I have posted some topics on Colour Revolutions recently and it seems a surprise to people when I say that Hungary was a colour revolution. In reality I should be able to just show the TIME magazine cover supporting the “freedom fighters” and that should be it. Why on earth would TIME be interested in promoting “true socialists”. That should be the end of this post really - “look TIME supported them”. Dust my hands off at a job well done. \
The bourgeois and Trotskyist press has long maintained that “actually they were true socialists that were crushed by tanks by the evil baddie Soviet stalinists”. Even today they are still at it. (some examples below)
https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/43532/Hungary+1956—rebirth+of+socialism+from+below
https://www.socialist.net/the-hungarian-revolution-60-years-on.htm
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/10/hun1-o25.html
This is a profound rewriting of history. I recently had a discussion with someone on here that said there “wasn’t an antiCommunist nature to the protests”.
Radio Free Europe (should be familiar to everyone here) was broadcasting that the US would not allow the “revolution” to be crushed and encouraged the protests
The CIA had numerous assets in place under the agencies Red Sox/Red Cap program
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence, PP.150-160
Section from the book “The Truth about Hungary” by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940’s, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
"But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing."
>"Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. **These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements**' ...." (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
"The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary."
>"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives.“”
Backed by US and British imperialism with Gladio style weapons caches. If you are unfamiliar with Operation Gladio it was a US/British backed operation to fund and arm nationalists and fascists against a hypothetical invasion by the USSR. In reality the USSR was invading noone having suffered 27 million dead in WW2
Instead Gladio became an operation to commit terrorist attacks against civilians, blame them on Communists to create a “strategy of tension”
I can recommend Daniele Ganzers, NATOs Secret Armies
Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war.
The mid-1950s were regarded by the British and the United States as the last chance to challenge Soviet dominion over eastern Europe. The Eisenhower administration had been elected on a platform of “liberating” the Soviet satellite states, but in the 10 years since the Allied victory in Europe, the Soviet Union hadstrengthened its hold over the central and eastern part of the continent.
The name of Mr Smith’s main contact - a military officer working for MI6 - has been withheld under a D-notice. However, he recalled “picking up agents on the Hungarian border” to take them across in to the British-occupied zone of Austria in 1954. “We were taking them up into the mountains and giving them a sort of … crash course. I would be told to pick somebody up from a street corner at a certain time of night in the pouring rain. Graz was our staging point. Then, after we’d trained them - explosives, weapons training - I used to take them back … We were training the agents for the uprising.”
In return, the British received information. Paul Gorka was one of a group of students recruited in the early 1950s to gather intelligence on Soviet activity in Hungary. “In due course we received coded messages from Vienna asking us for information about Russian troop movements … We replied with information written in invisible ink in innocuous letters to special addresses.”
Pictures from the Counter Revolution of them dragging dead jews and communists through the streets, spitting on their bodies, burning pictures of Lenin and Stalin and the USSR flag
Also the Time Magazine cover and the CounterRevolutionary fascists stopping to have their picture taken with a American cia agent
for completeness here’s a pasta on it, would be interested in your comments on it. JoeySteel (RIP) sometimes let his rage get in the way of his writing and I think it could be condensed further
The Soviet invasion of Hungary was good and based and one of the few correct things Khrushchev did. It’s worth bearing in mind the uprising in Hungary coincided with Israel, France and UK’s attack on Egypt.
It was a mix of a popular uprising against Khrushchevs faked “secret” speech about Stalin which enabled the fascist elements (paid, armed and trained by US and UK) of Hungarian society to gamble their chance on getting rid of socialist rule.
Fascists marked Communists homes with a white cross and those of jews with a black cross for extermination squads:
The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of these days, said that! the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
Andre Stil, editor-in-chief of the French Communist newspaper, LHumanite, arrived in Budapest on November 12. He toured the city and conferred with many Communist and other survivors of the days of White Terror. His account is substantially the same as the reports sent in by Times and Tribune and Commonweal and Commentary and U.S. News and Life and Politika eyewitnesses, fascistic mass murder reminding one of the Berlin days of 1933—and the Budapest days of 1919. Thus:
After the tortures, those who were still breathing were hanged Even dead people were hanged. The corpses of those hanged were in such a state that many could not be recognized. The trees in Republic Square still bear the traces. These corpses, in all parts of their bodies, were bored through with bayonet thrusts, assailed by kicks, tom by nails, covered with expectoration…
(Herbert Apheker, The Truth About Hungary, p.220)
CIA sent terrorists to Hungary under the RED SOX program (Horthy here was the leader of the Hungarian fascists under 23 years of fascist rule in Hungary until Soviet liberation).
