Contemporary Europe is divided as it was decades ago, this time the problems are migration and border control, sovereignty and cooperation. A West-East divide almost mirroring the Iron Curtain of old has again appeared, free speech is under threat.

A recent discussion between the main dissenting voices in the EU: Hungary and Poland, sheds light on why the continent is the way it is today.

During his first foreign trip since being re-elected as the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban discussed the migrant crisis with his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki.

Morawiecki “Here, in Poland, it’s we who decide who will come to Poland and who will not.” Orban: “We also have hearts, we do not have stones instead of hearts. We are a Christian people. We know what commitments are, what it means to help. But we cannot help anyone if we destroy our country in the meantime.”

Viktor and Mateusz agreed that Eastern and Central European nations had a special perspective on political and social matters because they had endured the horror of Communism during the 20th century.

When WW2 ended Europe was divided between West and East by the Iron curtain.

Poland was divided between the Germans and the Russians during WW2, after which it fell under the yoke of Communism after the war all the way up until Poles gained independence in 1989.

Hungary was in a similar situation, initially being an ally of the Germans in WW2 but becoming almost neutral by the middle of the war, it too was conquered by the Soviet Union and Hungarians suffered under Communism for 45 years until the revolutions of 1989.

Free speech was non-existent, dissidents would be rounded up and either tortured, executed, or, perhaps the worst, sent to gulags as slave labourers. Millions perished this way.

Today it is in the West that speech laws are being put into place, ‘Hate speech’ an Orwellian term whose vagueness is used to police thought across the Western half of the continent is being used to stop people from objecting to the forced transformation of their nations.

Police time and resourced are being wasted on patrolling online forums while foreign people, whose cultures are alien to the continent, change the face of Europe and their crimes are largely overlooked because of Political Correctness.

Reasons and solutions

The reason why the Eastern half of the continent is having none of this is because the East has already been through a half century of what the West is experiencing now, albeit with far less immigration of non-Europeans but with the same ideology that would destroy all identity and turn man into Homo Oeconomicus, a mongrelization of the human experience.

Today the West faces the same dangers but under the guise of democracy and safe in the knowledge that the menace of communism never reached them. But it did, just in a subtler way, instead of tanks and marching troops, Communism, Multiculturalism, Diversity, and all the evils of post-modern thought have infiltrated the West through pen, paper and academic discourse.

The way to fight this is through embracing traditionalism, the past is the future, we’ve got to look back at the traditions of our forebears, and re-embrace them, because they work. Modernity has brought much in the way of technological advancement but very little in the advancement of the morals of society, in fact it has perverted these morals. A sickly nihilism plagues Europe and this is because of all the deconstruction of religion, traditions and history, as well as guilt over the conflicts of the past.

The son is not guilty of the sins of his father. So too we have to accept what happened in our history and rather than wallow in guilt, we have to understand it and move on to a new tomorrow. If we wish, and many of us do, to atone for the sins of our ancestors, we can do this by fixing our current communities, and after that we can help the world, as we have before. But not until we help ourselves and accept the fact that we must put family (Europeans) before strangers (everyone else). When our house is in order, then we can, if we choose, help our neighbour’s house.