Asklemmy

Sure! Here are some not “think tank” sources on these subjects! Opposition parties being removed from running in the election due to communist party pressure, soviet troops deporting the secretary of the Smallholders’ Party, blackmailing an elected prime minister into exile, communists being able to vote like 15-20 times aka blue-ballot election fraud, another source

NYT is a capitalist propaganda rag too, though. They've been called out numerous times for willingly participating in pro-imperialist narratives, especially in Palestine recently.

Forcing every peasant into giving their land to coop’s and requiring such an insane plan requirement that didn’t leave you enough seeds to replicate the next harvest as well was a failure

The communists socialized production, and committed an error afterwards. It sounds like you're arguing that production shouldn't be socialized at all, and that socialization caused the error, not the mistakes in calculation. There's good reason crop yields in all socialist countries went up overall post-collectivization.

Fascists were indeed jailed and executed, but you miss the point. The revolution didn’t happen because the communists executed Arrow Cross Party members and such, but because the Communist Party won in a fraud, instilled fears with ÁVH, produced famine due to the failure of collectivization, issued massive censorships, not being able to leave the country as a hungarian, making staged show trials (László Rajk) and conveniently sending anyone who dares to question the government to Gulags, not just straight up fascists.

The counter-revolution happened because lingering fascist elements from a decade ago were emboldened by the west, and while there were some legitimate greivances, the character of the counter-revolt was fascist and western supported. Kinda like what's happening in Iran recently, legitimate greivances twisted into extreme fascist violence. Socialism was amazing for the Hungarian People's Republic overall, achieving astounding economic growth and development.

If we are think tank-ing, then Comrade’s Library is also a think tank source. Hearing the word “progressive” and sending people to work camps only getting 1 soup per day in Siberia, Recsk or other places doesn’t sound too progressive to me.

Comrade's library isn't a source, it's a book repository. That's like debunking a public library as a source when I tell you to read a book housed within it. Soviet prisons were quite progressive overall, and pretending the only ones that existed were the ones in harsher conditions is classic propagandizing, exaggerating extremes and pretending they were the norm. The soviets even abhored using handcuffs as being too barbaric. Read the book.

Yes, I can see that the CIA funded the Radio Free Europe. I have expressed all the others previously.

Then it shouldn't be surprising that it emboldened the fascists, just like Fox News with the Jan 6 rioters in the US Empire.

Both the west and the soviet bloc had a proven track record to support their ideologies or give a huge prestige blow to eachother. Everything was explained earlier, but fascism didn’t outweigh the socialistic ambition of the revolution, especially seen by the leadership and antisemitism being in small isolated incidents.

Fascism absolutely outweighed the minor progressive side, especially considering the "progressive" side still ultimately wanted to liberalize the economy and sell out to the west. This sparked one of the largest migrations of Hungarian Jews out of Hungary since the Holocaust itself.

Overall to me it seems you are upplaying the amount of antisemite, fascist, Horthy sympathizers in the Revolution from an incredibly biased source from Aptheker, who was even removed from his communist party, making up facts, and conveniently not mentioning relevant informations trying to paint the 1956 Revolution as an event made by fascists and the west, and trying to pretend that anyone who questions the Communist Party is a fascist, even if they are socialists and not a hardliner stalinist.

You're downplaying the role of fascism in Hungary, as though they all disappeared after 1956. The fact is, the overwhelming majority of those oppressed by the communists were fascists, hence the widespread pograms and Jewish flight from Hungary.

Anyone who does election fraud, state-wide censorship, sending anyone to work camps, eliminating the option to emigrate, doing propaganda 24/7, and shooting into civilians is a monster to me. Maybe if Lenin wouldn’t have died so early, we wouldn’t have seen the light of stalinism. Who knows.

The fascists were doing worse in Hungary, at a far larger scale. Stalin continued Lenin's legacy. You're confusing the incredibly tumultuous period post-war with the entirety of the socialist experience.

