Category Archives: Travel

Friendship

Friends, Philosophy/Ideas, Sunsets, Travel

 

Daniel Klein lived for a while on the small Greek island called Hydra and frequently noticed a regular group of old friends who got together in a taverna where they sat on the terrace.  By a strange coincidence I remembered I had spent a couple of hours there on a sunny day in April when I was a young lad with a lovely wife. It was our first European holiday and it was wonderful. But I was a young man. I don’t think I appreciated it enough, even though I always remember it and even though we did not do much on it. It was a short visit. But a spectacular visit with nothing spectacular about it. I think we also sat on the patio of a taverna in the warm Greek sun overlooking the harbour, sipping on a drink in relaxed contentment.

 

Many years later I found out that Leonard Cohen had lived there on that island  for a long time. That was where he met Suzanne and wrote a famous song about her. A beautiful song as only Cohen can write.

 

When Klein was on the island he often sat at the taverna and from time to time noticed this group of old men. One of the old men, would stop to pick up a wild lavender and put it behind his ear and then from time to time removed it, took a sniff of it and returned it to its rightful place behind his year. A simple pleasure. Really the best kind of pleasure. Klein was reading a book of thoughts from the teachings of Epicurus an ancient Greek philosopher.

 

What kept the group together was friendship, laughs and thoughts. Klein spoke about French Philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne who had said, “I know the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from one end of the world to the other.” What a great thought. Klein then noted that “Like Epicurus, Montaigne was convinced that friendship, and the good conversation that comes with it, was the greatest pleasure available to us.”

 

Now that I am an old man, I see the wisdom in that. I am lucky to have several groups of friends. Some just men. Others, men and women. All great. All important. Life is a conversation.

Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher who enjoyed simple pleasures, like sitting around with friends watching the setting sun.

Why do Countries that Know Fascism Slip Back into Fascism?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Death of Democracy, Fascism, Hungary, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

 

During the entire time I was cruising through the Balkans along the Danube River I kept coming back to a question that was haunting me:  Why do so many countries that experienced fascism and know how awful it is, slip back into it?  You would think they know better and would avoid it, but so often they don’t.  Perhaps the best example of this is Hungary.  It was a long-time vassal state of the Soviet Union. Then for a very short time it was a genuine democracy. Yet it seems to be sliding back into fascism and some even suggest it has already gone all the way back. What happened and why?

 

After I got back to Canada without solving the problem on the trip, I heard an interview by Fareed Zakaria with a very interesting Bulgarian born political scientist, Ivan Krastev. Zakaria was interested in the same question as I was.  He put the question this way: “One of the biggest threats to liberal democracy these days comes from a region that was once considered its brightest horizon, Eastern Europe.” He, like me, was particularly interested in Hungary because of its sharp turn towards autocracy after Viktor Orbán was re-elected after losing his Parliamentary majority after the first election.

 

Krastev started said this:

 

“This is very interesting about the liberal revolutions. After every revolution, people were leaving the country. But normally this is the defeated party. This is the white Russians who left after the Bolshevik Revolution. After the liberal revolution of 1989, the first to leave with the liberals because they went immediately to study, to work, to live abroad. And suddenly the idea was that what they should do is to imitate the West.”

 

Every expected them to follow the west. The people who were left in Poland after Communism collapsed, just as in Hungary as well, were resentful that they were told by the political elites that were left, that they ought to copy the west. They were left out, just like non-college educated people in the United States, have felt left out by the liberal elites. And, as Friedrich Nietzsche knew, resentment is a very powerful emotion. Resentment is dynamite.

 

If they were expected to be like Germany, for example, then why not rather just go to Germany. No one likes to slavish follow someone else. They felt like losers. And as the American Democrats have learned the hard way, no one likes that.

 

Added to that, if the west won the war so conclusively, as it seemed, why did the “winners,” from the west leave the country? That is highly unusual, yet in so many of the former satellite countries, the liberals left the country, leaving a mess behind.

