Orbán’s Women’s Affairs, or the Case of Soft Censorship in an EU member state
Why Independent Intellectual Work Matters
The illiberal state is about creating and maintaining inequalities. The same applies to intellectual work. A state seeking to exercise control not only takes away the opportunity for paid and quality work, but also makes it impossible for its results to appear. Especially when it comes to women and gender issues. How does this happen in practice? Let me explain.
A Book is Born
As an example, let’s look at the recently published monograph “Orbán’s Women’s Affairs,” which analyzes illiberal gender politics across 320 pages in an understandable and easily accessible way, through widely known stories, based on the latest English and Hungarian academic literature. This was written in a year and a half because Zsuzsanna Balázs decided to become a freelance journalist instead of having secure income, and then invested her working time, while I received and used paid research leave from CEU and the former Willy Brandt, now City of Malmö Professorship at Malmö University to write this book.
Publishing the Book
We have the book, now comes publication. I’ll spare the reader the increasingly awkward emails and personal conversations through which collegial relationships of several decades turned into nothing, when colleagues were coming up with the most impossible excuses with downcast eyes Completely understandable - fear eats the souls.
Selling the Book
Then, after three brave Slovak-Hungarian women and the publishing house they founded published the book, came the big task: getting it to readers. On the day of the launch in Budapest, at CEU Democracy Institute, when all the non-government media covered this volume and the launching event, the book suddenly disappeared from the website of the bookstore chain, Lira contracted with the publisher.
I commented on this on Facebook, whereupon the Líra put it back, saying they do distribute it but the volume had sold out. Interest is enormous, yet the bookstore chain only orders a few dozen copies, even though it’s clear there’s huge interest in the book. When I point this out on Facebook, a Solomonic decision is made: you can’t order it on the website (they say: yet), please make the effort to go to the store, where of course there’s no copy on the open shelves. Now we’re at the point where you can order online (already?), but there are none in the stores. Well, this is exactly what we wrote in the book: this is what the illiberal state is like too - it looks like it works and exists, but in reality it doesn’t.
Why Is It So Important to Censor Ideas?
Because the illiberal state has no original ideas of its own, as we also wrote in the book. Everything it proclaims and everything it does is copy-pasted or cobbled together from previous systems, or is the emptying out and exploitation of them. Every original thought and thinker is dangerous. That’s why Central European University had to be driven away from Budapest and the Hungarian university network impoverished, while they create a parallel proxy university and research system.
What Can Be Done?
The book exists, we put intellectual and physical work into it, and - in theory - it can be purchased. Visit one of the stores belonging to one of Hungary’s largest chains near you that isn’t Libri, because the sharp-eyed state has already bought that, and inquire politely but firmly. Order it online. If that doesn’t work, order from the publisher’s Slovak website, since not every package arriving from Slovakia can be censored. (Oh yes it can, smiles The Censor.)
And most importantly: read it and discuss it with those you trust and with those you don’t. Only from conversation and dialogue will we get a livable country, never from censorship.