The only good thing I can say about you is that the commie apartment block program was a really great investment, even if they were poor quality, it did make considerable amount of subsidization into these to have something for people to live in, even there was like 6 people in 1 small apartment.

And these massively progressive programs extended to education, healthcare, development, jobs, and more. The fascists wanted to take them all away.

And on the other hand where 47% polish people are living better and 35% are worse isn’t mentioned in Poland’s wiki. How convenient.

Poland is a seperate conversation, and too benefited dramatically from socialism while having serious problems with fascism.

This 72% of are regarding the Kádár era, which is indeed true according from my grandma’s and parents’ statements, however this doesn’t mean that economic life was great all times. At Rákosi people had to resort back to a ticket based system in order to get basic food like bread, where the last ticket system was in WW2 or WW1, mainly due to the force of collectivization and industrializations in an agricultural country with plenty of farmable land.

Nobody ever said economic life was great at all times. Coming out of World War II and dealing with the political instability of lingering fascism was immensely destructive. The Kádár era was better not because Kádár was a better person, but because socialism had had longer to solidify.

Additionally this poll was made in 2009, 3 years after the deviza crisis in Hungary and 1 year after the 2008 bank crisis.

Not many polls regarding socialism are made, further the longer we are removed from the dissolution of socialism in Europe the less reliable polling results become.

Luckily Kádár wasn’t as a hardliner stalinist like Rákosi, but he especially prioritized wellbeing in order to not experience another 1956 again. Life did improve around the mid 60s, especially by abolishing the collectivization efforts. It seems private farmland ownership works better than having everything in the state.

Rákosi also prioritized wellbeing, you can't just snap your fingers in a post-war, post-fascist environment to make things better. Rákosi was more of a hardliner, and this over-reliance on soviet-style economy without adhering to Hungary's conditions did slow growth, but it was still positive. Selling out to the IMF was disastrous, as this contributed to the decline in socialism and its dissolution.

Even if hungarians lived in goulash communism, it was still forbidden to act against the government, critiquing the soviet occupation, talking about 1956, questioning Kádár, etc

Again, simply letting western media have their way with Hungarian public opinion and provoke another 1956 would have been another tragedy.

There were more hospitals, subsidizied house programme, starting to be able to attend vacations, seeing some whitelisted western media, but only those which aligned with communist interests, like the Bud Spencer + Terence Hill movies. (These are simple but pretty entertaining movies, I can easily recommend Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure) We can also thank for the Information Age for better living, where basically all countries improved by it worldwide.

Socialism indeed produced good results for the people, as did the internet.

Unfortunately after the oil crisis, Kádár wasn’t able to retain the current living conditions, so he had to resort into a debt spiral indefinitely. This caused the start of massive inflation, especially after the regime change. Also emerging unemployments

Selling out to the IMF was avoidable, and exactly where even the "progressive" elements in the 1956 counter-revolution were heading. You're arguing for disaster to have come earlier.

Also collectivelly all the eastern bloc countries have lost their companies due to the western items were usually much better, like Trabant, Lada (still exists tho, but not as popular anymore), Ikarus etc. Maybe if we would have remained non-communist, then we would have had more competent companies, who knows.

Building up industry in lesser-industrialized countries took time. China is now overtaking the rest of the world, but it didn't happen overnight. If the Eastern Bloc was never socialist, then they would have had the slower growth they had post-socialism.

EDIT: Atleast we can hopefully agree, that the current monopol corpos such as Google, Amazon, etc. are downright evil.

Sure, I believe that, but it seems that you're more aligned with them than against.

Using “counter-revolution”. The definition of a revolution is going against the currently established authority / government. If you imply the 1956 revolution is a counter-revolution, then simply I guess in some way the Communist Party wasn’t the ruling party and never had any power in Hungary despite clearly them having absolute control over it.

This is just phrasemongering. Socialism is revolutionary compared to capitalism, wishing to reinstate capitalism and/or fascism is trying to turn the clock back, ie counter-revolutionary, and serves the bourgeoisie.

