Based Hungarians
13th May 2022
Last month, a student of mine here in Budapest had a surreal experience at an international debate he participated in. The western European moderator opened the event by inviting everyone to introduce themselves by sharing their “preferred pronouns.” The invitation was met with blank stares: in the Hungarian language, pronouns are not gendered.
This little episode is emblematic of woke doctrine’s amusing failure to translate into a central and eastern European context. Some conservatives stateside have started to notice that we here in East-Central Eruope are “based”—or at least, we’re remarkably resistant to wokeness. It’s worth reflecting on why that might be.