“The CIA sent RED SOX/RED CAP groups in Budapest into action to join the Freedom Fighters and to help organise them… Radio Free Europe, and the RED SOX/RED CAP groups encouraged the rebels.” Often since denied, this was something known at the time to those in the know. For example, on November 10 1956, the FBI tapped a conversation between Pagie Morris and Jay Lovestone. Morris said “I know the whole thing… Do you remember when I said to you that it was criminal to incite a revolution and a rebellion, and not to follow it through? … Well, the Wisner crowd incited it… And the Horthy crowd has been in it… That Radio Free Europe is the crowd that’s behind it.”
(James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence, by Michael Howard Holzman, pp. 150-160)
The CIA chief in Vienna recalled that these “were very sad days” – we sat powerless on the sidelines watching the Soviets preparing to crush the revolution.
(ibid)
Weapons were British and American
Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war.
(MI6 trained rebels to fight Soviets in Hungarian revolt, The Independent)
Hungary, in 1954, was considered a “weak spot” of the Soviet Union according to US committee ’
Again on New Years day, 1954, the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate released a study, through its chairman, Senator Alexander Wiley which spoke of “accumulating tensions” and mounting “sabotage and underground activities” in Eastern Europe and referred in particular to Hungary as being the most tender spot - the "weakest link
(Truth About Hungary p.112)
The mid-1950s were regarded by the British and the United States as the last chance to challenge Soviet dominion over eastern Europe. The Eisenhower administration had been elected on a platform of “liberating” the Soviet satellite states, but in the 10 years since the Allied victory in Europe, the Soviet Union had strengthened its hold over the central and eastern part of the continent.
USA was planning on WW3 with Soviet Union in 1943 (2 years before WW2 ended) whilst the British - at war with Hungary at this time “looked on at favour of Horthy” (Horthyism was the brand of fascism in Hungary in power for 23 years prior to Soviet liberation which was only more and more influenced by Nazism as the alliance with Austria and Germany deepened during that period and was to be the main fighting force in 1956)
By April 3, 1943, the editors of The Nation, in discussing “Russia After the War,” warned that many of the rich insisted on the inevitability of World War III—a “thought entertained by powerful forces in the United States which fear any modification of property relationships and are made uneasy by the possible existence of a powerful and successful collectivist state in the world.”
Specifically, in terms of Eastern Europe, as Doreen Warriner writes: “In 1944 all the anti-Soviet elements in the Balkan capitals believed that America and Britain would invade the Balkans after the defeat of Germany,” (cited work, p. 21n.). Leigh White, an American correspondent in the Balkans, writing in 1944, commented upon “the disreputable dynasties (there) of which our Metternichs of the State Department and Foreign Office are apparently so enamored” (cited work, p. 459). The distinguished English historian, Professor A. J. P. Taylor, in his introduction to the Memoirs of Michael Karolyi, declares that: “Even in the Second World War, when Hungary was an enemy state, and democratic Hungarians, one might have thought, our only friends, the British Foreign Office looked with favour on Horthy, Kallay and the rest, while Michael Karolyi was held at arm’s length.”
(Herbert Apheker, The Truth About Hungary, p.71)
Americans gravitated toward the fascist elements in Hungary at the end of WWII
When I left Italy in the Summer of 1945 (writes Mr. Riegel), talk of an inevitable war with Russia was fashionable with the Catholic Right and the small cynics who know the answer to everything. Arriving in Hungary, I found this same inevitability of war an article of general faith, intensified by a heritage of Nazi propaganda and wishful thinking.
He found, in agreement with all other observers—the testimony of some of whom has been offered on earlier pages—that … fascism and para-fascism, with their off-shoots of anti-Semitism and clerical reaction, are still strong forces in the country.”
These forces gained encouragement from the American officials, for in Mr. Riegel’s words: “The Americans gravitate toward the most dubious elements remaining in Hungary, the remnants of the gentry, industrialists, the higher clergy, and the motley assortment of fascists and opportunists.”
