Part Two: A War Against Tankies and Tanks: the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Margaret continues talking with Mia Wong about the communists and socialists who fought for workers’ power against the USSR.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're weekly podcast that actually comes out twice a week
that I've been calling a weekly podcast the entire time.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is
Mio Wong. Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hello, Hello, Hello, I'm back. We're doing it again right now,
doing the Revolution.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I know it's funny, how excited I am about this
failed revolution, but it, like whatever, it genuinely changed an
awful lot of things about world history and very positive ways.
And like what also changed world history? I don't have
to pivot to introducing Sophie. I can just introduce Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
you're my producer.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
I want a good pivot. What do you mean, give
me a good pivot?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Ah? Okay, Uh, what's that behind you? It's a different topic.
Our audio engineer, Rory, how was that?

Speaker 1 (00:56):
You did it?

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Hi? Ri?

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Hiri?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Hi?

Speaker 2 (00:59):
RORI me and we can't continue until you say, Hi, Rory.
It's my one obsession. Oh I missed it. I'm so sorry.
I I just said it really high set.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
I was like, Hi, Roy, Yeah, and here's the thing.
Zoom fucking gates that out.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Zoom. Hey wait a minute.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Does it let me do any of my fun little
squeaky things. It's so mean. I'll get to like a
good squeak in in an episode and then nobody else
will hear it besides my dogs.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Oh r, I p the squeaks, but not the dogs.
The dogs are great.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
The dogs are great.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
My dog is incredibly happy about the fact that the
sun stays out and the weather is warm. In a
couple months he will not be as happy because the
weather will be too warm. But for now, literally, he
just spends all of his time sitting in the yard
just staring at the sky happy and it rules.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
That's so cute.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
And I can see him from the like when I'm
washing dishes, i can see him. I can see my
yard for my I'm just but like and he's just
like happily staring at nothing, and I'm just like, this
is nice.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, when it gets too warm, just you know, put
him in the car and drive many hours, many hours.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Air condition I'm air conditioning outside.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
No, I'm just trying to trick you into bringingtront a visit.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Oh yeah, it's true, because you all summers are nicer.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeahin tra rain tra.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Well, I get to do these things because there's a
decent standard of living where I live for now, but
it's quickly dropping. And actually that's not true. It's really
bad here. Everyone I know is completely broke. But where
else there was a bad time that had a revolution.
This will sound really prescient a year from now, or
wildly optimistic. It will sound naively optimistic or prescient. It's

(02:47):
only real. Two options is hungry in nineteen fifty six.
So you have the po TOFI circle right, and they're like, oh,
we should what if conditions were slightly improved? And they
call for protest. That's a solidarity protest with the workers
on trial in Poland for the revolt that I was
talking about. The you know, the uprisings are starting to

(03:08):
happen around the especially the satellite states. They're rarer inside
the USSR, although they happen there too. Hungarian officials go
back and forth constantly about whether or not they're going
to let this happen. So all of these groups at
first and there's a period where they're allowed to do it.
So all these groups, including the official Young Communists, meet

(03:28):
up on October twenty third, and they march to the
Statue of Joseph Bem who was a Polish guy who
had joined the Hungarian fight against the Austrians in eighteen
forty eight. And I really like this. I like that
the thing that kicks off the revolution is a solidarity
march for another country. And I like that the symbol
that they go to is the statue for the Polish

(03:49):
guy who threw down for the Austrians, you know that
as they go off to go throw down for the Poles.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yep, yeap.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
The Minister of the Interior was like, oh, we got
to cancel this. But then the government was like, oh shit,
it's too late. And so they're like, never mind, you're
allowed to do it. And so there's this thing that
when the government tells you can't do something, if you
get enough people, the government says, never mind, you're allowed to.
Quite often, every single marsh that has ever attempted to
get a permit that like probably shouldn't have tried to
get a permit. It's like I was like doing wh

(04:19):
flashbacks to the seat the DNC sixty eight, all the
permitting bullshites like ah, yes, many such cases.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
It turns out power concedes nothing without a demand, does
Frederick Douglas put it, sometimes if you demand, they will concede. Shit, yeah, no, yeah,
if you if you present force, it doesn't have to
be violent force. It has to be force that is
capable of mass disruption. That is what puts the state
in a situation where they want to negotiate with you

(04:46):
instead of crush you. Sometimes it puts them in a
position where they want to do both. Has this about
to happen to all of these people? So the government
they're like, all right, you're allowed to do it. But
they get on the radio and they're like, this is
counter revolutiontionary. Revolutions famously counter revolutionary. Oh uh huh. There's
a hundred thousand people at this march. I am a

(05:07):
little bit. I've read multiple sources to say those one
hundred thousand people, But there's like they say one hundred
thousand people also for the Polish one. I think this
is just a nice round number that people reach for.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Yeah. Yeah, it's just like a large Yeah, you need
a large number, you just yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And they probably don't have like a press helicopter that
has like freedom of this press and is like doing
the crowd counting and stuff, you know, And that's always
like it's.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
Hard to count crowd sizes, like it just is.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
No.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
The way that they do it is that they you
pick like a city block, and you count the number
of people in it, and then you like count if
it's a march, you then like count the number of
blocks worth of people that go through that block. It's
really I used to think about the stuff all the time.
He's to go to protest like every day, and uh,
and everyone's really bad at guessing anyway, whatever, I think

(05:55):
we all know this, Okay. When I was a young
radical and counting lots of protos, I didn't give student
protests and protesters enough to do. I bought into the
lie that mainstream media sells us, which is that college
protesters are just like people playing at politics with no
real impact. This is a lie. I think fewer people

(06:17):
buy into this lie these days. For example, the day
before we recorded this, police broke down the doors of
multiple student activists houses in Ipslante, Michigan, because students living
there had been involved in pro Palestinian protests.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
You were close, ips Lanny.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Ips Lanny. We should leave in me being wrong. I
think it's funny. Maybe it's not, do you know what ips.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Lanny's famous for.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
The cops that broke down the door.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
So for having a water tower that looks like a penis.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Oh that's funny too.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Spent a lot of time there.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Hell yeah, Well you in the future probably have more
information about this than I do. But turns out now
that I read history books all day, I know that
student protests are invaluable because they're the start of a
really large percentage of revolutions, in particular once they connect

(07:15):
with the working class. So these hundred thousand protesters, they're
marching around the big Dick water No wait, no, different
time and place. These hundred thousand protesters they start by
going to Parliament and saying shit like we want m
Ra Nag back, basically bring back the new course right
because nog has been set aside, which I think is

(07:36):
the name of the frengie with working class ethics in
Deep Space nine. But I don't know if that's related
or not. I like to imagine this is where we
get to that the Mia hack and fraud has never
seen Deep Space nine thing and every trans girls and
trying to show it to me, and I'm like, would.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
I have time?

