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
I mean not even mentioning the workers councils that literally shut the country down and dismissing them as something only the trots care about is a huge problem to start. Like, workers didn’t started a strike wave so a few fash and CIA agents can start lynching.
The lynching did happen btw, but it wasn’t something that was condoned by the wider movement, quite the opposite. Here is what the paper of Imre Nagy’s supporters wrote about it.
"We hated fascism, no matter its color, we hated the bandits of Hitler, who, with the innocent Jews, exterminated such great persons of this nation as Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Endre. We hated and hate now the red fascists, the stalinist-rákosiist-péter gáborist-farkasist, or whatever directionist cops who killed, imprisoned, driven to suicide or turned into a physical and mental wreck some of our greatest patriots. And we hate the fascists lurking in the dark, who, taking advantage of the turmoil of the revolution, are trying to bake their own bread over the fire that’s cleansing the nation.
It’s tough to separate justified rage of the people from the hooligans trying to hide in the upset masses, but we got to.
There were lynchings in the city yesterday. Posters started to appear on the walls saying “Down with Communists! Down with the Party! Exterminate the Communists!” Shady people join the masses pointing at houses, saying “there’s a communist living here”, hoping that the masses will listen to them.
Instead we appeal everyone listen to reason! We call everyone to think! We feel like Igazság has deserved the right of calling on everyone to think, as we have supported the rising people from the first and hardest hours, screamed the truth despite the ÁVÓ guns pointed at us, protected the freedom fighters and spread their truth.
First of all we gotta remind you that even in the darkest times, in the midst of terror there were party members, who, risking their own and their families lives, ruining themselves, but came forward and unveiled the enemies of the people, even if it was the leaders of the party. These people were thrown out of the party, lost their jobs, some of them even got imprisoned. They started the process that led to the removal of Rákosi, and to the fact that in the frontlines there are active Party members.
We also gotta remind everyone to the siege of 1944-45 when the snitches brought the Arrow Cross soldiers on the necks of the believers of true freedom and the hiding Jews. They only had to say “This one is a friend of Jews, this one listens to English radio, this one is a member of an opposition party…” Do you remember? And do you remember the workers who were taken away from the barracks because they were succdems or union members?
The tollers of revolution are back. When the weapons were the loudest, they were hiding in the basement and now they’re back to whisper “Communists live here.” You gotta recognise the instigators! The revolution and them are like fire and water!
We say, all of them should be punished! Punish the AVH snitches, punish the AVH members, who ruined families, punish the functionaries who brought this people to ruin instead of rising them! They should be punished, but by the revolutionary tribunals, by the terms of Hungarian laws!
The revolution broke out for the freedom of order and the rule of law. The lynchmobs’ judges and the AVH executioners grew from the same ground. True revolutionaries will condemn lynching as they condemned the fascism of Rákosi.
The order of the Revolution is: Every criminal should answer to the law! But the streets are no tribunals. You shall unveil the criminals of the past, hand them over to the authorities and reject the ones calling for lynhing!
You’ll protect yourself and lay the base for a silent revolution and the blooming of productive life if you do this."
Also there was the “Unguarded money” chests which were started as an art project, by the writers union but in two day they raised about 42 thousand dollars worth of money for the families of fallen revolutionaries and AVH members who were victims of lynching.
These are just the first two examples i could find about how the lynch mobs were rejected. I will maybe address the “color revolution” claims later but i’ve been writing this for 2 hours now. But in short: everything i saw in the alst few years about them makes me think that even if there were western elements in the revolution (probably were) they were strictly limited to the street fights in Budapest, which explains why that is the part that gets mentioned is that and why no one apart from the trots and a few marxists ( like CLR James , who can’t be accused with being a liberal and compared the Hungarian revolution to the Cuban one) mention that the factory councils had a huge part to play in this as well (like when they stopped sourcing the police with weapons after the first instances of firing into the crowd).
Edit: Just out of curiosity i did a ctrl+f of this thread and this comment is the first with the word “council” in it. Kinda telling.
Every time I read something from libcom it’s an absolute blast.
:meow-floppy: so broadly it can be described as general unrest with both (prolly more?) sides ™ vying for power, due to mismanagement or heavy hand of moscow? :meow-floppy:
Like: gib councils side (disaffected workers?), and freedom in workplace; fuck commies side (former bougie types?), gib marshall plan
There were definitely more. And it was a shitstorm, which is well demonstrated by the fact that Maléter (one of the “leaders” of the revolution, also an avid communist) didn’t even know of the lynchings until videos of it were shown to him on his trial (source: his biography page 273 ).
The reasons of the revolution was economic hardships combined with the fact that this era of communism was hardly anything like what Hungary expected after WWI. You couldn’t even start wage negotiations about your wage without shady people starting to ask questions about you behind your back. For 30 years Hungarian communists were sold because they thought council communism is the way, but after WWII that didn’t return. That contradiction was what blew up and if you check the demands ( linking the hungarian because the english translation is ridiculously bad ) they were all things like “living wage for workers” “give the same subsidies to people working alone and people working in co-ops”, “Bottom-up elections in the Labor Party” etc, which were all in the terms of communism staying intact. There are nationalist demands as well, like changing the flag back to the original red-white-green with the Kossuth-badge, but these were formalities.
The most comprehensive work about 1956 from Hungary is by Eörsi László, a Jewish historian, but i only know of one of his books that was released in English, [this one](https://www.amazon.com/Hungarian-Revolution-1956-Realities-Studies/dp/0880335912 i didn’t find a pirate version unfortunately) . It’s cover is shit but he really did a lot of legwork in order to start pushing the narrative leftwards here regarding 1956, he wrote a book where he compiled the biographies of everyone who was sentenced to death, writing in the prologue basically “yeah, there were people who deserved it.”
It actually seems to track with some strikes in ussr around same time and czechia later :soviet-hmm:
It’s some internal contradiction of revolution/coherent tries of socialism it seems, if you immediately go council communism, shit stops working (notable exception of barcelona aside :thonk: ), if you go central party planning, party squashes dissent and then quietly rots away for 50 years until complete revisionism, where bottom up approach could have rescued it.