 

According to Krastev, after the fall of communism when the liberals were gone, the people were expected to imitate the west who won the cold war, but none of them wanted to do that. As Krastev said,

“But you know what? Imitation is not a fun business. If I’m imitating you, it means that I recognize that you are better than me. And then, if I’m imitating you, what about me? So, this resentment against imitation, in my view, was the reason why in eastern Europe, much earlier than in other parts, you have this kind of populist resentment saying, OK, you are not better than us.”

 

The pride of the people left out was hurt. Many of the people felt like they were looked down upon by the west and very much resented that.

Added to that, as Krastev  Orbán was a “very gifted politician”  who  could manipulate the system in Hungary so that the rules of the game would be rigged to ensure his election. For example, he made sure all of the media supported him. If they didn’t’ they lost their licences.  Trump has been threatening the same thing in the US and the threats have worked. As a result of all of this, the former Russian satellites became  more like Russia and eastern Europe than America, even though Russia lost the Cold War. And they are transforming the west to be more like Russia! And as if that is not weird enough, the American right-wing is making America more like Russia too. The world is topsy-turvy. Led in part—a large part—by Donald Trump.

 

Orbán could cleverly navigate that world so his victory would be ensured. That was more important to him than democracy. Trump was pretty good at that too

 

Autocratic Leaders take advantage of our weaknesses

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Critical thinking, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Fascism, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Populist, Machiavellian, and autocratic leaders have learned to take advantage of our natural (evolved) biases against us.  Goodman used the example of Andrew Tate in England to illustrate his point. I would use leaders with autocratic tendencies instead, like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. And of course, it seems to me, that the young people, being even more impressionable than the older people, seem to be most attracted to such strong man leaders.  Perhaps they are more impressionable, or perhaps, even more likely, they are the most unhappy with themselves.  In modern society, young people are starting to realize that their parent’s generation has screwed them by rigging the rules of society against them. It is no accident that this current generation, for the first time in history, is likely to live less well off than financially than their parents.

 

Strongmen, like Trump, are masters at using deceit and manipulation to create absurd trust in their abilities, against all evidence to the contrary, and then use that ability to propel themselves into positions of authority where they can use that authority to improve their own financial position at the expense of those who supported them. It’s a nasty trick if you can get away with it, and none is better at it than Donald Trump. Trump has done it many times and continues to do it as his supporters don’t seem to notice or don’t seem to care.

 

One of the techniques that strongmen in the past have used to gain influence over the populace include attacking science and knowledge. Hitler did it. Stalin did. And now Trump is doing it. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia they quickly attacked the scientific community with claims that they were merely, “bourgeois” scientists who were acting on behalf of their financial supporters and then replaced them with more compliant and ideologically pure scientists. This is precisely what Trump has done by attacking woke scientists.

 

We must be careful to avoid allowing this to happen. As Jonathan Goodman said in his Guardian article,

 

“Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education.

 

And finally, when reigns of terror end – and eventually, they always do – it is critical to learn and absorb the lessons. That way, we inoculate ourselves afresh against our natural tendency to trust the untrustworthy, carrying that wisdom forward into the future so that we’re better able to stymie the autocrats who seek to close our minds.

 

The best tool we can muster to defend ourselves from such attacks is our ability to think critically. We must cherish and protect that skill, as it is our most powerful weapon of self-defence. This is always our most powerful tool. When we give it up we submit to arbitrary and ruthless authority. That is why autocrats are so quick to attack it because that makes us defenceless to their attacks.

 

Are we hard-wired for autocracy?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Critical thinking, Death of Democracy, Fascism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Jonathan R Goodman in an article in the Guaridan earlier this year asked this question “Are we hard-wired for autocracy? That is the big question.

 

Here is what he said,

A recent piece of research [in the UK] suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship… The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most Machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.