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah, it's okay, it's it's fine. It's nineties TV. There's
like so many good like Xena or Buffy or Deep
Space nine. Like there's like so many good like you
can see where good stuff came out of it. You know. Yeah,
actually I like Deep Space nine more than anything else.
I just said, Yeah, Buffy has yeah, structural issues. But

(08:16):
you know, the list of demands besides, of course, a
season two of Firefly, which no one's demanding anymore, because whatever.
The list of demands of these protesters in nineteen fifty
six is to quote in paraphrase from the Movement Communist Report,
the Belgian and French Communist Report, which, by the way,
it's in the sources. It has some of the most

(08:38):
complete Like here's a list of every council they set up.
Here's a list of all of the militants. Here's a
list of all of these things. It's very sourced and
it's very backed up. These claims about like you know,
it was mostly workers or whatever. Anyway, Okay, there are
a list of demands. They want new party leadership elected,
they want nog as prime minister, they want mul party elections.

(09:01):
They want to get the Russian troops out, they want
economy led by people who specialize in economy and not
the Communist Party, which makes a lot of sense, right,
You're like, we're all in like an economic tailspin. We're like,
what if instead of picking the economy based on ideology,
we picked it on like how we get to eat
the most bread, you know, relax agricultural quotas and support

(09:23):
independent producers, a review of all political trials, and like
releasing people. And this one's interesting. They wanted to use
the eighteen forty eight Hungarian flag, which is the red,
white and green stripe, but without the red star and
crossed hammer and wheat that the Communist one had. And
they actually win this the next year, I believe, but

(09:43):
nothing I've read, I know, nothing I've read since. And
then they won their demand. But as I was trying
to like read about the flag, I was like, wait,
in nineteen fifty seven, it switched over back again. So
they win the most symbolic one, and they want freedom
of speech in the press, and so they've got this

(10:05):
march and they go to the radio station because that's
where propaganda is getting sent out over the airwaves. And
I've read that they tore down a stalin statue on
the way. I've read that they like split up in
a two different groups, and one group went tore down
the Stalin statue and one went to the radio station.
Both of these things happened. Couldn't promise you the linearity
of it. They reached the radio station and the AVO,

(10:27):
the secret police that's been around since Nazi times and before,
are guarding the place, and for a while it seems
like no one will be allowed in. Then finally the
police led a delegation inside. They're like, all right, you
can send a couple people inside. And then two hours
go by and they're like, where are those people we
sent in? And the crowd was like, well, what the fuck?

(10:50):
And so they maybe lunged forward and the AVO opened
fire with machine guns.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Oh.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
God, the crowd grabbed the machine guns and shooting at
the station. Two hundred protesters were killed, forty cops were killed,
and the revolution begins.

Speaker 3 (11:07):
Also, I just want to point out that this is
like a perfectly American twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five
moment of like every time a Polesta Union camment would
send a negotiators to negotiate with the university that arrest
the negotiator. It's like the only the worst people in
history do this, shits like us in the Soviets society,
great great stuff, great stuff.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
The British did a lot of Like Yeah, the thing that, like,
in my mind was always an exaggerated thing for fiction,
which is you get together a peace conference where you
invite all of the enemy leaders, especially if they're sort
of like the Scottish clans or whatever, right, and you
bring them all in one place and then you just
poison them all and murder them all or whatever. I
always thought that was like hack fiction. Shit, No one

(11:46):
was that evil. I've read across that, run across that
like at least three times while study in the British Empire.
It's like like the worst people in all history.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, Finnished Americans. So it's like, God, really terrible.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
I hate it.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
We hate it.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
And so the Hungarian army was sent to put them
down outside the radio station, and the soldiers were like, actually,
you can just have our guns instead.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yeah, I would rather not start massacring a bunch of
my friends, Like fuck.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
This, And so some of them like gave the crowd
their guns and then left, and some of them were like, no,
I'm actually just like with you, and I'm using my gun,
but I'm irritating. Eventually they seize the radio station and
do you know what they started advertising, I mean, broadcasting
demands to buy the products and services support the show.

(12:37):
They were ahead of their time. They were supporting Wow.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
Wow, the first podcasters.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
I know. Yeah, before this, no one had mattresses or
therapy or gambling anyway, the origin of the modern world. Truly,
here's the mads and we're back. And so yeah, they

(13:05):
were like, we're having this revolution now. And at this
point workers had been part of this first march, but
it was largely a student ish, like youth march kind
of thing, you know. But as soon as it kicks off,
the workers are like, all right, let's do it. And
fortunately they've all been industrializing, so they all work at
like gun factories and shit, yep, and so they're just like, here,

(13:25):
we brought you all the guns we made. Here's a
fucking tractor trailer full of the guns.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, those rules, and then.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
They all start building marricads. Of course, according to the
communist press at the time, these folks weren't revolutionaries. They
were armed bandits.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Oh they didn't even have the Nazi line yet they
were on armed bandits. Oh yeah, incredible, incredible.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah no, I took them a while to develop the
technology of calling them Nazis.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah no, And it's funny because I like the arm
bandits one. Because this is, as far as I can tell,
this is like code for people who dislike our authoritarian rule,
but specifically when communists and socialists and anarchists dislike their rule.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah, because this is the thing I said about Makno
like in the Russian Revolution. I was like, what hold on,
I've seen this one before.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah no, and you can still find it today on
Twitter dot com when it readirects to x IS people
claiming the fucking the Ukrainian anarchists and probably these people
are all bandits. But as you pointed out, now they've
moved on to calling these people Nazis. Except I'm getting
ahead of myself, because do you know what they've first
the communists first said about all of this, nothing's happening,

(14:37):
nothing's happening. Very sure.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
I got in one gut in one.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Despite four hundred and fifty people being arrested, two hundred
protesters killed, forty cops killed by day two. The communist
press buries the story, or, to quote internal documents, Comrade
Khrushchev recommends that we not cover the situation in Hungary
and our press until the cause of everything have been
well clarified. Oh my god, I can't say anything because

(15:06):
we don't know what We don't want to get it wrong.
So just not tell anyone, ye.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Journalism practice. Yeah, yeah, So simply do not report of
massacres like yeah, because we don't know what caused them. Like,
who knows where those bullets came from. They could have
like flown at it. They could they could have flowed backwards.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Who knows.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
Look magic for the sky, capitalist demons, You never know.
Bullets come so many places.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
They've been celebrating and shooting into the air and it
doesn't fell down.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
They felled out, Yeah, rained from the sky.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah. And uh. And and Nog, who the crowd is
ostensibly supportive of, he did not start off supportive of
this revolution. He was immediately put into power to mollify
the rebels, so they actually get one of their demands,
like right off, they're like, all right, Nog's in charge again.
Partly because like Nog is like, not not their guy,

