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Europe
Hungarian Revolution 50 years ago today
2006-10-23
Brave men and women whom the West pretty much ignored.
Many elderly Hungarians still remember the shots that reverberated through the streets - and were heard on the airwaves - as fighting broke out near the radio station in central Budapest. Freedom fighters tried to keep control of the station by holding off the much better armed Communist forces.

The radio station was a crucial information tool during the 1956 Revolution against Soviet rule and Hungary's Moscow-backed government. But the struggle for freedom that began October 23, 1956 was crushed less than two weeks later by Soviet forces. About 2,800 Hungarians died in the fighting and 200,000 others fled to the West.

Now 50 years later, Hungary is free, the Soviet Union is an ever-fading memory, and yet tensions are again high in the country, this time sparked by the anniversary celebrations.

On Sunday, during an awards ceremony in the parliament building, several former freedom fighters refused to shake hands with Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. Mr. Gyurcsany was born five years after the revolution, but he was a leader of Hungary's Communist youth movement in the 1980's, and recently admitted he lied to voters about the economy to win re-election. Outside the parliament building people shouted for his resignation.

The ceremonies to mark the anniversary began Sunday with a concert at the Hungarian State Opera. Just before the performance began, one of the foreign leaders who are in Budapest to mark the anniversary, Austrian President Heinz Fischer, urged Hungarians to overcome their divisions and to celebrate the lasting importance of the revolution 50 years ago. "One thing is clear, the freedom fight of 1956 was not in vain as it showed the courage of the Hungarian people," said Heinz Fischer. He added that the Soviet military was in fact the moral loser. What was bloodily crushed in 1956, Mr. Fischer said, was achieved peacefully in 1989.

Ceremonies Monday to mark the anniversary include the unveiling of a new monument in Budapest's Heroes' Square to honor those who died in the uprising 50 years ago.
Various images of the revolution here.
Posted by:Steve White

#10  ['] <- candle
1956
Polak, Wegier, dwa bratanki!
(Pole, Hungarian, two brothers!)
Posted by: for Hungary from Poland   2006-10-23 13:53  

#9  I read "Bridge at Andau" also. At the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, my father and a cousin were in the US Army somewhere in the south Pacific, waiting to be sent into the Japanese Home Islands. Another cousin was a US sailor, had already survived a suicide bomb attack on his ship off Okinawa, and was waiting for his ship to be sent into Tokyo Bay where it was to be scuttled (unbeknownst to him). I was born almost 2 years later. Somehow, I never read "Hiroshima" and never regretted not doing so. I did visit the Trinity site in NM on the 60th anniversary of the first nuke tests, soaked up a few rays, said a prayer for the dead of WWII, civilian and military, and was thankful the toll wasn't higher than it was. I did not feel guilty.
Posted by: Slaviger Angomong7708   2006-10-23 13:14  

#8  I think everyone of a certain age read "The Bridge at Andau",

I didn't realize it was that widely read, Sgt. Mom. It's telling how almost no school kids read it any more - if they know there even was a Hungarian Revolution. But this past summer Hiroshima was a required book on my ninth-grade son's summer reading list.
Posted by: xbalanke   2006-10-23 12:56  

#7  I think everyone of a certain age read "The Bridge at Andau", Xbalanke...I read it in junior high. I think I was innoculated against any attraction towards communism by it. That, and knowing in a casually friendly way, a whole long series of people who had fled from Communist Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and China, etc.
It did not escape attentio that I knew personally all these people who had fled communism with all speed... but not a one who was interested in actually running towards it.
Posted by: Sgt. Mom   2006-10-23 12:40  

#6  I'd love to talk to my Latin teacher from high school on this anniversary. He escaped from Hungary with his wife during the revolution (he laid mine fields in the Army, so he knew where NOT to walk). He lived in Austria and Germany before finally settling here.

His passionate hatred of Communism was legendary at the school. We'd often bring up Communism in class just to watch him rant for the rest of the period (man, talk about a mad Hungarian). But his hatred of Communism was equalled by his passionate love for this country. He is a true American.

