Let's take up a few thread points...

Dear forum friends,

I have been unable to post for a while due to incapacitating health issues and family conflicts... but I have been getting ready for a while. I always re-read Realityrebel's thoughtful replies to my lengthy speculations on the state of the world - beyond the everyday level and at the level of world politics and economy. Most of which material confirmed and refined my own feelings and techniques of thought and perception. There are a couple of statements which pose further questions in me...
As many times before, the points Hungary and similar transitional places brings into my mind allow interesting revelations on mechanisms operating in the larger world and in history.

I distilled these points I am posting here for further discussion. Right now it is easier for me to sum them up, though this isn'n the most correct way of forum posting (quoting verbatim would be), all I can do to make up for this is verify my understanding with questions.
Additionally, I read a new and interesting perspective from a Serbian-born American professor of economy, Branko Milanovic, which may help us think these things through... (I started to write on this but reading it the next day, I realized it sounded a bit lecturing and too complicated, perhaps the subject of a book rather than a forum reply.)

1. Much of the stuff I "complain about" in Hungary - my words, not yours - and the entire region is due to poverty or an economic factor. (Did I get this correctly?)
This makes me think and start further contemplation. Basically, it sounds true. Different questions follow and mutatis mutandis applies - e.g. Hungary appears to make an existing regional and global problem worse by its attitudes than tiny Slovenia. Particularly our Prime Minister and the fake Conservative majority behind him, singled out today in the speech of the US Ambassador to the UN as a bad case with the state, supposedly an American ally, openly supporting racist and extremist attitudes.
As recently as last week, talking to a Polish-American translator colleague - plus reading local news - made me think the problem is regional - we fit into a large pattern of a complete but gradual collapse of society in the Eastern regions, including Russia. Which IMHO will have serious consequences.

2. Mediumistic information - Putin will self-destruct in a short time. (Did I understand this correctly?) Explanation at a more everyday level: Russian economy is going down and that will finish him off.

Heavens, I would like to believe this. Part of me thinks it is a good thought to hold up to influence events by the power of thought. However, this assertion contradicts the tendencies I read in the surface world. Putin just made Turkey its strong ally, so far a worldly ally of the West and NATO. What happens in Turkey today is not much better than Guatemala in the eighties and nineties, except Turkey is larger, and it is situated very near to Europe, next door to Syria and it holds millions of Middle Eastern refugees.

It is a stated goal of these Eastern dictators to demolish and divide the EU and control part of it directly. My experience in history is that powers like this will not accept defeat easily, they will wage a bloody fight while going down.

Question: if Putin suddenly dies (he is extremely healthy and well guarded), or if he is removed, will the system we fear and loath here change?
Isn't it worse if an even more openly aggressive, Fascist guy takes over in Russia?
The entire militaristic and paranoid phenomenon seems to build upon the systemic collapse of the Second World, and the total indifference if not outright help by most Western powers. (Noted exception is Mr. Soros, who is the greatest backer of Hillary Clinton, no wonder Orban demonizes him and his philanthropic establishments.)
The main problem is not this charismatic leader (personally I find nothing much that throws me in his style). It is the inhuman model.
Orban is far worse as a personality, but he commands a country less than twenty times as small in terms of population (and far smaller in territory or trade).

It is the system of iron fences built upon a decades-long collapse, with resurgent Fascist groups and a gradually strengthening military police model - quite in line with the interpretation of the phenomenon of the rise of Nazism after the economic downfall that followed WW1.
No, Russia is not as strong as Germany was at the time compared to the rest of the world. Even together with Erdogan and Iran and Western ultra-rightists. I recall reading that German industrial production was on a par with that of the US at the beginning of the WW2. And we have discussed that Russia has always been an authoritarian society, so far failing to go through the gate of the civil revolutions of Western Europe. (For that matter, Serbia where Milanovic grew up is not much better - and both countries waged bloody, totalitarian wars in the nineties.)

I would not think that the downturning of the oil and nuclear-based Russian economy actually makes people get rid of dictators and mafiosi. Quite the contrary, and Hungary, as small as it is, is sort of like a lab experiment to prove that this long, protracted falling apart of society will not engender social revolutions of even reforms. According to Milanovic, a logical turn would be a radical leftism but this does not happen in Eastern and Southern Europe, except in Greece and Portugal, two countries which have recent experience of Fascist dictatorships. Because of the - mostly mistaken - belief that Soviet or Yugoslav society was leftist, there is a "generational ban" on the direction of the real solution.  