(15:59):
you know, like the Soviets, They're like, eh, we didn't
like your new course thing. We put in a strong guy.
But Nog wasn't anti communist or something like that, right, Yeah,
And so immediately he's in power, and his whole line
for the next week is like, stop fighting. We will
punish anyone who revolts. The revolution is over. We won

(16:21):
go home. Oh, no one listened to him.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
That rules. That rules, because that shit works. Sometimes people
sometimes will be like, hey, it's over, you've won, go home,
Go home. And then I know, like the refreshing continues.
But good for them, good for them.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
And it's interesting too, because this is the line by
which people are able to kind of spin a web
of deceit around the Hungarian revolution, is that they're able
to kind of be like, oh, it all sort of
revolved around Nog. He's the leader of it and all
of this stuff, and it's a way to ignore the workers'
councils that are about to get started.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah, and it's also like they dragged him, kicking and
screaming in to the revelation.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Life totally totally, and he's he probably knows this is
the end. Of him, you know, like, yeah, Russian forces
show up right the fuck away by day two, October
twenty fourth, because they were stationed about fifty miles away already,
because Hungary was already an occupied nation.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, which, by the way, I just want to point out,
like how ue hinged, Like having other countries station their
armies in your country is not a normal thing. That
is only a thing that happens to like colonies and
countries are being occupied. Like that's like I feel I
feel like he just has not God mentioned here, but
mia the United States does that all over the world.
Uh huh uh huh. Totally normal things on the military

(17:42):
basis of all of these countries, Completely reasonable and normal.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
But if you don't like the USSR, that means you
like the United States.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
I am going to become the joker. Yeah. No, that
because like I imagine you sign this like we're all packed
and you're like, all right, we all got each other's backs,
and you're like, you know what it is.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
It's just like the end of season four of Lower
Decks is what it is. But I don't want to
spoil it, but if you watch season four of Lower Decks,
you'll know what I'm talking about anyway. I just watched
the episode last night again.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
But yeah, they're like, oh, we're all equals, and they're
like just getting some people are more equal than others.
So people start fighting. There's hundreds of tanks and thousands
of soldiers from the USSR suddenly in Budapest and around
the country, and people just start fighting them, and they
come really close to pulling it off. For the first
week they they win the first week. They're dismantling tanks

(18:42):
with kitchen utensils. I do not know what that means,
but I ran across it that rules.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Yeah, I just like just imagining someone with like I mean,
you know, so like immediate thing, it's like, okay, yeah,
they're unscrewing bolts with knives or something. But now I'm like, no,
they got a rolling pin. They're going like this, They're
just whacking it. They're just whacking it.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah, here the rules, and it just specifically said they're
dismandling tanks with kitchen utentils and gasoline. I suspect that
gasoline was more useful in this project.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Probably, Yeah, yeah, ghasoline very useful substance for dis mantling
a tank, as many people have learned.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, there's a lot of molotops going on, and they're
not mollified by Nog and honestly, they kind of don't
like him very much anymore at this point. And when
it really becomes a revolution isn't just that they've had
some of their demands met. It's that the workers and
students get together and set up a revolutionary Council, which

(19:39):
is made up of representatives elected by local councils from
all of these different workplaces and shit like that.

Speaker 3 (19:47):
That rules there, the rules. It's so awesome. I didn't
know the students were involved in this. That's so cool. Yeah,
I don't know as much about student councils during this.
I know about the student's involvement in setting all of
this up, and I know about later they're gonna have
soldier councils as well. But yeah, so they get together

(20:09):
and the Revolutionary Council calls for a general strike and
they're like, do not put down your weapons, do not
be mollified by Nog. And the general strike sweeps Budapest
in much of the country, and I've read it described
as total, like just incredible. Yeah, the revolutionary councils are
built from delegates coming from the workers' council, soldiers councils,

(20:30):
and peasant councils. They go around and disarm all the
secret police. They start sending delegations to nog who's like, yes, yes, yes,
we'll please, we'll make it better. Just just put down
the guns and let us be in charge of you again.
I swear you know. People from the country side started
delivering food directly into the city bypassing the state apparatus

(20:51):
of like food distribution. They finally did it. They finally
did the think of Potkins said in the Conquest of Bread,
where you have to get people from the country. I
had to send food to the cities. They finally did it.
Finally did it. I guess the anarchists has Spain did it.
But like wow, it's amazing, it's amazing the whole thing.
They could have saved the Russian Revolution from the beginning.
They actually did it. Yeah, they really are doing the
Russian Revolution. But like they're actually like doing it, like

(21:12):
they saw out the councils. They're like allying with the peasants.
They have food moving into the cities. It's amazing, I know,
it's like, it's like one, if the Russian Revolution didn't suck.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Yeah, wow. And what's annoying is because if the Russian
Revolution had done it this way instead, it wouldn't have
had the Red Army as its enemy, and so they
probably would have won, you know. Yeah, And so some
folks started divving up the land. They sort of a
lot of places decollectivized, but i'd like back into small
holders and things like that. Other places were like, fuck, yeah,

(21:41):
our collective is finally in charge of itself. Yeah, and
had like bottom up control of the collectivized farms. One newspaper,
The Observer, wrote, quote, although the general strike is in being,
there is no centrally organized industry, the workers are nevertheless
taking it upon themselves to keep essential services for the
purposes which they determine and support. So yeah, the general

(22:03):
strike people are actually working. They're just working for the
revolution to continue. The quote workers' councils and industrial districts
have undertaken the distribution of essential goods and food to
the population in order to keep them alive. It is
self help in a setting of anarchy that rules. Yeah. Ah,
that's so.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Cool, And it's also it's a really interesting look at
A question that I get a lot is like, if
everyone goes on strike, how are you going to feed people?
And the answer is, you don't just go on strike,
you take control of everything. Yeah, this has happened a
bunch of times in long term general strikes around the world,
including the Seattle nineteen nineteen nineteen. Yeah, general strike that

(22:43):
continued like all the essential services. Yeah, there's a great
FDR line where he calls this is like after Seattle,
but he calls the US. It's like the I forget
how many states ahead of the times, it's like the
forty eight states of the Seattle Soviet because.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Hell yeah, So as the revolution goes on, more and
more of the Hungarian army is defecting, and they get
like whole like fucking leader people with all the troops,
and they're like starting to like get mortars and not
a lot of them, but like they're starting to get
some heavy weaponry. And the Soviet troops keep massacring unarmed demonstrators.