So, here's to you, Mr. Lagler. I'm so glad you lived to see your native land emerge from its long nightmare.

If anyone's interested. Here's a good book on the topic. I had to read it for my high school Modern European History class - enlightening and harrowing.
Posted by: xbalanke   2006-10-23 12:04  

#5  I remember being in grade school and reading about the Hungarian uprising and the limp response to it by the west. That's when I learned how to make a Molotov cocktail. That's when I started reading about Communism from MSM like the Reader's Digest. That pretty well immunized my mind from worshipping the god that failed. The sacrifice of the brave Hungarians was not wasted.
Posted by: Slaviger Angomong7708   2006-10-23 11:25  

#4  As long as communism is celebrated on our universities and the human toll of a 100 million dead, and still counting, is buried by our education system, when personalities make cover by sharing photo ops with Cold War era puppets of Moscow, these stories will remain the rare and arcane. When the ‘National German Socialist Workers PartyÂ’ is a common pejorative but ‘commieÂ’ is considered an honor by way too many who pass themselves off as ‘intellectuals‘, the price paid by the Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Baltics, and others will not be properly recognized. The left which tries daily to sale guilt and shame for an imperfect American history has no time for living human beings whoÂ’ve survived the horror and dehumanization at the hand of their petty human gods.
Posted by: Procopius2K   2006-10-23 09:55  

#3  David Pryce-Jones, National Review:

On October 23, exactly 50 years ago, the Hungarian revolution broke out. LetÂ’s commemorate the brave people who then took to the streets. More than a revolution, it was a fight for freedom. The whole nation took part in it. They wanted to be rid of the Communism that Stalin had imposed on them through the Red Army. Among other symbolic gestures, the Communists had pulled down a famous church and erected a monster statue of Stalin in bronze on the site. The first act of the freedom fighters was to take metal cutters and demolish that statue, leaving nothing but StalinÂ’s empty boots on a plinth. Similarly in Baghdad in 2003?

Hungarian soldiers were obliged to wear a Red Star cap-badge, and one of the sounds of the time was the tinkle these cap-badges made when whole units threw them off. Hungarian soldiers and policemen joined the freedom fighters, established themselves in a cinema and a barracks, and fought off the Soviet army. More than epic, it was Homeric, something to remind mankind of the heights we can rise to in order to be free. Dragged along by events, the newly installed Prime Minister Imre Nagy did his best, but he had behind him a lifelong career as a Communist, and he made the fatal mistake of trusting the Russians. We know now that Khrushchev and the Politburo in the Kremlin always preferred a military solution to a political compromise with Hungary. They tricked the Hungarians into coming to arrange a treaty, arrested the delegation, sent the tanks in, smashed up everything, judicially murdered Nagy and at least 300 others, imprisoned over 20,000 and drove 200,000 into exile in the West.

“Help Hungary. Help!” was the final appeal on the radio, put out by Gyula Hay, the playwright and in his day a veteran Communist too. In sad fact, the United States did nothing, making it plain that the Soviets could do their worst. On hearing that a revolution had broken out, President Eisenhower limited himself to saying, “The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary.” Heart is all very well, but what about muscle? Robert Murphy, then undersecretary of state and an experienced trouble-shooter, summed up Washington’s failure: “Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way.”

The problem may change geographical location, but not its essence. What’s to be done about tyranny? “Help Iraq. Help!” is the message that Iraqi bloggers are putting out more and more urgently. This time the free world indeed intervened to give people their liberty, and again the State Department seems to lack the skill and imagination needed for devising the way to realize it. The Hungarian revolution marked the moment when the inhumanity of Communism was shown up as unbearable, and its doom therefore certain one day. Events in Iraq mark the moment when the inhumanity of Arab and Muslim political order is shown up as unbearable. A day of reform will come, and then the free world can take pride that it did more than show a well-meaning but futile heart
Posted by: Mike   2006-10-23 08:00  

#2  SPACEWAR.com/Other > Russians still grumbling about BMD/GMD and issues.
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2006-10-23 03:12  

#1  Bless you Hungary. Bless you all. may you be a hold.
Posted by: closedanger   2006-10-23 02:08  

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