(ibid p. 73)
NATO furnished support to the fascistic elements of the Horthy fascists with:
The Mutual Security Act (of 1951) has as its stated aim, “to maintain the security and promote the foreign policy and provide for the general welfare of the U. S. by furnishing assistance to friendly nations in the interest of international peace and security.” To this was added an amendment, introduced by Representative Charles Kersten (R., Wis.) and approved by the House (and the Senate and signed by President Truman in October) in the following form, appended to the above:
and for any selected persons who are residing in or escapees from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, or the Communist- dominated areas of Germany and Austria, or any other countries absorbed by the Soviet Union, either to form such persons into national elements of the military forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or for other purposes, when it is similarly determined by the President that such assistance is important in the defense of the North Atlantic area and of the security of the United States (Congressional Record, August 17, 1951, vol. 97, p. 10261).
(ibid p.95)
The worst thing about knowing all of this is that you can’t tell anyone. If you tell liberals all of this they will dismiss you as a tankie conspiracy crank. They knew the uprising was good and democratic and that the Soviets were bad and authoritarian send they refuse to be told anything else.
i remember trying to tell my lib grandma some of this stuff, and she constantly just tone policed me. “You should breathe more.” “Calm down.” “You’re talking too fast.” “You know you sound really angry right now.” “I can’t pay attention to what you’re saying when you get like this.”
This bizarre part of this is I was being very calm, slow, patient, and was taking care to police my own tone. I wasn’t actually worked up. It felt like a deliberate strategy of avoidance.
this is my experience as well.
“well, sure, there were probably SOME fascists, but the people have a right to self determination” :blob-no-thoughts:
Self determination is not a valid argument if the individuals who want to do that are fascists. Inevitably, you must then ask “self-determination at the expense of who?”
Another win for the tankies. Join us, Anarcho brethren! We are consistently right
We are consistently right
No. There are many examples of Marxism miscalculating and failing to adapt. The point of this post is not “anarchists wrong”, it is to clearly outline a historical event so it can be properly discussed and understood.
Accepting Capitalist and Imperialist propaganda as events where Marxism failed only weakens our ability to adequately critique, study, and build upon socialist theory.
If the USSR had been consistently right, it would still be here. It is not. We must all learn from those missteps so we do not repeat them.
With that said, The USSR combatting Hungarian Fascists and halting the beginnings of another antisemitic genocide is an event where the Soviets succeeded.
Stop effort posting on my sectarian jokes!
Of all the things Kruschev would do after Stalins death that Stalin should’ve shot him for - running tanks into Hungary was absolutely correct
The Communists who sided with tanks going into Hungary was how Communists earned the moniker “Tankie”
Yet 50 years later it’s revealed that MI6 were training the rebels :shrug-outta-hecks:
“Tankie” should unironically be worn with pride in the fact “tankies” were absolutely correct in characterising the uprising as a semi-fascist counter-revolution (doors of jews and Communists were marked by pogroms during it) that needed to be put down
Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war. Additional: The Truth About Hungary is a brilliant and quite short book worth reading. Published in 1957 it basically set out the character of the protests as semi-fascist and supported by the imperialist powers. Basically everything that was dismissed as Communist propaganda but has now been confirmed by the Western press. People seem to forget that hungary only a 11 years previously was a fascist state allied with the Nazis and Left Anticommunists have continually tried to portray the uprising as a “socialist uprising but with a more human face”
https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf
My eyes just rolled to the back of my skull.
If you have legitimate critique of this, than please share. I’m interested in other perspectives, especially any Hungarian sources.
You were threatening long post with modern info from hungarian sources for some time :meow-floppy:
Or maybe just source, so as not to bother you too much
I do lol but it would take time to compile it and i like to spend that with not arguing on the internet, especially this last year. but with all these revisionist posts it looks like i seriously gotta get to it.
How is this post revisionist, this matches the Soviet and communist view at the time and has contemporary sources to back it up.
If anything, you coming in with “modern Hungarian sources” would be the revision
I’m a bit perplexed by this as well, but I’m always up for learning and better understanding.
Apparently the Western Liberal historical account is always default and correct and attempting to show the historical account from the point of view of anyone else is “revisionism”