(23:23):
Because it's a weird mix, right, It's like there's a
kind of a war going on, but there's also just
like big unarmed demonstrations happening everywhere.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
You know, and so of course they're shooting that, they're
shooting the workers in this This is like this is
always the most like horrifying elements of this to me
is just the number of like Okay, when you're fighting
the Nazis, right, like you know from the beginning that
these people want to kill you, right, Like that's you
know that that's what they are, the Nazis. But it's

(23:51):
like there's just something viscerally horrifying to me about like
just the communist parties feeding the working class to the
machine guns. Yeah, which just I don't know, because it
just brings me to such a profound sense of grief
and just like horror that like you're doing this to
the people that you're supposed to be like liberating, Like, yeah,
what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Oh God, there's gonna be a good quote about that
later from one of the people who fought in this revolution,
Ugh Onward. On April twenty sixth, the rebels do what
all good revolutionaries do, and they open the prisons, and
if you read some reports that are kind of trying
to like whitewash the whole thing, they're like and then

(24:35):
they freed all the political prisoners, which is true, but
they did that by freeing all of the prisoners that rules.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
That absolutely rules, Like we love that.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
Yeah, no, it's way better that way. They freed a
seventeen thousand because also, like you're in an authoritarian regime,
Like I already I think all prisoners are political, period,
but like when you're an authoritarian regime, they're like extra political.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
You know.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, And people, the longer you've lived into one of
these regimes, the easier it is to understand where there's
you know, because you could just like watch your fucking
neighbor being dragged off. But like in the US, there's
like this I don't know it. People are really precious
about like there being a justice system that like sends
guilty people to this punishment they deserve instead of the

(25:20):
thing that actually happens, which is just like we're torturing
a bunch of people.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah. I think about this comic all the time, some
web comic that was like oh yeah, don't go into
my basement. There's a guy down there, and you're like,
wait what They're like, ah, I'm trying to steal my
car a liile. I guess I'm just keeping him locked
in the basement. You're like, that sounds monstrous.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Yeah, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
And they free seventeen thousand prisoners in total, a quarter
of whom are quote unquote political prisoners. The rest are
quote civil prisoners. From the freed prisoners, they learn about
all the torture and nightmarish conditions in the prisons.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
Oh god. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
And meanwhile, so the Tanky line on this revolution is
that it was all a CIA plot and or fascists
and or before his arm bandits, and before that it
wasn't even happening whatever. I looked into this as much
as I could. I wanted to figure out where the
like kernel of truth might be. I spent way too
long in this particular part of it. I wanted to
spend more time about them dismantling tanks with kitchen utensils.

(26:20):
But yeah, it was not a CIA plot. There are
a ton of recently declassified documents from the US and
the USSR about this whole revolution. The CIA had only
one agent in the country. Eisenhower was sympathetic to the rebels,
but didn't actually want to help because he didn't want
to turn the Cold War hot. There was one avenue

(26:42):
of Western intervention in the revolution Free Radio Europe. Free
Radio Europe was a series of propaganda radio stations that
would broadcast over the Iron Curtain with very specific state
controlled plans to disseminate specific propaganda, which is a very
you know, it's the kind of thing that we got
mad at these union for doing. We were doing too, right, yeah,

(27:03):
we that gets air quotes. There was a scathing internal
report in December nineteen fifty six, which is after the revolution,
is more or less crushed about how the Hungarian section
of Free Radio Europe kind of went rogue and off
script from what they were supposed to do. I don't
know if this is the US just trying to cover

(27:24):
its ass, but this is an internal skating report, not
a public one, so I think they were genuinely annoyed
about Free Radio Europe Hungary being like, yeah, revolution, here's
how to dismantle a tank, like, you know, like yeah,
partly because it's a lot of people who had lived

(27:44):
in Hungary, who had had the FLEA, who were running
these radio stations. Yeah, so they're probably going off script.
Free Radio Europe pushed the revolution hard, and they did
so unjustly and by lying as well. They broadcast lots
of specifics about how to defeat tanks and fight gorilla insurgencies,

(28:05):
but they heavily implied that Western help was on its way,
that if the rebels centralized their military structure, NATO would
show up and throw down and it would be a real
war and they would have allies in it. This was
never going to happen. This was false hope. So that's
the like I can genuinely say, like that was foreign intervention.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Yeah, sure, yeah, But it's also like, you know, you
could see what they're trying to do here, right, which
is like they don't like NATO doesn't actually want a
state run by workers councils, no, like appearing there, Like
that's also a really bad look end for those So
you know they're trying to be like, well, if you like,
if you make like a Western style army, like we'll

(28:47):
help you.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
And it's like, yeah, totally. By October twenty eighth, they've
negotiated a ceasefire because they did really well without Western
help for a long time. They negotiate a ceasefire to
the Moscow loyalists, and the government take off to Moscow
and they fucking defeated the Soviets and it seems at
that moment the real decision is like, do we take

(29:09):
moderate reforms from NAG or do we keep fighting to
win it all? Do we want actual freedom and bottom
up organization or do we want like socialist democracy. That
seems like they're two options on the table. By October thirtieth,
the Soviets have left Budapest and the Revolutionary councils with
reservations are like, fuck it, we'll take NOG. We'll take

(29:31):
NOG with like multi party democracy, like all of our demands,
et cetera. Right, And during all of this, the borders
finally open up to Yugoslavia and Austria. Since Austria is neutral,
most people want to leave to go that way. Western
journalists of various stripes come into the country to cover
what's happening, which I gotta admit, I've gotta be fucking

(29:54):
bravest shit, right, because you're like, oh, the border's open,
pretty sure. The border is only opened for a moment, right, Yep,
ye for.

Speaker 3 (30:03):
A little bit of time. It's like, yep, we're going
into a war zone to do something not the smartest,
but yeah, someone's.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Got to do it. It's like darting under like a
closing garage door, you know, like and it's one of
the most important things that came out of the revolution
was the fact that Western journalists of different political stripes,
including communists, went there and saw firsthand what was happening. Yeah,
now that there's freedom of press, Like literally they've only
had this revolution for a week, there's suddenly twenty five

(30:31):
daily papers.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
I really are communists. Anyone who argus these people aren't
communists I know, does not know. Paul right.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Probably half of them are just like the Hungarian Workers
Socialist Party of Hungary whatever, aryan.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Socialist Workers Party, which is a different entity.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
They hate each other.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
They have been ancient. They have an ancient, one day
old enmity with the Workers Party.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
The new government cabinet is made up of a couple people,
the Communists who are former Communist Party but they're no
longer calling themselves. That have three members, the small owners
have two members. There's one peasant seat and one Social
Democrat seat. That's the like I don't know if that's

(31:20):
what I was going to stay, but that was there, like,
oh shit, we're doing this today, you know, so not
a right wing revolution when you could like maybe be
like the two small owners, but like, probably not. They
might just mean that you can actually have a small
business in a socialist society if you like don't employ
wage labor and whatever. Anyway, what does this new government do? Well,

(31:46):
they actually go all the way with it. They formally
announced that they're leaving the Warsaw Pact on Halloween. Well
it gets announced in the morning, but the meeting was
on Halloween.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Hell.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Yeah, they announced that they're leaving the packed to become
a neutral country, and they beg the UN for help.
So this is the other thing about the US intervention.
They fucking begged for US intervention. That's all they wanted.
You know, I'm not I'm sure everyone, but this is
their hail Mary. They have taken control of their own government.

