's degree programs in gender studies and environmental sciences and the CEU Center for Media, Data and Society is the leading center of research on media, communication, and information policy in the region.



CEU, Central European University graduation, Budapest, Hungary.

[JI7]

1. going backwards

[LiberalArkie]

2. Conservatives tend to prefer that direction

[appalachiablue]

3. Very bad, regressive for an area in need of advanced western democratic education.

[Hassler]

4. Right is setting the Wayback machine to the 19th C.

[DBoon]

5. This is the recipe for what the Republicans want to do in the USA

- Change election laws to lock in their majority
- Eliminate independent judiciary
- Eliminate independent press
- Attack academia

https://hungarytoday.hu/us-congressmen-visit-budapest-claim-trump-orban-meeting-matter-time-46341/

[appalachiablue]

15. The plan. On changing election laws, there's Michael Anton

at conservative Hilldale College who thinks citizenship shouldn't be a birthright. This would drastically alter the demographics of elections to favor conservatives.
https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2018/07/27/former-trump-advisor-michael-anton-birthright-citizenship-is-a-misinterpretation-of-the-constitution/

[allgood33]

6. Loving the "poorly educated" is spreading thru the globe.

America, we have set an awful course in human history with the election of Donald Trump as President.

[JudyM]

7. What a wonderful concept Soros had here, and well executed too, now shuttered by ignorance.

[saidsimplesimon]

8. "When Hate Surges" George Soros

I am going to post an op ed written by Mr. Soros separately. He is a philanthropist who survived the anti-semitism in Hungry to become one of the most successful investors of my time. His fortune was earned, not seeded with inheritance money.

Here's the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/opinion/george-soros-when-hate-surges.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

George Soros: When Hate Surges
By George Soros
March 16, 2017

President Trump has wasted no time in cracking down on immigration. He pledged to build a wall, hire 15,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents and speedily deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He justified these actions by claiming that immigrants regularly flout the “rule of law and pose a threat.” In his first speech to Congress, he directed the Department of Homeland Security to create a new office — Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or Voice — dedicated to helping victims of crimes perpetrated by “removable aliens.”

[SunSeeker]

9. Sad for Hungary. Good news for Vienna.

But Vienna already has great universities. Hungary doesn't.

[still_one]

10. During WWII 450,000 Hungarian Jews were rounded up by the gestapo with the help of its Hungarian

equivalent, the Arrow Cross Movement, and sent to extermination camps in Poland.

[SunSeeker]

11. Former Trump Administration official Sebastian Gorka was/is a member of one of those groups

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/03/reports-allege-a-hungarian-pro-nazi-group-claims-t.html

Here's Gorka proudly wearing their medal and uniform:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sebastian-gorka-made-nazi-linked-vitezi-rend-proud-wearing-its-n742851

[still_one]

13. yup

[appalachiablue]

16. My mother old us about Wallenberg and a college friend's

Hungarian parents survived Auschwitz. That time was so filled with evil and suffering it's difficult to comprehend.



Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, Jews waiting in a grove near gas chamber #4 prior to their murder, May 1944

https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/fate-of-jews/hungary.html

The Arrow Cross party's ideology was similar to that of German Nazism, although a more accurate comparison might be drawn between Austrofascism and Hungarian turanist fascism which was called Hungarism by Ferenc Szálasi – extreme nationalism, the promotion of agriculture, anti-capitalism, anti-communism and militant anti-Semitism. The party and its leader were originally against the German geopolitical plans, so it was a long and very difficult process for Hitler to compromise with Szálasi and his party. The Arrow Cross Party conceived Jews in racial as well as religious terms. Thus, although the Arrow Cross Party was certainly far more racist than the Horthy regime, it was still very different from the German Nazi Party. It was also more economically radical than other fascist movements, advocating workers' rights and land reforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_Cross_Party



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg

[TygrBright]

12. My heart aches for Hungary...

More than once in its history, Hungary has stood as a light of hope in the darkness. Their cultural tradition of finding ways to blend cultures and peoples and faiths to build a future for all goes back many centuries.

They fought for progressive ideas against the Austro-Hugarian empire, enacting reforms that brought civil rights to ethnic minorities and a measure of political autonomy to their nation. They pushed for a modern economy that united traditional agricultural and pastoral areas with transportation, communications, and urban industrial endeavors. They tried their damndest to bring sanity into what would become the runup to WWI, engaging in shuttle diplomacy long before shuttle diplomacy was a 'thing'.

After WWI their ill-fated attempt to model a pacifist, progressive policy was taken brutal advantage of by territory-greedy neighbors and internal opportunists and they lost great economic and territorial resources and went through profound upheavals that landed them with a fascist government and dropped them into WWII on the side of the Axis powers.

That was when much of Hungary's intellectual and creative capital migrated to the West, but they retained ties with progressives in the homeland through the brutal Soviet occupation and "Stalinization" post-WWII. In the 1950s, expats and progressives in Hungary saw hope in the liberalization of the Nagy government, and undertook the 1956 Revolution that almost... almost... succeeded in freeing their country from Soviet control.

Until it was brutally suppressed, and Nagy was executed in prison. But during that period many thousands more Hungarian entrepreneurs and scientists and artists left the country, creating a major expatriate community. They continued to work with reformers who remained in Hungary and in the 1960s and 70s produced the most "liberal" economic and political element within the Soviet bloc.

In June of 1989, Nagy was reburied as a national hero and martyr after free elections that ended communism. In the economic upheavals that followed, political control has seesawed back and forth between progressive parties that included many returned expats and support from other liberal democracies, and the authoritarian remnants of communism, morphing rapidly into fascism.

Authoritarianism will find whatever political cover it needs to pursue its agenda.

And the Hungarian people deserve better.

I hope they can pull it out, I really do.

sadly,
Bright

[GulfCoast66]

14. Hungary, like man Eastern Europeans countries actively hunted down Jews.

But because they were occupied by the Soviets they never had to own up to that dark chapter in the past like Germany did. In fact, they could put all their guilt on the Germans.

We are seeing the results now with a return of their historical antisemitism.

Western European countries have memorials to the Jews that they themselves deported. They to a greater degree own up to it.