France used the leaden fist of the state to put the ‘Gay’ into Paree at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics. As a result, the sodden characters cavorting in Thomas Jolly’s pseudo-Satanic pagan pastiche evinced all the enthusiasm of public functionaries as well they might since genuflecting before LGBTQI imagery is what passes for a state religion among the trans-Atlantic elite.

The following day, in the mountainous forests of Transylvania, some 7,000 followers of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gathered to hear him speak. Many were members of the Hungarian diaspora – Greater Hungary in Orbán’s words – who were cut off from the motherland by the borders imposed at Trianon after the first world war. The iniquity of the Treaty of Trianon is a defining feature of the Hungarian view of the world.

In a speech that ran for 90 minutes in the blazing midday sun, Orbán set out his view of the tectonic geopolitical shifts that had been illuminated by the missiles launched in the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The war had been a Matrix-style ‘red pill’ Orbán said exposing the dynamics of global power. Orbán is betting that Russia will win the war with Ukraine because the West will tire of funding it and ‘step-by-step, everyone is siding with Russia’. By everyone, Orbán means the other Crinks – China, Iran, North Korea – India, and Turkey.

For Orbán, the Olympic spectacle provided the perfect illustration of the decadent, post-national West which eschews God and exalts the ‘inclusion’ of the oppressed individual. This stands in stark opposition to the worldview of Central and Eastern Europe where Christianity, national sovereignty, and the family are the fundamental organising principles.

Orbán acutely observed that in its decadent elevation and imposition of LGBTQI, the West has gifted Putin and his allies their strongest tactical weapon, the soft power of espousing traditional religious family values. Thus, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed on X that respect for Jesus is ‘an indisputable, definite matter for Muslims’ and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan condemned the opening ceremony as a ‘disgusting’ affront to humanity’s sacred values and an insult to the Christian world.

That was not the only unpalatable paradox that the Paris Olympics has presented. Palestine, whose supporters cheered its athletes sailing down the Seine in the opening ceremony, followed up the next day by chanting ‘Heil Hitler’ and performing Nazi salutes during an Israel-Paraguay soccer match.

On the same day, half a world away, the New South Wales Labor conference passed a motion urging the federal Labor government to make the recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state a priority. That Palestinian society is controlled by Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in Australia, hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of NSW Labor to create a fledgling terror state.

Underlining the role that Iran has played in funding Hamas’s war on Israel, its chief, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran this week. It comes only a day after Israel killed the second in command of Hezbollah, in a building in Beirut which was the coordination office of both Hezbollah and of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Israel says Fuad Shukr, also known as Haj Muhasin, was responsible for the attack on an Israeli Druze village killing 12 children playing soccer. Shukr was also wanted by the United States for his role in the bombing of the US Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983 which killed 241 Americans.

Orbán is right that the West has been derelict in facilitating the ability of Russia and Iran, both actively engaged in waging wars, to wrap themselves in the mantel of respect for traditional family and religious values.

More troubling is Orbán’s benign view of the rise of China. In March 2023 Xi Jinping said to ‘his dear friend’ Putin that a ‘change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years and we are driving this change together’. Orbán, who visited China at the beginning of July, upped the ante saying that ‘a change is coming that has not been seen for five hundred years’.

The change that Orbán says is coming is that ‘the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia – China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia’ and that this is already underway with the formation of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which has been joined by South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which, Orbán says, ‘these countries are building the new world economy’.

Orbán sees the process as ‘inevitable’, because, he says, Asia has the demographic advantage, the technological advantage, the capital advantage, ‘and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West’.

In the world according to Orbán, ‘Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes… the largest stock exchanges… the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science’.

It’s all very rosy. In reality, China is facing a demographic decline so steep that it may well grow old before it grows rich. It is also facing an economic crisis in the banking sector but Orbán sees the emergence of Eastern and Western blocs as a great opportunity for Hungary to be engaged with both. China, he says, sees Hungary’s membership of the EU as ‘an asset’ and has said that, ‘China and Hungary should participate in each other’s modernisation’. In return Orbán says, Hungary ‘will not get involved in the war against the East. We will not join in the formation of a technological bloc opposing the East, and we will not join in the formation of a trade bloc opposing the East’.

That nationalist Christian Hungary should embrace an imperial communist China with such enthusiasm is only one of many painful ironies that emerge from Orbán’s worldview. That the supranational nanny in Brussels has been the midwife to this state of affairs is another. Hungary wants to be part of Nato and part of the EU, economically, but not part of the decadent West.

In A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare writes the world’s most famous stage direction, ‘Exit, pursued by a Bear’. There are no shortage of bears in Transylvania, but Hungary is doing its best to exit the West in pursuit not just of the Russian bear but the Chinese panda. A Winter’s Tale has a surprisingly happy ending. How Hungary’s romance with bears concludes is still be written.