Branko Milanovic brought together real income data from a number of countries - he used to work at the World Bank. His chief subject has been inequality. In his interview, he said the recent popularity of Trump is only one side of the same phenomenon as the rise of the strong middle classes in India and China. He is careful not to make this a causal relationship though. When looked upon the world at the start of the recent wave of globalization (while the Second World still existed), comparing data throughout the years, there are outstanding losers both geographically and socially , but somehow my thinking so far has not yet allowed me to make this connection.
Thinking in traditional modern left terms, I used to compare working classes of special qualfications to the same in China or the Western world. That is a bias which made me mismatch globally. In terms of real income, university professors, leaders of society, even Party leaders of the old Second World system are matching to trained workers and lower middle class people in the Western World, and they both lost big time to globalization.

The societies of the Soviet model, geographically, with all their faults, used to fall into this middle category, with greater equality but still better off than the worst half of human masses in the Third World. The same income group was virtually destroyed in the West as these former Second World countries - an income group which would be below the well-to-do, the affluent middle classes of the West, better off than most of the Third World but not much. (I would love to find the graph in English).
The winners - in masses - are the emerging middle classes of India and China, plus the super-rich layer of the world.

That is to say, while Putin may fall indeed, the phenomenon he is based upon is not so quick to go away. Trumpism may fail in America - I certainly hope so, and it appears realistic -, but no humanistic alternative is shown for Eastern Europe, Russia and Turkey. India and China - while very friendly - do not invest here at all. And the are fine with ultra-authoritarian systems existing here. The US and Western and Northern Europeans regularly point out faults of democracy and actively help more equality-minded civil groups, but China, for one, does not care as long as we buy their products. The only small thing they helped to establish was acupunture clinics, the way the Turks established great baths.

3. Eastern Europe, perhaps Hungary in particular, will be a great place to live in a decade or so, perhaps sooner than we think. (Did I get this correctly?)
Well, I have some old dreams that still allow this possibility, but right now, not only Hungary, but also an entire string of countries like Poland and Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus etc. are going the opposite way. The only thing is that Belarus has already fallen to the pot and the Baltics and us are still falling.
While the solution of spreading neo-Nazi states is as much a misreaction as Nazism was to the demise of Germany after World War One (including the vengeful and totally unjustified items of the Versailles Treaty), I understand the problem these neo-Nazis are trying to answer.
The entire region of the former Second World was badly mishandled after the break-up of the Soviet system. Perhaps the Poles will some time get rid of their far right government (and they were far better off so far than Hungary, and their society was among the more functional ones among the "losers"). But Croatia and Poland already thinks about Orban as the model...

Hungary, for one, is getting ready to get out of the European Union. That is not the key to success and peaceful prosperity in the coming years... Perhaps we will not if Orban is toppled (and he can only be toppled violently by now - he is not one to concede an electoral loss). Right now if it weren't for hundreds of thousands of people sending money privately from their work in the West, including, yes, some illegals in the US, Hungary would face state collapse. Which is less of a problem to these leecches - it is to all of us here though.
As soon as the EU money taps are closed, Orban will exit the union - it is only a question of time. Or: we will have a civil war and degenerate into a varsion similar to Yugoslavia and Syria.
The Russian nuclear plant here is due to be challenged by the EU either in late 2017 or by early 2018. They already said so, however, it still takes years for the sake of formalities. Elections will (or will not) take place in 2018.
At this time, Orban's pals are still selling Hungarian citizenship to tens of thousands of people from China, Russia, Turkey etc. because it is in the EU (in fact, I have seen Russian web pages advertising Hungarian citizenship for something like ten thousand Euros) but as soon as the EU stops this practice, the ship will sink.

Perhaps, like some of the sinking boats in the maelström in the story of Edgar Allan Poe, we will come up on the other side. But I think in the short term, that maelström is already here.

Here's an interview with Milanovic:

and if you want to look at the graph in the Hungarian article, it is the first graph if you scroll down:
Milanovic in Hungarian

reg, #1:

reg said
I have been unable to post for a while due to incapacitating health issues and family conflicts... but I have been getting ready for a while. I always re-read Realityrebel's thoughtful replies to my lengthy speculations on the state of the world - beyond the everyday level and at the level of world politics and economy. Most of which material confirmed and refined my own feelings and techniques of thought and perception. There are a couple of statements which pose further questions in me... As many times before, the points Hungary and similar transitional places brings into my mind allow interesting revelations on mechanisms operating in the larger world and in history. I distilled these points I am posting here for further discussion. Right now it is easier for me to sum them up, though this isn'n the most correct way of forum posting (quoting verbatim would be), all I can do to make up for this is verify my understanding with questions. Additionally, I read a new and interesting perspective from a Serbian-born American professor of economy, Branko Milanovic, which may help us think these things through... (I started to write on this but reading it the next day, I realized it sounded a bit lecturing and too complicated, perhaps the subject of a book rather than a forum reply.)
RR's response: IMO, the discussion paradigm you and I have been using on these boards so far seems to work quite well, and I see no reason try and improve on it. I've listened to the long video of Milanovic explaining his politico-economic theories, and so far I'm very impressed with both his knowledge of these difficult subjects and his wisdom in drawing what strike me as some of the best interpretations I've ever heard.

