In today’s Europe, Hungary is at the centre of a current of nationalist resistance to the supranational impulses of the European Union. But in November 1956 Hungary was at the centre of resistance to another, much more violent and all encompassing empire that of the Soviet Union.
Back in 1956 Hungarian politicians wanted to have more freedom to govern themselves within the Soviet bloc but the Soviet Union under their leader Nikita Khrushchev would not countenance the idea of the Hungarians getting uppity and breaking away from the monolithic doctrine of Communism. Khrushchev sent in the tanks to Hungary causing the deaths of thousands of Hungarians, the imprisonment of over twenty thousand more and forcing many more Hungarians into exile.
The Soviet invasion of Hungary as well as hurting the Hungarians tremendously, and probably setting the stage for that nation’s hostility to the idea of being governed by Brussels, also marked the time when no sane, thinking and moral person could see Communism as the answer to humanities problems. The Hungarian uprising and the brutal crushing of it by the Soviet Union was the moment when no amount of lies could sustain the fiction that Communist societies were decent places to live.
There is a fabulous article over at the Unherd site by James Bloodworth published to mark the 62nd anniversary of the failed attempt by the Hungarians to free themselves from the Soviet yoke. In this piece Mr Bloodworth outlines the events that led up to the uprising and the perturbations that the crushing of the Hungarian people by the Soviet Union caused the British Left. The sight of tanks rolling into Budapest and the tales of the brutality of the Soviet troops and new puppet government meant that no longer could the majority of the British Left make excuses for the Soviet Communists. Hungary was the final straw for a British Left that had made allowances for the brutality of both Stalin and Lenin and those Leftists, a minority of them it’s true, that stayed true believers to the Soviet cause were given the derogatory nickname of ‘Tankies’ after the images of Soviet tanks crushing the resistance of the Hungarian people.
Those who do not understand why the Hungarians are so fixed on protecting their culture from what is rapidly becoming an invasion of often dangerous third world Muslims posing as ‘refugees’ should look at recent history, a history that is within living memory and understand that Hungary has intimate experience of being invaded. It is this memory of having their country torn apart by the invading Soviets that goes some way to explain why the Hungarians are so dead set on protecting today what they were unable to protect back in 1956, their nation and their people.
Mr Bloodworth made this sober and accurate observation of the state of left wing circles in 1956 and said:
To those who had never swallowed the doctrines of Marx and Engels, the question was not whether you were still a communist after 1956, but rather, how you could have remained a communist until that point. The slaughter in Budapest followed the deaths of between two and three million people in the Soviet gulag. This itself followed the murder of hundreds of thousands under Lenin’s dictatorship.
For those who continued to cling to their illusions about Soviet communism, the moral equivalence bar got progressively lower as the twentieth century progressed. Communists began the post-war period by asking themselves whether the Soviet system was superior to the United States. As the scale of Stalin’s crimes was gradually revealed, they ended up defending communism against the charge that it had produced regimes as murderous as Hitler’s Germany.
The brutal events of 1956 have had a lasting impact on Leftist politics, helping shape what has been called the ‘New Left’, an attempt to square the theoretical circle of economic planning and political freedom.
Personally I don’t think that the Left recovered from the events of 1956. No longer could Communism be seen as a liberation movement and even the third world Communist movements that some thought would be Communism without the problems of the Soviet bloc ended up as savage dictatorships with death tolls that are hard to comprehend such are their size.
After 1956 the Left could no longer claim that Communism brought about better economic and social conditions than Capitalism and the general public became increasingly aware that Communism brought nothing but death and misery to whatever country followed this accursed ideology. I believe that part of the reason why the 1968 generation of leftists who came to prominence because of the student protests of the time, started on the long road to the identity politics that we see today had its roots in the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 as after that date Communism became morally untenable. After 1956 Communism was a busted flush economically and the Left was left with little more than identity politics, race baiting and sexual politics.
I tend to agree with Mr Bloodworth that today’s Leftists should look at what happened in 1956 and understand that Communism and its variants too often lead to both bloodshed and oppression. Whilst we should remember those who died in the Hungarian Uprising we should also use the memory of the Soviet invasion of Hungary to inoculate ourselves against the return of an ideology that is just as hateful, oppressive and destructive as Nazism was. Those Leftists of today who falsely claim that Communism will bring liberation for the individual and a fair and just society, should look at what happened in 1956 and re-evaluate the path that they are on because it is a path that doesn’t lead to freedom but to life under the jackboot.
We must remember the fate of the Hungarians in order to prevent today’s misguided Leftists doing their utmost to recreate the ideology that crushed the Hungarians and kept the Soviet Union’s Eastern European vassal states imprisoned for nigh on half a century. Communism always goes bad and 1956 showed that rottenness to the entire world.