(32:18):
But Russia has a lot of fucking military yeah, and
international help is not coming. The Western nations leave Hungary
and the Hungarian people to the Red Army. But do
you know what would have saved them?

Speaker 3 (32:36):
The products and services support this podcast all bulletproof if
you wear Nope, probably can't say that, Nope, no, no, no,
you know what, maybe the ads are unrelated to the content.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
You all ever thought about that? I think about it
all the time. It keeps me up at night.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
Here's the ads, and we're back.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
So the revolutionary council system doesn't just give up because
it's important endorse noog. It's not like, oh, weve endorse nog,
like time to dismantle. That's all we were gonna do.
They're like, no, we are going to create essentially a
dual power system. We are going to continue to have
this as a sort of political entity. They get together

(33:23):
and they put together a nine point program, including things
like the factory belongs to the workers, and the supreme
element of authority is the workers Council, elected democratically by
the workers. Shit like that, Holy shit, they're doing communism,
I know.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Oh my god, to the horror of the Western and
the Eastern world.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
They're doing the thing. Yeah exactly. A nag is like, yes, yes,
it's probably Please just go back to work and please
go back to work. And then the workers councils they're
like playing nice with the government. But I think I
think they're trying to just like flex a little bit.
They're like, all right, we're going to return to work

(34:04):
on November fifth. Guy fox masks suddenly appear on all
their faces at the same time. On October thirty first,
Moscow seemed to give up. They published a statement that
read quote, the Soviet government is prepared to enter into
the appropriate negotiations with the Government of the Hungarian People's

(34:24):
Republic and other members of the Warsaw Treaty on the
question of the presence of Soviet troops and the territory
of Hungary. And then later that same day they're like, no,
never mind, let's just kill them all.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
Great great stuff from the Soviets. It's incredible, incredible organization.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
And we have their like meeting notes from when they
got together and decided to kill them all.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
And they were afraid of losing There's two things they
were afraid of. They were afraid of losing face in
front of the world. Because on October twenty ninth, the UK, France,
and Israel had invaded Egypt in the Suez Crisis in
order to regain control of the Suez Canal, which I
will pretend like I know more about, but I don't.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Oh it's I will say, if you want to go
reading too that it is a very very funny example
of like France in the UK, as these like dying empires,
having a temper tantrum and trying to be like real
big boys one last time and then just getting absolutely rolled.
It rules. It's like, it's really really it is the
closest thing the British did to Brexit before Brexit, Like

(35:23):
it's like their last imperial temper tantrum before they ceased
to be a relevant world power.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
So poor timing for the Hungarians of that happened because
Russia is now like, oh, we like really extra, can't
lose face to the West right now. But so they're
afraid of looking weak. But in the same document, this
is not the way they phrased it. But thanks to
the terrible internal echo chamber of Communist party politics, the
communist officials were afraid of losing face in front of themselves.

(35:52):
The other Soviet leaders.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
They were like, ah, I can't be the because they've
just survived the Great Purge, right They're like, oh, if
I don't not only tow the party line, but like
push it, I'm gonna fucking die.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
This is a terrible system, Like don't organize the Great Purge.
You can just like no, like if there's a stalin,
you can just shoot him, like he'll die. Like, if
you shoot him with enough bullets, the man will die.
You don't have to do the great purge. You can
skip them.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
He's made of steel.

Speaker 3 (36:24):
I could get a really big bullet. Is the thing
are re fiercing rounds? Yeah, there's a little green tip,
go right on through there. Yeah yeah, And like it's
why echo chambers are dangerous, because echo chambers allow you
to take whatever is the most radical position, and it
will continue to the You'll push your own little Overton

(36:45):
window further and further. And it's why, like radicals of
all types, including anti authoritarians, need to stay in contact
with people who disagree with them. You need to talk
to people. It's the social equivalent of touch grass is.
You should probably talk to your neighbors if your idea,
if you're if your neighbor isn't like a right wing bigot,
and if you're afraid that your idea sounds really wacky
to your neighbor, that doesn't mean that you're wrong, but

(37:08):
it means you need to think about it. You know,
like you still might be right. The ideas that I
have are absolutely.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Wacky by society standards, but like, yeah, I'm immune to
echo chamber effects. Fortunately, because the only person around me
doesn't talk, he barks a lot. I've actually decided I
hate airplanes because of my dog, who barks at airplanes
all day. That's my real That's not true. I don't
hate airplanes, but Rentrell does. I figured it out, though

(37:36):
I probably already said this on air. I think the
reason he barks at all the birds in the airplanes
is that he's like one of his million working dog
mutt things is keeping chickens safe from hawks and so like,
when he was around a bunch of chickens, I was
afraid he was gonna do a murder on the chickens,
but instead he was just trying to herd them, which
did not work. Chicken anarchists and narco chickenism, Yeah, but

(38:01):
I think he would. He would absolutely keep him safe
from hawks because no hawks come near my well, they
circle overhead because I live in the villa nowhere. But anyway,
what also circles this isn't an ad pivot. What also
circles around Budapest are.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
Russian tanks who good tradition terrible thing. Yeah, Russian troops
started circling Budapest on November first, there's more of them
this time. Last time it was hundreds of tanks and
thousands of soldiers and they won, not the Russians but
the Hungarian people. This time there are six thousand tanks
and two hundred thousand soldiers. Oh my god, which is

(38:39):
a lot. Yeah. What's the population of Budapest at this point?
Like I don't know?

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Oh, wait, I did know, because they incorporated it. It's
like a million and a half because they one of
the things that they did is incorporated like a bunch
of the surrounding suburbs all into one city.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
Yeah. So that's like, don't do math on air. I
just had an episode where I said, don't do math air.
Now I'm attempting to do math on the air. One
in six there are like like a sixth of the
population under is like one soldier for every six random
people in Boodfest good lord and uh. On November fourth,
at four fifteen am, nineteen fifty six, the Russian tanks

(39:17):
roll in. This is like the moment of tanky ism. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
At five twenty am, nog announces this on the air
that this invasion is happening. A couple hours later, he
flees to the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. He doesn't flee
the city, he goes to the embassy of another country,
and for a week the revolutionaries fight like hell. By
November third, the Russians have taken over the country more

(39:43):
or less, and a Soviet puppet named Cotter takes his
oath of office, despite the fact that nag never resigned,
he was just hiding in the embassy. The battle is fierce.
It devolves men and women both. One worker said quote,
they gave out arms to whoever wanted to fight. When
the person was tired, she left her combat position and
went home, keeping her weapon or not. Everything rested on

