A change of pace. It’s time to have a little fun with those “national security experts” who diligently support the Orbán government’s propaganda campaign, which portrays asylum seekers as current or future terrorists who will be the scourge of Europe within a decade or two.
Here I will concentrate on three of these so-called experts: György Nógrádi, László Földes, and, the latest addition to this illustrious crowd, George Spöttle. It seems that the Hungarian media simply cannot get enough of these guys.
Let’s start with Nógrádi, who is the smartest and best educated of the bunch, though he has a checkered past. In 2009 researchers of the 1956 Institute identified him as one of a large group who were supposed to spread government propaganda at the time of the reburial of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs. The historians also discovered that in 1981 Nógrádi joined the internal security establishment. He received a cover name and was assigned an officer to whom he had to report. He denied the allegation, but his cover name, “Raguzza,” gave him away. He was known to be a lover of the former Yugoslavia, and Raguzza is the Italian name for Dubrovnik. In any case, the 1956 Institute didn’t remove his name from their list. Until recently he taught at Corvinus University, but last year he was invited to teach at the new National Civil Service University. It looks as if his past sins have been forgiven by Fidesz.
György Nógrádi
The past of László Földi is not exactly pristine either. Born in 1956, he was a devoted member of the Communist Youth Organization (KISZ) all through high school and later at the Ho Chi Minh Teacher’s College in Eger. Földi never spent any time teaching. After graduation he joined the Hungarian intelligence service (III/I), where he became the party secretary. After the regime change Földi’s career didn’t suffer until the fall of 1996, when the socialist minister in charge of the intelligence service removed him from his position. I can’t go into the very complicated story that became known as the Birch-tree Affair, but it seems that Földi wasn’t only investigating criminal activities in the Hungarian-Romanian-Ukrainian border area but also socialist politicians, and that he may have passed this information on to Fidesz. At this point Földi became a businessman. Later, during the first Orbán administration, he received a lot of government orders and became quite rich. Ever since his retirement from the intelligence service he has been one of the experts on national security matters.
László Földi
We know only as much about the life of our third expert, Georg Spöttle, as he decided to share with us. He had to have been born around 1960, and his father was “a Hungarian from Marosvásárhely (Târgu-Mureș)” who didn’t figure in his life but as far as he knows was a diplomat. His mother, whose maiden name was Spöttle, was a German who during the war ended up in Hungary. Since his father didn’t care about him, he decided to take his mother’s name. In 2002 he claimed that he had spent about half his life in Germany, where he was drafted into the German army. Because he speaks four languages, the German military intelligence approached him with a job, which he gladly accepted. He claims that in that capacity he spent a great deal of time in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. Oh, yes, before I forget, Spöttle was once abducted by UFO’s, as the blogger of orulunkvincent.blog.hu discovered.
Georg Spöttle
All three of these experts are forewarning the Hungarian public of the immense dangers that await Europeans. Let’s start with Nógrádi, who predicts that in twenty years Europe will be in the midst of civil war, ethnic tensions, and total chaos. He was one of the first “experts” who suggested building a barbed wire fence. The reason for keeping these people out is Nógrádi’s conviction that Middle Eastern immigrants cannot be integrated into European society. How to keep the new immigrants out? Simple, sink the boats that bring them to Europe’s shores. “They say that this is inhumane. My answer: they should have been sunk a long time ago.”
Földi’s favorite theme is that Europe is at war. A war that was started by the United States and her allies and that by now has reached Europe in the form of the influx of migrants. They are foot soldiers sent by ISIS to destroy Europe. He is convinced that there is a whole intelligence network behind the refugees whose members organize the movement of the people. “This is a consciously planned, built-up system in which everybody to the last man is channeled in.” All of them receive instructions from the organizers. Földi believes that the intelligence agencies of European countries are fully aware of all this and that, if the fence is not enough, “if necessary even weapons must be used.”
Földi is busy. Every three or four days he comes up with a newly-discovered horror story. A couple of days ago he told the public that Hungary by now is absolutely full of spies, just like Vienna used to be during the Kádár period. Hungary is both politically and economically a stable country and therefore it has become a favorite place of foreign secret services. Földi claims that there are many night clubs in Budapest where groups of foreign intelligence officers can be seen because “they want to demonstrate their presence.”
And then there is Georg Spöttle. He is also convinced that the refugees are not escaping from ISIS but on the contrary are being sent by the Muslim extremists. In his opinion, the European intelligence agencies have known since spring that ISIS is planning another 9/11 in Europe, adding that 85% of the migrants are young men of military age. “Once these muscled young men grab guns, God save Europe!”
On state television Spöttle and Földi were asked to comment on certain files found on an abandoned cell phone that the “experts” of TEK had already identified as proof of the owner’s terrorist affiliation. The program dealing with these files was about ten minutes long. Besides Spöttle and Földi, another former secret service official, József Horváth from the Kádár era, was also interviewed. Horváth’s name should be familiar to those who followed the case of UD Zrt, for whom Horváth worked after he was sacked by the secret service in the socialist period. UD Zrt spied on the government on behalf of Fidesz. All three people took it for granted that an especially gruesome picture found on the phone was proof that the phone belonged to a terrorist.
Enter János Széky, a columnist for Élet és Irodalom, who charges that either the so-called experts are total dolts who know nothing about the subject they keep talking about or that MTV, with their help, is knowingly falsifying the facts. The title of Széky’s article, which appeared in parameter.sk, is “They found Ivan in Röszke,” a cryptic one. All of you who can read Hungarian should read the original, which I’ll summarize here for those who cannot.
There is one picture that the great experts found indicative of the mentality of these terrorist soldiers who are already in Europe. According to Spöttle, who helped the audience interpret the picture, on the photo there is “a dead infant with a weapon in one hand and a dagger in the other; around the child there are empty liquor bottles.” People who carry such pictures on their phones are pseudo-refugees. M1’s Híradó (News) blurred out the picture of the child.
Széky became curious and, with the help of Google Image Search, in no time found the original of the picture. On the original the child is not dead but is a well-fed baby. So, the staff of M1’s news lied; after all, they were the ones who blurred out the child’s picture. But it is just as bad if not worse that the picture has absolutely nothing to do with the Middle East. It is an old baby picture of Ivan Guzmán, the oldest child of Joquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the hunted drug lord of Mexico. In addition to this picture, Híradó also showed Arab-language videos which, according to Spöttle, were produced by ISIS for recruiting purposes. Széky found these videos on YouTube and with the help of an Arabic-speaking friend found out that, in fact, these videos condemn ISIS and claim that the group’s extremism has nothing to do with Islam. So much for the “experts” whose opinions are so useful to the Orbán government’s anti-refugee propaganda campaign.
And finally, just a brief return to László Földi, whose latest salvo is that Angela Merkel should resign because she is “entirely incapable of leading the continent.” Europe is engaged in a war and “since when did a woman win a war?” asked the former history major. Several papers pointed out that Földi should have learned in elementary school about Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, all of whom managed quite well in times of war.