 

Yascha Mounk, Associate professor  at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C. made similar claims about the US and backed it up with personal research. If both the US and UK are headed toward autocracy the world is in trouble. Sadly, there is a lot of evidence that this is the case.

 

Part of the problem is that humans have a strong liking to be led by strong men. Like our primate cousins. As Goodman wrote,

 

“Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males. Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence.We learned that cooperation was more effective than bloody competition. We don’t have to be ruled by bullies, but it is natural so we must be careful, diligent and smart to resist the “natural” tendency. In fact, many now realized that it is through cooperation much more than individual initiative that humans have mastered the globe, where our primate cousins have fallen behind us in development.  As Goodman said, “Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education.”

 

Our nearest evolutionary neighbours, chimpanzees,  also cooperate but not to the extent that we do. They are much more likely to be led by strong alpha males, though sadly and unwisely, in my view, we seem to be evolving towards their approach. Goodman put it this way in his article: “It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them…”

 

The researchers  pointed out we have more recently evolved to cooperate more and compete less. That has come about from learning biases. In other words humans have evolved to believe what other people around us believe, particularly those we see as being successful. For example, in the US many people see Trump as successful. I don’t but they do. People evolved to believe the strong men in their group because that was where they could find protection. Scientists call these conformity or prestige biases.

 

There was an interesting scientific work by the  psychologist Solomon Asch that showed people would tend to believe what successful people around them believed, even when they were wrong. For example, he devised a test where people were asked a simple question. He asked them to compare 2 lines on a piece of paper that were actually the same length. But when they heard others around them say one was longer than the other, they tended to believe it as well.  This probably evolved with us when we lived in small hunting groups. However, those overly trusting beliefs can lead us into serious trouble. Autocratic leaders for example can exploit this natural tendency. Many of the autocrats  are very skillful at manipulating others. Goodman put it this way:

 

Some people call this trait proactive aggression, others, Machiavellian intelligence,  or the ability and inclination to dominate not with violence, but via social manoeuvring and deceit.

 

It is easy to see how this can apply to autocratic or wanna be autocratic leader, such as Victor Orbán in Hungary  or Trump. In other words they found that we can favor those among us who pretend to cooperate at least until they stop. Then they become rivals. We have to be smarter and think more critically.

 

These evolutionary traits can be helpful or dangerous.  When we realize we have these traits, as do most people around us, we have to be careful to look out for bad signs of trouble ahead. We can resist these tendencies, but too often don’t,

How did Hungary fall into Authoritarianism?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Fascism, Hungary, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Retuning to my question of how was it possible for a country such as Hungary to move from democracy to autocracy, I want to look at Hungary as a prime example.

 

Guardian writer Danielle Renwick wrote about how people learn to live with a dictator. To look at this issue from the perspective of Hungary she interviewed  Stefania Kapronczay the former head of Hungarian Civil Liberties Union.

 

In comparing the United States to Hungary she made one very important point that surprised me. Kapronczay said what is happening in the US does in fact echo what happened in Hungary but with one big difference:

 

“It’s happening much faster, and it’s surprising for me that so many private companies and institutions just complied with the perceived or expressed will of president Trump. I didn’t expect so many people would be so risk-averse.”

 

 

Viktor Orbán was first elected to power in Hungary as a capitalistic liberal in 1998 when the people in Hungary were very unhappy with post-cold war politics. That was actually a common reaction among countries that were from the Communist bloc and then felt lost when that bloc collapsed after 1989. This is not entirely different than the recent collapse of support for democracy among large segments of American and Canadian societies. That is why Hungry is so important.

 

A lot of people in Hungary thought Democracy did not deliver what people expected after the fall of communism. They hated communism but thought they would do better with democracy than they got.  In 2002 Orbán’s party lost power as people were dissatisfied and voted out his party.