1. Much of the stuff I "complain about" in Hungary - my words, not yours - and the entire region is due to poverty or an economic factor. (Did I get this correctly?) This makes me think and start further contemplation. Basically, it sounds true. Different questions follow and mutatis mutandis applies - e.g. Hungary appears to make an existing regional and global problem worse by its attitudes than tiny Slovenia. Particularly our Prime Minister and the fake Conservative majority behind him, singled out today in the speech of the US Ambassador to the UN as a bad case with the state, supposedly an American ally, openly supporting racist and extremist attitudes. As recently as last week, talking to a Polish-American translator colleague - plus reading local news - made me think the problem is regional - we fit into a large pattern of a complete but gradual collapse of society in the Eastern regions, including Russia. Which IMHO will have serious consequences.
RR's response:
Yes I feel very strongly that the most basic reason that the Eastern part of the EU, most of the former members of the Societ Empire, and Russia itself are doing much worse than the rest of the EU is not only economic, but rooted in climatic and ecological factors that could be overcome only through massive infrastructure building that's never been seriously attempted. In other words, the distances are longer, the soil in both forests and grasslands is poorer, and natural resources are rarer and harder to exploit.

2. Mediumistic information - Putin will self-destruct in a short time. (Did I understand this correctly?) Explanation at a more everyday level: Russian economy is going down and that will finish him off. Heavens, I would like to believe this. Part of me thinks it is a good thought to hold up to influence events by the power of thought. However, this assertion contradicts the tendencies I read in the surface world. Putin just made Turkey its strong ally, so far a worldly ally of the West and NATO. What happens in Turkey today is not much better than Guatemala in the eighties and nineties, except Turkey is larger, and it is situated very near to Europe, next door to Syria and it holds millions of Middle Eastern refugees. It is a stated goal of these Eastern dictators to demolish and divide the EU and control part of it directly. My experience in history is that powers like this will not accept defeat easily, they will wage a bloody fight while going down. Question: if Putin suddenly dies (he is extremely healthy and well guarded), or if he is removed, will the system we fear and loath here change? Isn't it worse if an even more openly aggressive, Fascist guy takes over in Russia? The entire militaristic and paranoid phenomenon seems to build upon the systemic collapse of the Second World, and the total indifference if not outright help by most Western powers. (Noted exception is Mr. Soros, who is the greatest backer of Hillary Clinton, no wonder Orban demonizes him and his philanthropic establishments.) The main problem is not this charismatic leader (personally I find nothing much that throws me in his style). It is the inhuman model.
RR's response:
When my Guides speculated about Putin "coming to a bad end" they weren't talking about his dying of natural causes, being assassinated, or being brought down a coup d'etat, but about being gradually ground under by the next phase of "systemic collapse of the Second World" you mentioned. And this will be grounded in the economic factors I mentioned above. Regardless of Putin's domestic and foreign policies, Russia is still not building the kind of inrastructure needed to make Russia First World nation, and IMO, he's going to get in trouble over this quite soon on a number of different levels. My guides have no idea what form this trouble may take, except that it will probably be a complex process, caused by the evolution of several different kinds of social, economic, and political opposition at once over several years.

reg said: Orban is far worse as a personality, but he commands a country less than twenty times as small in terms of population (and far smaller in territory or trade). It is the system of iron fences built upon a decades-long collapse, with resurgent Fascist groups and a gradually strengthening military police model - quite in line with the interpretation of the phenomenon of the rise of Nazism after the economic downfall that followed WW1. No, Russia is not as strong as Germany was at the time compared to the rest of the world. Even together with Erdogan and Iran and Western ultra-rightists. I recall reading that German industrial production was on a par with that of the US at the beginning of the WW2. And we have discussed that Russia has always been an authoritarian society, so far failing to go through the gate of the civil revolutions of Western Europe. (For that matter, Serbia where Milanovic grew up is not much better - and both countries waged bloody, totalitarian wars in the nineties.) I would not think that the downturning of the oil and nuclear-based Russian economy actually makes people get rid of dictators and mafiosi. Quite the contrary, and Hungary, as small as it is, is sort of like a lab experiment to prove that this long, protracted falling apart of society will not engender social revolutions of even reforms. According to Milanovic, a logical turn would be a radical leftism but this does not happen in Eastern and Southern Europe, except in Greece and Portugal, two countries which have recent experience of Fascist dictatorships. Because of the - mostly mistaken - belief that Soviet or Yugoslav society was leftist, there is a "generational ban" on the direction of the real solution.
RR's response: I agree with everything you just said, and adds evidence to support the opinions I described above, which I channeled from my Guides without being able to figure out the details for myself. This is why it's important that you and I discuss these subjects, because it looks like the we can come up with conclusions woring together that neither of us perceive on our own.