(40:06):
commitment and confidence. The average fighter's political position was, according
to one witness quote, Yugoslav socialism plus the workers councils.
I don't know enough about Yugoslavian socialism. It is confusing
to me because I haven't done an entire episode about it.
But it's like non Soviet.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
Yeah, it's like less repressive, more like it's like a
weird kind of like system of co ops with like
a strong state element to it, so there's like more
workers control there.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
This is the one that played up that wanted to
be friends with the United States and shit.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
Yeah yeah, but they also but because of just a
bunch of stuff that happens, like there are also a
lot like there are like workers' councils. There is that
like run things, but they're not like completely in control,
and there is still like a central government, and so
they're actually weirdly that they end up taking a lot
of anarchists principles were like if you read books about it,
we'll talk about like Yugoslavia and self management like a

(41:04):
very sort of anarchist sense, and this was like one
of the just actually like the tendency that's like the
closest to like the revolution in Algeria I was talking
about where the fuhone the workers councils was Okay, they
were looking at this, but also like the the thing
about it is that like it is also a market economy,
so they are also like competing ainst each other. So
it's it's very weird, a very very weird system that

(41:24):
also was being held together by subsidies to a large extent.
But yeah, it was it was like one of the
things I was considered just like the other poll against
like the US and the Soviets, was like the system
of like, yeah, you like sort of have democratic stuff,
you can manage your workplace, and.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Yeah, I think that this is what kind of what
they mean in this context when I say Yugoslav socialism
is that the like non Stalinist socialism plus these workers councils,
the military leader as much as there was one, and
this actually might have been only for one fighting unit.
The way that a lot of this was written was
fairly confusing. There was a forty nine year old to

(42:00):
livery driver named Yano Sabo, and he had fought in
the nineteen nineteen revolution and was a fierce anti Stalinist.
He said, quote, this is the quote I promised to
you earlier. Quote the Russian soldiers that we kill are
as much heroes as we are. It is the crime
of the leaders which makes us fight against each other.

(42:21):
And if that doesn't sum up my position on authoritarian communism,
I don't know what does.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
God what a line? Oh my god? Is that is
really something?

Speaker 2 (42:31):
And he got the same do as most of the
Bolsheviks who fought in the revolution. He was executed by communists.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Oh god, yeah, yeah, this this is the vertical problem
of communists, is that you will be killed by other
communists yep, for the crime of doing communism yep, where
is the crime of toscreeing with someone? Which?

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, you know, whichever, the further.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
In you go, the more likely did you getting killed?
I guess this is This is a brief resurgence of
the old days of being killed for the crime of
doing communism versus the middle period of being killed for
being a slightly wrong kind of Bolshevik.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah, for being friends with Stalin but in the wrong way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
Yeah, that's like you tossed off Bria.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Like yeah. So A ton of the rebels in the
Hungarian Revolution were veterans of the Russian Revolution and or
the Spanish Civil War, but most were under twenty years old,
so most were new to this Jeese.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
They fight like hell, but they are outmatched and they
are alone. The miners in the north of the country,
where they actually have some hills, hold out the longest,
as do the densest workers neighborhoods in the major cities.
The last stronghold in Budapest is a hospital that is
taken by force on November sixteenth. The workers' councils keep
organizing despite the military force being defeated, they try to

(43:46):
coordinate better and better despite losing the war. A lot
of Red Army soldiers defect over the course of those revolution.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
Oh that I never heard that part. It makes sense, Like.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
I mean, it's funny because it's like every time I
hear about the Red Army putting down actual workers, I
hear about them defecting, you know, but not not enough
of them. Yeah, not enough of them.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
It's just a few.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
Which is funny because it means not like the Red
Army is famous for a couple of things. One you
can't invade the country U. Two they'll just send zerg
swarms of people that they don't care if live or die.
And three they defect a lot.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
Yeah, because it sucks. It turns out the army sucks.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
And then usually they're like sending you after people who
actually are closer to your own ideology than the people
that are trying to get you killed.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
I remember I read an account, and this is a
really badly sourced There's an account talking about like the
troops they sent in who like literally the thing that
they were told by their commanders was that like they
like they were literally fighting like a resurrected version of
like the s s and that, like like the actual
Nazis from World War two had like taken control again

(44:55):
and they get there where they're like what the fuck,
Like hold on, we why we're shooting work?

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Yeah, like march on those mines and kill the miners
and you're like wait what what?

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Hold on?

Speaker 2 (45:06):
I read some marks a while ago, and I think
it's just said something about not doing that.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
Yeah. No, in order to liberate the politaria, you must
liberate them from life with bullets. This is called socialism. Yeah,
totally back to weird Christianity. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
So there were right wing and anti Semitic components to
the revolution, they were never anything approaching a majority force
within it, as best as I can tell by reading
a lot of different sources, including like Jewish sources that
I think would have wanted to be anti communist. The
primary source for the idea that the whole thing is

(45:45):
a nationalist, anti Semitic revolt comes from not the Tankies,
famous Holocaust denier David Irving.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
What David Irving is the guy you invented the things.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
I don't know if he invented it, but at least
the way it's talked about comes from a poorly sourced
book he wrote in nineteen eighty one about the Hungarian Revolution.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
God, oh, why is everything David Irving? He's the fucking
fire bombing a Dresden guy, Like, you know, why is
the worst guy? Oh my god, I hate him so much.
Oh David Irving, jump scare. I was not prepared for this.
Yeah no, oh, this is like this is like opening
your door. There's just like a barrel of shit there.

(46:29):
Like it's the worst surprise ever.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
And it also means that when people are like, oh,
it's anti Semitic this revolution, which is like one of
the things that tankies will sometimes try and claim about it,
it is it was just literally repeating David Irving Holocaust.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Their courts the Holocaust, and I are like, great, great stuff,
incredible things here. Yeah, oh good god.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Oh no.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
And so there was anti Semitism in the ranks of it. However,
Jews fought on both sides of the revolution. Like one
of the things is that, I mean, it's funny because
almost no one in this story is really justly Jewish, right,
most of them are communist atheists, but like whatever, all
that shit is complicated. But so a lot of the

(47:10):
Communist Party leaders who had fled were Jewish, but so
were a ton of the people running these workers councils
and doing all of the fighting and like, and Jews
were also in the secret police, so some of them
were getting killed. But then as Vic's you pointed out,
there's like the famous photo of the like, we killed
a Jewish person, but it's actually a Christian who was
a Christian, Okay, Like, Yeah, and so I believe that

(47:33):
there was some anti Semitic graffiti. The only real the
thing I can point to that was anti Semitic that
happened comes a little bit later, and it was not.
It was actually after the revolution failed, Jews fought on
both sides, which is the easiest thing to believe ever,
for anyone who has ever read about Judaism in Eastern
Europe and especially Eastern European communism. The oppression is mounting

(47:56):
wherever the Soviets control, Suspected rebels are hanging from bridge
is everywhere. And yeah, Cotter, the guy in charge meets
with a new Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest on
November fourteenth, and the workers say, we want the Soviets
to leave, we want secret ballot, multi party elections. We
want democracy, we want socialist control of the factories. We

(48:18):
want to legalize the unions. We want freedom of press, association,
and religion. And Cotter is like, nah, fuck you. I've
read a couple different versions of this, but I did
find one that's quoting him directly. He said, you have
the right to not recognize my government. That doesn't matter.
I am supported by the Soviet army, and you're free
to do what you want. If you don't work, that's

(48:39):
your business. Here in parliament, we will always have food
and lighting. So he's like, I'm gonna win, is what
he's saying.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
He also said basically, you can't have a National workers
Council because we already have a worker's government. Oh oh.
Then on November twenty second, agreed to leave the embassy
because he was promised that he would be Okay, Oh,
don't do that. No, Like, no, no, this is like

(49:11):
the same thing as like when what's his name, Progovian?