 

Then later Orbán returned to power as the head of government after the Hungarian democratic elections in 2010 and then he was a different leader. He was no longer the liberal, so he changed the rules in his own favor. First, he changed the voting rules so it would be easier to get his party elected the next time. Trump did this too and is doing it now. I know Democrats have done that too but during this time Republicans in the US controlled more states. I often think very few people in the US actually want democracy.  Each time one party is in power they change rules for their own benefit.

 

Orbán, again like Trump, also stacked the judicial system with people who supported him. He also attacked the liberal universities, like the one run by Canada’s former leader of the Liberal party, Michael Ignatieff. Trump has done the same thing in the US. Orbán also went after the press to toe the party line, just as Trump has been doing with vigor. Orbán also attack unfriendly NGOs and again Trump has followed suit.  Also, Orbán made some changes that that helped the poor in Hungary.  Trump has done a little of this, but much less.

 

The key here is gradual steps of dismantling democracy.  It does not happen with a bang. It usually happens by small steps. innocuous, but ominous small steps.

 

Kapronczay warned us in the west that opposition parties must understand that it is not good enough to run on platforms defending democracy.  That is too esoteric for many electors. Opposition parties in the west must not fail to address basic pocket book issues or they will be turfed out of office or never get back in.

 

Kapronczay also pointed out one more important thing opponents of autocracy should do is to avoid extremism. Tas she said,: “Autocrats really want to polarize the society, so any kind of initiative that goes against it is really important.”  Politicians like Trump thrive on the extremes. The more the liberals rant and scream at him and his supporters the more Trump likes it and the more his supporters think he must be doing a great job.

Polarization and autocracy go together like love and marriage.

 

So how does a country slip into autocracy from a democracy? By small steps. No steps are more dangerous than baby steps.

 

Is Hungary a Fascist State?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Fascism, Populism, The Sleep of Reason

 

 

Andrew Marantz is a writer from the New Yorker and in the last couple of years has been paying a lot of attention to Hungary. He has visited it a number of times and he is very concerned about it. Besides writing about it, he has appeared in a number of podcasts together with Tyler Foggatt as part of The New Yorker Political Scene Podcasts.

 

Like me Marantz and Foggatt wanted to know: How bad have things got? How close to an authoritarian state has the United Statement become? And they started by looking at Hungary.

 

First, Marantz said when you go to Hungary, “it’s not a police state. It’s not like Russia.” This made me feel a little better. I was at the time travelling there. I have now been there again. When I was there I worried a bit about whether or not I had to be careful of what I looked at or read or wrote about. To the extent that fear was justified, Hungary is no longer a democracy, but an authoritarian state.

 

I wondered when I was there whether or not I should worry about what I wrote on my computer? Could I criticize Hungary? Could I criticize their leader Orbán? I really didn’t  want to go to jail. But I also didn’t want to shut up either.

 

Marantz also said this about Hungary on the podcast:

 

“It’s not like, you know, North Korea.  It’s a beautiful European capital where you walk around and it’s nice and you sit by the river and sip an espresso. And I interviewed all kinds of dissidents, academics, journalists who are opposed to the regime. And they didn’t say okay, you know, we can’t talk here. We have to go somewhere where we’re not going to be, you know hauled off into a van or something. Like that’s not the vibe.”

 

That sounded pretty good. I know Christiane and I visited Budapest in 2004 and I never once, not once, felt uneasy about being in a former Soviet satellite country.  But that was then. This is now.  And thanks to Viktor Orbán things now in 2025 are very different. And Hungary is a very good example for the rest of us about what can happen to a functioning democracy. Democratic countries can slide into autocracy or illiberal democracy or even fascism and many believe Hungary has done so under the second presidency of Viktor Orbán. He changed.

 

I know this time I felt a little different. I don’t want to exaggerate the feeling, but I don’t want to deny it either. So, what happened in Hungary between our last visit in 2004 2025.

 

First, what happened in Hungary has happened in many places in varying degrees.  A lot of countries around the world have been flirting with autocracy?  I visited some of them on this trip? Romania. Bulgaria. Serbia. And above all, Hungary. Why did this happen? That is the question I would really like to answer.

