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
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?”