I don’t think they were trying to restore capitalism. That’s kind of what my whole critique hinges on.

I just think the revolution was a legitimate response to these grievances, and the fact that Western propaganda helped to foment it doesn’t delegitimize it. The CIA’s role doesn’t negate the essentially democratic nature of the revolution or the heavy-handed repression carried out by the Soviets. In my opinion your interpretation removes the Hungarians’ agency, and they become proxies rather than people fighting for their own political freedom and material conditions. It gives the impression that sending tanks into the streets of Budapest, and later to prevent a worker committee meeting from happening, was ok because Western Imperialism.

That’s what’s so baffling to me. If you read any history, e.g. the one I linked, you can also try the numerous ones on marxists.org, even wikipedia, honestly pick your source on any part of the political spectrum, you find out that there was a student movement, followed by mass protests, strikes at factories followed by a general strike, the Red Army was kicked out, a provisional worker’s council committee was established that was democratically elected by workers, then the Red Army came back in force and ended it, after which there were more strikes and mass mobilizations that were repressed by the Soviet military and the Kádár government. There are many accounts of revolutionaries clarifying that they didn’t want to return to capitalism, they just wanted the Red Army out so that they could build what they referred to as real socialism.

I’m well aware that Radio Free Europe was propagandizing throughout the 1950s, there were leaflet drops, and the CIA document shows a relationship with Béla Király after the revolution, when they sponsored his organization. The Artemov book on page 36-38 talks about the information warfare waged on Hungary by the West but it doesn’t give an account of what actually happened.

The idea that Béla Király was training militants in the mountains with the CIA is also contradicted by the fact that he was imprisonned from 1951 until a few weeks before the revolution. As a sidenote, while he fought on the Axis side, he was later named one of the “Righteous Among Nations” by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center because of his relatively humane treatment of Jewish prisoners.

Anyway I just don’t see the weight of historical evidence on the side of “reactionary coup”, but I guess I should thank you for forcing me to do more research on this. I did learn a lot.

No you didn’t. You think the Hungarian Revolution was a counter-revolution initiated by bourgeois reactionaries funded by the CIA, with no popular support. I think it was an uprising initiated by students that then became a massive proletarian revolution against the repression of the Rákosi government. You didn’t “address” this disparity. You just insulted me.

The book you cited doesn’t really talk about the revolution itself, so I have to infer that the author thinks that the psychological warfare waged by the West against the Warsaw Pact countries fooled the revolutionaries into revolting against their government because it convinced them that communism was bad. Again, although the CIA was present, I don’t accept this as the primary motivation for the revolution.

Capitalism has instability built into its model because it generates inevitable class conflict that has to be resolved through violence. There is no such thing as a stable capitalist state.

I realize that continuing this is pointless but I’ll just suggest that you attack the idea and not the person next time.

So ignoring your namecalling and dogmatism, I read the first two chapters of the book, introduction and the chapter on psychological warfare in the 1950s and 1960s. The only thing it says about Hungary is that it was a counter-revolution. Do I have to keep reading into the 1970s and 80s to find out where it’s revealed that the imperialists orchestrated the whole revolution? Should I cite histories by marxists and communists that talk about spontaneous worker councils?

Here, just for kicks

https://www.union-communiste.org/it/1996-12/30-hungary-1956-the-workers-councils-5619

I look forward to the next round of insults, comrade, you’re really doing your movement a service.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and told them “I can’t talk to you because you’re too ignorant, you have to read this book first”? How did that go?

Lol, yeah, totally reasonable way to engage with someone.

People hated the Rákosi government for its political repression and economic austerity measures. Imre Nagy was not a western-sponsored colonel in the Hungarian military, he was a communist. After the fighting in Budapest, revolutionary workers councils organized all over the country. You think the CIA and Radio Free Europe were responsible for that?

My issue with this type of logic is that it’s all or nothing. Thereis a sentence in the declassified document, therefore the whole thing was orchestrated by the US. There was more going on here than Operation Gladio.

I think calling it an op is going too far. There was a democratic students’ movement that siezed the radio station, and they had mass support. The CIA gave support to an ex-Nazi who provided military training after this had happened. The crackdown by the Soviets was brutal and many innocent Hungarians were killed. Dismissing the whole thing as just a CIA op makes it sound like another Bay of Pigs, which this was not.

Yeah the ones chosen for their similarity to the Moscow cityscape to be sprayed with radioactive cadmium to test the effects of nuclear fallout!

https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-community-under-the-atomic-cloud/

I wonder what the reactionary imperialist Vladimir Putin would do to Ukraine in the absence of NATO.

Right, if DSA wasn’t so counterrevolutionary we’d all be storming the Capitol right now. I’m dying to see the results of “true leftism.”

You’re really putting DSA on there? The only organization that has done anything remotely resembling progressive in the entire capitalist cesspool? The only legitimate critique of DSA is that they’re irrelevant, and this is currently being overturned. Go find some better news sources.

No, those 907 people absolutely had to die so that Britain could keep its frozen rock halfway around the world.

It’s only legitimate out of context. The two countries were trying to negotiate a transfer before the war broke out. Argentina was ruled by a military Junta and used the invasion to bolster its internal politics. Thatcher did the same thing by using overwhelming force over a territory that Britain was trying to get rid of. An Argentine cruiser was sunk outside of the exclusion zone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_ARA_General_Belgrano

Afterwards Britain fortified the island to feed its military industrial complex and drum up more support for its decaying empire. Everything about this war was totally pointless except from a domestic political standpoint.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/07/british-sovereignty-falklands-absurd-imperial-hangover-argentina

The victims of this conflict are the casualties of a completely pointless war, on either side. Neither side fought for legitimate reasons and both used it to drum up nationalism.

Look to Hungary for advice. We’re trying to systematically clean out every trace of the old regime. It’s not easy and probably won’t be perfect but people are being arrested.