 

Some have suggested that we have a natural inclination to autocracy and not democracy. Disturbing research has shown that in many countries the popularity of democracy as a political system is in serious decline. And most disturbing of all is that the decline is pronounced in the United States, the country long known as the leader of the free world. It often claims to be the first constitutional democracy. Is it possible that democracy is declining even there? There is actually a lot of evidence, particular in the reign of Trump 2.0 that it has moved sharply in that direction.  Can America and Canada learn something from what happened in Hungary? Those are things that interest me.

Hungary: From Communism to Democracy to Fascism?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Fascism, Hungary, The Sleep of Reason

Ever since we signed up for the tour of the Balkans, tour without adequate thought as I have said, I have thinking about Hungary?  Why would a country that came so close to a successful revolt against Soviet Union domination in 1956 that it became for a while the darling of the west, now, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, and Hungary became a democracy  not very long ago, be sliding back into autocracy?  Hungarians  know what Communism was like? How and why could this happen? Why would they allow it to happen? These are the questions that have haunted me and for which I have sought an answer, or at least an insight. I never have answers, who am I kidding? I just get more questions.

 

It seems like such a long journey: from Communism to Democracy to Fascism, but Hungary seems to have moved there in a flash. Not that is completely fascist yet, but it sure seems to headed in that disturbing direction. To me it seems like that is the journey Hungary has embarked upon under the direction of its populist leader Viktor Orbán. But is that really such a long journey? I actually think not. After all, communists and fascists agree on one very important thing—democracy is bad; autocracy is good. It is a movement from extremism on the left communism, to democracy and then to extremism on right namely fascism.

 

It is actually a very short journey from communism to fascism. Communism began with a dream of universal brotherhood of man—i.e. from each according to his means to each according to his needs. A beautiful dream that turned into a nightmare.  As Max Eastman, said, communism was “the God that failed”. The dream curdled from hope to violence. Lenin may have been the cook that switched the recipe when the proletariat, working people, gave up the hopes of freedom and justice in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat. When the communist leaders crushed the dreams of fellow feeling in their citizens  the  dreams of the proletariat turned inward and their hate and pain transformed  them into wolves instead.

 

When there is no longer room in the heart for empathy, it dies and kills part of us and the result is, as the singer song-writer Martyn Joseph said, “the good in us is dead.” Joseph feared would happen in that other Balkan state, Kosovo. What was left there were vicious dogs snarling and biting each other. And the brotherhood of man was given up as an empty dream. The best in them was dead. Leaving an empty burnt-out husk, incapable of love, empathy or fellow feeling. Only a corpse remained. That is the power of hate. It is as transformative as the power of love but in the opposite direction.

 

A couple of decades later, the world was left with another leader, Donald Trump who as I have said before, has the empathy of a turnip. His hatred turned a nation of brave men and women into a nation that feared itself, and found a scapegoat, the immigrants, who could be dispatched by a crowd in a packed arena at the 2020 Republican National Convention chanting gleefully, “Deportation Now.”  All of this while holding signs underneath smiling faces that read “Mass Deportation.”  This looked to me like the brownshirts of Nazi Germany who viciously turned on their Jewish neighbours. That was how the American MAGA crowd turned on their brown immigrant neighbours, demanding they be deported or sent to Latin American jails for torture. When your empathy is shredded what else could you do but shout for joy around calls to “lock them up?” The ugly ideology of Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht had taken over in America. To me it felt viscerally, like there was a direct lineal line of descendant, from the Night of Broken glass in Germany against Jews led by the Nazi Party’s SS troops and aided by the hateful Hitler youth and then ordinary, but rancid, Germans to those American Republicans. The bullies again were in control, only this time in America.