Speaker 3 (49:14):
Proosian?

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Is that his name?

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Oh? I don't know the guy he led that weird
Wagner rule, Like got on an airplane to Africa.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
It's like, don't get on that plane. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah,
Like CEILR.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
James writes this about Walter Rodney, who's the guy who
wrote how Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and like he knew like
Celia James, uh, people who don't know Seelar James's. He's
a weirdly very influential like black Marxist writer in historian.
He's also like all of his friends basically in like

(49:46):
the Pan Africa's this group that he's like part of
the founding of, like go on to like liberate the
colonies in Africa, and so like he knew Walter Rodney
and he wrote a speech about it, and it was
like Walter Rodney, Buddy, why the fuck did you get
in that car? They were obviously going to kill you, Like, buddy,
why did you do this? And it's it's just like
I don't know, like people throughout history keep doing this
and they keep dying, and it's really horrible and tragic.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
It's like, I mean, at some of what you're like,
I bet he's probably like, well, at some point I
gotta leave this embassy. You know, at some point they're
either coming in to get me, Like I don't know,
I don't know. I was going through his head. But
he was arrested and he was flown to a secret
prison in Romania. He was convicted of treason and he

(50:31):
was hanged, with the ostensibly nice Krushchev saying that he
was killed quote as a lesson to all other leaders
in socialist countries, so like, very explicitly, the lesson is,
do not try to be a socialist country not under
the control of the Soviet Union. It is a bare threat.

(50:53):
He was buried in an unmarked grave with his hands
and feet tied up in barbed wire. Jesus, And I
don't know whether they did that before they hanged him
or not, but which case, it's very Jesus.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
He that's yeah, what, oh my god.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
Like By November nineteen fifty seven, the workers' councils were destroyed.
They actually held on for about a year, but their
organizers kept getting arrested and often executed.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
All told, somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand Hungarians were
killed in the fighting, and about three to seven thousand
Russians were killed. Twenty two thousand people were convicted for
participating in the revolution, and at least two hundred and
twenty nine were executed around two hundred thousand Hungarians left
the country while the Iron Curtain was down, which is

(51:40):
actually one of the main other things that they accomplished.
These twenty to fifty thousand Hungarians who died in that
fighting helped get two hundred thousand people out of the country. Like,
they didn't retake their country, but they helped get two
hundred thousand people out of this nightmare country. Yeah, the

(52:01):
border wasn't fully closed again until March nineteen fifty seven,
and this diaspora is called the fifty six ers. When asked,
there was like a poll, the majority said the reason
they left was because of fear because of this is
not surprising, but you know, it was fear of reprisals
and imprisonment and deportation to the USSR or within the USSR,

(52:23):
A huge percentage of the people who'd been in the workers'
councils fled. At one point, I think the only Western
military action of the entire revolution, a Hungarian fled across
the border to Austria and a Soviet soldier came after
him crossed the border to try and keep this guy
from running. So an Austrian soldier shot the Soviet soldier

(52:43):
dead is the only border patrol person I've ever heard
of where I'm like, I like you. Twenty thousand of
the people who fled were Jews, which is very disproportionate.
Best as I can tell, based on what I've read,
most Jews weren't fleeing the supposedly anti Semitic revolution, but

(53:05):
because they were part of this revolution and they feared
the return of Soviet control.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
But the one anti Semitic thing that I can point
to that happened once they were in the refugee camps,
there were anti Semitic riots when Hungarian non Jews decided
the Jews were getting special treatment or whatever.

Speaker 3 (53:21):
The fuck Jesus fucking Christ.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
They were like, ah, you're getting first pick of country
because we're weird and never changed fucking anti semitism. Yeah,
but I actually read a lot about the refugee camps
and they're like kind of the best case scenario that
I've ever read about, and like people were like, like

(53:44):
there was a humanitarian worker, was like, never in my
life have I seen people being like, all right, who
wants Sweden get on this bus? Who wants you know, Germany?
Get on this bus?

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Uh huh?

Speaker 2 (53:53):
And the Cool People Award for the week. The sides
of the Hungarians who do this revolution goes to Austria.
Austria went into overdrive to help people escape. They declared
that they were going to offer asylum as early as
October twenty eighth, like only a couple days after the
revolution started.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
They set up two hundred and fifty seven refugee camps
and volunteers poured in. These were like not concentration camps basically,
as far as I can tell, volunteers like poured in
both from Austria and internationally to help the refugees.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
And this was they were a neutral power, This wasn't
a NATO power, and they had a socialist Minister of
the Interior. And yeah, so the revolution failed. People learned
the truth about the USSR. Peter Fryar was a journalist
for the Daily Worker, a UK Communist Party magazine.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
Oh, I was wondering, group we're going to get to him.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Yeah, it has only got a couple of line or
so in it. Yeah, he wrote what he saw and
about the censuring of his reports because the Communist Party
of the UK was like, now you can't say any
that shit. And he was kicked out of the Communist Party,
and now we all know it tanked because they're the
people who are like but I like censoring Peter Fryar's reports.

(55:08):
Ever since, the world has tried to deny that it
was a revolution led by workers councils. The USSR wants
us to believe those capitalists. The US wants us to
believe those capitalists. The revolution has been recuperated by Hungarian nationalists.
At the fiftieth anniversary commemoration, the officials didn't mention the

(55:28):
workers or their organization and reduced it to trade unionism.
But if you want to know the ins and outs,
there's among the sources in this episode. In the show notes,
there's a libcom article with Storming Heaven in the title
that has more than you want to know about all
of those so much and has down to the details

(55:49):
of the points of unity of like this council versus
that council, and the organizational methods, and it's amazing. Yeah,
that's the Hungarian revolution.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Hell yeah, you know, there's a lot of I guess
I in some sense I have like like girl who's
read a book about China, This looks like China brain,
But you know, I think there's there's a really interesting
thing that happens here where again, like like all of
you know, the the establishment of workers councils the control
production gets described by the liberal press as liberalization. Yeah,

(56:23):
that's not what liberalism is. Hold on, yeah, hold on,
liberalism does not support the formation of the workers councils
to sees controlled the media production. That is in fact communism.
Like and it's interesting you see this this tendency like
play out throughout the course of the of the twentieth century,
where like the actual thing that's happening is that there's

(56:44):
I mean, you know, like I said, you're like four
or five currents, but there's there's always at all times
in the capitalist countries and in the communist countries, like
a third current they're fighting against, which is the tendency,
which which is the workers councils. And this is a
bunch of what like the uprisings in France May sixty eight,
and this happens in Italy a bunch of times in
sixty eight and again in like seventy seven, and in

(57:06):
all of these different countries in like Spain and Algeria
and like all of these different places, there are these revolutions.
You see this also in like between like the prog
Spring and Czechoslovakia, like all of these places for workers councils,
and everyone goes, oh, these are liberal capitalist revolutions, and
they're not. They're like that. There are revolutions that are
about like like they are communists, right, they are communists.