reg said:
Branko Milanovic brought together real income data from a number of countries - he used to work at the World Bank. His chief subject has been inequality. In his interview, he said the recent popularity of Trump is only one side of the same phenomenon as the rise of the strong middle classes in India and China. He is careful not to make this a causal relationship though. When looked upon the world at the start of the recent wave of globalization (while the Second World still existed), comparing data throughout the years, there are outstanding losers both geographically and socially , but somehow my thinking so far has not yet allowed me to make this connection. Thinking in traditional modern left terms, I used to compare working classes of special qualfications to the same in China or the Western world. That is a bias which made me mismatch globally. In terms of real income, university professors, leaders of society, even Party leaders of the old Second World system are matching to trained workers and lower middle class people in the Western World, and they both lost big time to globalization. The societies of the Soviet model, geographically, with all their faults, used to fall into this middle category, with greater equality but still better off than the worst half of human masses in the Third World. The same income group was virtually destroyed in the West as these former Second World countries - an income group which would be below the well-to-do, the affluent middle classes of the West, better off than most of the Third World but not much. (I would love to find the graph in English). The winners - in masses - are the emerging middle classes of India and China, plus the super-rich layer of the world. That is to say, while Putin may fall indeed, the phenomenon he is based upon is not so quick to go away. Trumpism may fail in America - I certainly hope so, and it appears realistic -, but no humanistic alternative is shown for Eastern Europe, Russia and Turkey. India and China - while very friendly - do not invest here at all. And the are fine with ultra-authoritarian systems existing here. The US and Western and Northern Europeans regularly point out faults of democracy and actively help more equality-minded civil groups, but China, for one, does not care as long as we buy their products. The only small thing they helped to establish was acupunture clinics, the way the Turks established great baths.
RR's response:
According to my Guides, only significant decreases in the Earth's total human population are going to break the world out of the doldrums you just described, and they are getting increasingly convinced that this is going to start happening soon.

reg said:
3. Eastern Europe, perhaps Hungary in particular, will be a great place to live in a decade or so, perhaps sooner than we think. (Did I get this correctly?) Well, I have some old dreams that still allow this possibility, but right now, not only Hungary, but also an entire string of countries like Poland and Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus etc. are going the opposite way. The only thing is that Belarus has already fallen to the pot and the Baltics and us are still falling. While the solution of spreading neo-Nazi states is as much a misreaction as Nazism was to the demise of Germany after World War One (including the vengeful and totally unjustified items of the Versailles Treaty), I understand the problem these neo-Nazis are trying to answer. The entire region of the former Second World was badly mishandled after the break-up of the Soviet system. Perhaps the Poles will some time get rid of their far right government (and they were far better off so far than Hungary, and their society was among the more functional ones among the "losers"). But Croatia and Poland already thinks about Orban as the model... Hungary, for one, is getting ready to get out of the European Union. That is not the key to success and peaceful prosperity in the coming years... Perhaps we will not if Orban is toppled (and he can only be toppled violently by now - he is not one to concede an electoral loss). Right now if it weren't for hundreds of thousands of people sending money privately from their work in the West, including, yes, some illegals in the US, Hungary would face state collapse. Which is less of a problem to these leecches - it is to all of us here though. As soon as the EU money taps are closed, Orban will exit the union - it is only a question of time. Or: we will have a civil war and degenerate into a varsion similar to Yugoslavia and Syria. The Russian nuclear plant here is due to be challenged by the EU either in late 2017 or by early 2018. They already said so, however, it still takes years for the sake of formalities. Elections will (or will not) take place in 2018. At this time, Orban's pals are still selling Hungarian citizenship to tens of thousands of people from China, Russia, Turkey etc. because it is in the EU (in fact, I have seen Russian web pages advertising Hungarian citizenship for something like ten thousand Euros) but as soon as the EU stops this practice, the ship will sink. Perhaps, like some of the sinking boats in the maelström in the story of Edgar Allan Poe, we will come up on the other side. But I think in the short term, that maelström is already here.
RR's response:
My Guides just told me that everything you just said is likely to occur, but that the EU will land on its feet after the exodus you described and the nations who leave, including the UK which is already out and Russia which was never in will all find themselves in serious economic trouble that only the EU can help them solve. The EU will quickly form complex economic alliances with the USA and the usual First World allies (Canada, Australia, Japan, etc,) and prop up the UK to form a new First World Alliance which probably won't have a formal name. Russia and Eastern Europe will turn to China and India for help, but the infrastructure for giving it doesn't exist, so they'll have to deal with the New First World. And as I said, my Guides predict that this will actually work, as long as the total world population is significantly decreasing at that time.