 

 

The Great Ordeal

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Thoughts o n Travel

The great ordeal began at 5:30 a.m. We had to carry our own luggage to the main floor for pickup to the coach.  I was grateful that by my standards I packed light.  I could have travelled even lighter had I left my tripod, which did not work, at home. My bad. After that I learned why leaving luggage at the door in the hallway, while risky, is such a good idea. Getting all our luggage to the main floor of the hotel while it was crammed with people leaving was a challenge. The first of many this long last day.

 

Novella, our CAA representative was very helpful as always. She works hard on her trips. Her passengers are the beneficiaries. She shepherded us through the check-in process which always seems bewildering no matter how often you do it. At least to me.

 

For once it is nice to be heading home. I am rarely eager to get home. This trip was an exception. Mainly because the trip was an ordeal for Christiane. Perhaps this is our last European trip. That would be sad, but it might be realistic. It has become very hard for her.  While I frolicked all over, she was often stuck on the ship. I felt guilt. She felt pain and disappointment.  Thank good ness she had the bartender to keep her company. They became good friends.

 

We are not sure what comes next. Really there is no way travelling can get easier than a river cruise. If this is too hard, we are done. We only unpacked once and packed up once.  Of course, there were the extra days at the beginning and end.

 

I have decided to not even think of travel for a few months. For me that was a resolution impossible to meet.

 

Other than her woes, I enjoyed the trip immensely. I guess I can still do it, though it is challenging. More challenging than it ever was before. It was more interesting than most trips or two reasons: the people we encountered on and off the ship. People are always the best part. Secondly, the cities were beautiful with fascinating histories (to me at least). Others don’t care about history as I do.  They are entitled to that view. The food was fantastic. I have never eaten as well on a huge ocean ship. The smaller numbers allow the chefs to shine. The fellow travellers were outstanding. They always are. The staff were always helpful, attentive, and cheerful. They worked hard to make our trip enjoyable.

 

Yet travel gets harder and harder each year, because our bodies lose capacity each year too. We won’t talk about the minds. Stress seems to be amplified every year, particularly on flights and in and around airports. They generate stress in creative new ways each year. As a result, even flying premium economy as we did, is more stressful than we would desire. But premium economy helped BIGLY. We can’t fight it.  We are what we are.

 

Much to our surprise, after we learned from our new Newfie friend Mack that Frankfurt was the worst airport in Europe, which was confirmed by our bad experiences in the airport pn the way in, this time things went relatively smoothly. But this time we were lucky. Not smart, lucky.

 

When we landed in Frankfurt and disembarked, it took quite a while for us to be reunited with Christiane’s walker. We stood and waited for a long time after being assured it would come soon. Novella, the CAA representative, stood faithfully by our side. We were not worried. Well not much. Eventually it did arrive and again we had our long walk to the right gate. By then we were a long way behind our confreres.

We told Novella to leave and catch the other passengers, as we would make it to the Gate on our own. We had plenty of time. It was another long walk and again for some mystical reason had to have our passports checked again, even though they had been checked in Budapest and we had not left the airport security zones. Why we had no idea. No other airport asked for that. We trudged to the gate which as usual was at the far end of the airport.

 

When we arrived at the right gate, we noticed none of our fellow travellers were there. How could that be? Could they have boarded the aircraft?  No, we were assured. Were we at the right gate? Yes, we were assured again. What could have happened to our friends? Another mystery.

 

It was only a mystery until our friends, now frazzled, all arrived about 15 minutes after us! What had happened? The same thing that happened on our first flight to Frankfurt.  Our friends arrived well before us, but were told they were at the wrong gate because it had been changed so they had to walk back, like we did coming in the first time. Again, like the first time they had to turn around and walk back because the gate was changed again, to the original gate, where Christiane and I were sitting.  We missed this adventure because we were so slow. We missed entirely the shovelling back and forth because we were so slow the first time. Sometimes it pays to be slow. This was one of them. So Frankfurt airport was only acceptable because we screwed up and did not follow instructions designed to make it difficult.

We did make it home, but we were weary.

Christiane has resolved to never fly again. I will believe that when I see it.