(57:28):
They want communism, they are, but you know, but they
take all of the things that they were told about communism,
about communism being the workers control the means of production
very seriously, and they're like, Okay, how do you do this.
You do this by you know, managing production democratically through councils,
and this tradition of like the annihilation of memory. Like
I wrote a piece a few years ago called When

(57:51):
Communists Crushed the International Workers Movement. That's like sort of
looking at this stuff. The thing that this reminds me
a lot of is the way that Tanneman is rem
We're like Chhaneman is also a protest starts with the
student protest and then very quickly, just unbelievable numbers of
workers show up, right, and you know, you have some
similar things of workers showing the arm themselves. And if

(58:13):
you read the reports of like what these people are
talking about on the interviews they're giving, like they are
also talking about like democratic control on the factories, and
this is just gone for the matream accounts of it.
Everyone remembers, like Channleman as a student protest that was
for liberal democracy. And this is like the last of
those kinds of things where, you know, because it's convenient

(58:34):
for every side right for it to have been sort
of like pro western like capitalist pro democracy protests. There's
a whole lineage of movements that it's just that we're
not that, We're never that didn't really want that, and
like Ganlemen and at least you can point to the
students and go like, well some of them wanted that,
but right, you know, there's this whole lineage of these

(58:55):
things that are workers troupments that just get erased because
it's politically inconvenient for everyone, and because the idea that
like you and the other people at your workplace who
do the work should run it is so dangerous that
everyone is willing to just like throw aside all of
the ideological differences they have with each other. Would be
like fuck it, eat shit.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
No, it makes sense. I mean It's like one of
the things I've always realized, and not that these people
are anarchists, but in this you know, anyone who desires
state power and authority is always going to hate people
who want actual democracy or want actual you know, bottom
up control of society. And like, it's interesting because one

(59:34):
of the things that I think about, I'm trying to
think about why I'm doing this Tanky episode right now,
because like, honestly, I am personally trying to get over
some of my biases around some of this stuff, because
I believe that the real threat right now is fascism.
Right Fascism has captured the state power of the United
States is the most powerful military of the world has

(59:55):
ever seen. That's bad, you know, And but I think
a lot of it for me get summed up in
that quote from the forty nine year old truck driver
who you know, was a military leader of the revolution,
which is that like, when I think about the average fascist,
I'm like, well, this person isn't in it for good reasons.

(01:00:15):
Is doing a bad thing for bad reasons. And when
I think about the average Tanky, I am thinking of
someone who is doing a bad thing for good reasons.
And I think that that difference matters, and I think
that what we can try to do is challenge them
on being like, well, don't do these things that keep

(01:00:36):
happening historically where you all do really bad things. Stop
doing the really bad things. Yeah, and go ahead.

Speaker 3 (01:00:44):
Well, I said, this is like, this is like these
are conversations that are very difficult and suck. But like
I kind of I almost weirdly think about it as
it's almost like it's like de radicalization work in some sense. Right,
there's something that you do on a personal level with
the personal relationship you have with people, but also you know,
like some of the people who I trust the most

(01:01:05):
in my life are people who either like used to
believe the stuff or believe some of it. Yeah, and
you can, you know, you can do a lot of
work to make sure that someone who's in it for
the right reason and also has come to hold a
bunch of very weird beliefs from like a bunch of
shit on Twitter can be someone who you can trust
to like watch your back as the fascist descent, and

(01:01:27):
that's a really valuable thing. And like, both sides of
this revolution are communists, so you can't hold one side
up and then say, and I therefore hate communists, right
because you're like, well, I just said I like one
side of this, you know, and so we can challenge
people to be the right side of this. And and
I think for me the answer is political pluralism. Like

(01:01:50):
I think that, you know, one of the things is
you pointed out, like, Okay, so there's like sometimes capitalists
within these movements or whatever, And there's capitalists in right
wing people within this movement absolutely, just actually to a
less degree than I actually thought going in. I still
supported the revolution because I'm like, well, I believe in
political pluralism. But but I think that one of these
things that they're fighting for is like non forced collectivization.

(01:02:13):
They're like, we want to collectivize because we want to collectiviz, yeah,
not at gunpoint. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Like, and if someone wants to go their own way
and have a small farm where they're not exploiting anyone,
let them do it, because the systems that you create
to prevent someone from doing that are so much more
evil than whatever harm is caused by a small producer.

Speaker 3 (01:02:36):
You know. And I don't know, well, and I think
there's there's another principle there where it's like in a
functional society, you can have political disagreements with someone that
don't end in people being marched off to prison cells
and execution plots. Right, Like, that's a thing that you
should be able to have and it's not a like

(01:02:58):
you must let Nazis exist. But also like I don't know, like,
look what's happened to Eastern Europe after the Soviet block
felt like were they were they successful in defeating like
destroying Nazism in Eastern Europe forever? Like No, Yeah, you
can't actually kill people's ideas, and you shouldn't kill people
for their ideas even if they're awful terrible ideas. You
can only prevent them from doing terrible things with it

(01:03:18):
because of their ideas. Yeah, anyways, that's that's the moment
we're in now. We are now in the people with
terrible ideas have taken power. We need to stop them
from doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Absolutely, and we need to make common cause with the
people that I just spent two hours trash talking.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Hoorah. And so we have we have a podcast about this.
It's called a could Happen Here. It's every day. It's
actually like there's so many episodes you can listen to them.
It's great. It's on wherever fine podcasts are sold, sold,
distributed that one. Yeah, I'll sell you it could happen
here for three bucks an episode. Just benmo me and

(01:03:54):
I will send you an MP three file. I would
see about as much as that Bundy as I would
if someone, if fucking company was selling it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
So like you know, I love to say that Sophie.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
No Ah no censored by the corporate media.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Well that's it for this week, and when we come
back next week we will have more Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff. That's always the outro we use. I
don't know what you're talking about. Bye, everyone that was weird.
I liked it. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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