this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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They were putting chalk marks on the doors of jews and communists. It wasn't a worker's revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demands_of_Hungarian_Revolutionaries_of_1956
So you're saying the revolution demanding minimum wage and the right to strike wasn't a worker's revolution? Are all tankies this right-wing or just you?
drag does realize that the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries were working with literal Nazis, and were marking the doors of Jews and Communists, right? They were lynching people, and even freed Nazis from jail to help with the lynching. The "political parties" they wanted to be able to participate were not worker parties, but fascist ones.
This is genuinely what liberals often accuse "tankies" of doing: uncritically supporting movements based on nominally being progressive, despite in reality being highly reactionary. Further, Hungary wanted to get out of paying reparations for World War II, that was one of the biggest cruxes of the situation. Who did Hungary fight alongside in WWII, does drag remember?
Spoiler: the Nazis.
Source?
This is a decent overview of the background that led up to the events of 1956, and this is a decent overview of the darker side, where the lynchings happened. Content Warning: lynched corpses. Here is a source on MI6 training and arming the counterrevolutionaries. Those 3 articles give only the briefest overview of the events, but don't do the real buildup to them, their complexities, what the people actually supported, or the real character in any depth. If drag wants to actually take a deep dive, these are additional sources:
The History of the Working Class Movement in Hungary
1956 Counter-Revolution in Hungary
Others can offer more sources.
Overall, when it comes to geopolitical enemies of the United States in particular, it would not be a bad idea to treat drag's current understanding with extreme skepticism until drag has investigated counter-sources as well. That doesn't mean the US always lies, in fact it frequently tells mostly the truth, but will distory either the quality or quantity of an event.
If they were capitalists, why didn't the demands of the student protesters say anything about capitalism? If the USSR allowed workers the right to strike, why were the students demanding it?
You asked for sources and then you ignored them in favor of your "um actually" debate pervert bullshit. You're a deeply unserious person.
Read the sources drag asked for. What this was was a bourgeois supported counter-revolution that armed fascists that were doing pograms. The legitimacy of the demands immediately comes into question when drag understands that these were Nazi sympathizers. They wanted to allow fascist and Capitalist parties to dominate Hungary and wanted to get out of paying reparations for the damage they did as Nazis during World War II.
As for striking, it happened sometimes in the Soviet Union. Worker rights were much better there than in Western countries so it wasn't as common.
What do you think "all political parties participating" means in 1956 Hungary?
- Lenin, 1922
It probably means they read Lenin and liked his ideas a lot better than Stalin's nonsense. Now, you were explaining how tankies oppose minimum wage and the right to strike?
To be clear, drag is calling Nazis and Nazi sympathizers "the advanced working class." Trying to twist Lenin into supporting fascism is incorrect, to say the least.
Moreover, Stalin was dead before 1956, this was Khrushchev.
There's nothing fascist in the 16 demands, and drag's search for evidence of this chalk thing turned up nothing with the word "chalk" in it -
drag asked for sources, was that just to waste my time? Read them. Here's another few excerpts:
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: