October 23
Oct. 23rd, 2003 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wiseheart...is the most important event in modern Hungarian history. It's the day when - 47 years ago - people arose against the totalitary system. A few weeks later the Soviet army marched into the capital and stamped the insurrection into the bloody (I mean it literally, not as a curse word) soil.
People have hoped that the so-called free countries, led by the United States, would help us, or at least protest. None of that happened. Of course, we had no oil. We were just an insignificant little country, placed strategically in the middle of Europe, on the very border between the elated West and Eastern barbarism. We were not worth endangering the status quo.
When all this happened, I was barely 2 weeks old, and we didn't even live in Hungary back then. When we moved here, in 1965, I was taught in school and afterwards, up to the late 1990es, that what happened in October 1956 was a revisionist effort to turn our land back to capitalism. It was described in gory details what the criminals, who were left out of prison alongside the political captives, did to people.
Now, 12 years later, I'm told in equally gory details what the evil state police did to the revolutionaries. That some of those criminals were actually the heroes of the insurrection.
I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle. Politics work that way. The only certain fact is, that while our people were told to rise up and get rid of the Soviets (very much like a mouse or an ant is told to rise up and beat an elephant to bloody pulp), nobody ever moved a finger to help us. Or even raised their voice to tell the Soviets that there had no right to interfere.
Excuse me when I'm not eager to believe any big words coming from the big countries any more. I wish our politicians wouldn't, either. We could do well enough without sucking up to Bush and his croonies.
People have hoped that the so-called free countries, led by the United States, would help us, or at least protest. None of that happened. Of course, we had no oil. We were just an insignificant little country, placed strategically in the middle of Europe, on the very border between the elated West and Eastern barbarism. We were not worth endangering the status quo.
When all this happened, I was barely 2 weeks old, and we didn't even live in Hungary back then. When we moved here, in 1965, I was taught in school and afterwards, up to the late 1990es, that what happened in October 1956 was a revisionist effort to turn our land back to capitalism. It was described in gory details what the criminals, who were left out of prison alongside the political captives, did to people.
Now, 12 years later, I'm told in equally gory details what the evil state police did to the revolutionaries. That some of those criminals were actually the heroes of the insurrection.
I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle. Politics work that way. The only certain fact is, that while our people were told to rise up and get rid of the Soviets (very much like a mouse or an ant is told to rise up and beat an elephant to bloody pulp), nobody ever moved a finger to help us. Or even raised their voice to tell the Soviets that there had no right to interfere.
Excuse me when I'm not eager to believe any big words coming from the big countries any more. I wish our politicians wouldn't, either. We could do well enough without sucking up to Bush and his croonies.