Right under that journalist who was willing to provide favorable / biased views a communist leader in change of him being allowed to visit said country in the CIA doc.

Not sure what you're getting at, here.

Aptheker clearly thinks burning communist and communist aligned literature is a vile thing.

He'd be correct.

But when we are talking about cleansing and removing fascistic, everything is quite acceptable then. He would still prefer to see some of the books being present as examples, but clearly he doesn’t find major issues with it, even if he realized this degenerated into a full-scale censorship.

Yes, it's much better to censor fascist literature than communist. You're equating fascism and communism in this point, censorship was employed against fascists and capitalists.

There are some publications which analyzies Apthaker takes coming from the Young Socialist in this example, where he automatically thinks that the Social Democratic Party supported Horthy, because they existed under his regent

The SDP being more friendly to Horthy than the Bolsheviks were to the Tsar isn't unheard of. In Germany, for example, the SPD sided against the KPD and indirectly aided the Nazis in coming to power.

He clearly dismisses and doesn’t talk about how each eastern bloc countries were exploited and it’s resources were straight up funneled into the USSR, with way way less things to receive from them, which only started to turn around way later after Stalin’s death.

He dismisses this because the extent was exaggerated. The RSFSR was more developed, but did not export capital nor did it have any colonies nor neocolonies. Socialism involved lots of trade, and all of the members in the socialist bloc dramatically benefited from socialism. The sheer scale of plunder by capitalism far exceeds the uneveness in the USSR.

The author also presents that he took the Communist Party’s opinion of Laszlo Rajk’s execution as absolute truth with no question, only to be finally changed about this subject.

As a communist, he sided with the predominent opinion among communists, until shown proof of otherwise. Not surprising.

But what about the sources? It seems like he indeed cherry-picks too by using bias far-right sources and fabricated communist sources with no independent verifications.

But what about the sources? It seems like he indeed cherry-picks too by using bias far-right sources and fabricated communist sources with no independent verifications.

Yep, he does use far-right sources, like the New York Times, when they admit inconvenient truths. When capitalists praise communists, this makes it easier to accept than the standard demonization. Further, the idea that non-communist sources, independent and opposed to the system, need to confirm communist sources is deeply misunderstanding how media works. Discrediting a source because ideologically opposed sources don't back it up is false.

What is more damning is that his claim of the initial hours of where the freedom fighters supposedly instantly began to do antisemitic remarks, causing chaos, attacking innocent policeman has no source.

Your own source automatically discredits non-communist sources that back up his claims.

And not only that he states that noone knows who shot into the public at the Parlamient square which is absolutely debunked by now, and it was made by the ÁVH members with some tanks as additional measures.

Much of this article itself is unsourced, and as we know Wikipedia is right-wing biased. Even if this is indeed true, his lack of knowledge doesn't mean he is incorrect.

With so so much bias and willfully keeping off informations, it’s hard to trust any of his statements. One statement can be accepted, that antisemitism were indeed present in 1956, albeit in rural and isolated incidents. A fresher analyisis has a publication on the presence of antisemitism in 1956.

Your own sources were equally biased, and removed information as well. Being biased does not inherently mean incorrect, and your own articled willingly discredited communist-aligned sources.

As we can see these indeed happened, and in really cruel ways, but only in small instances. 4 towns and a few villages compared to the 3184 villages and 58 towns. There are also eyewitness accounts despising antisemite people’s remarks in Budapest by the crowds, but I can’t find sources for these.

Other jewish members aiding the revolution: Donáth Ferenc, István Kovács, György Fazekas, Erika Szeles, István Angyal, Istvan Eörsi, Gábor Földes, József Gáli, Miklós Krassó, László Nickelsburg, Ottó Szirmai

Peter Hidas, your source, was a participant in the 1956 counter-revolution. Hardly an unbiased source, with clear motivations to minimize the pograms. The presence of Jewish people in the counter-revolution does not discredit the fascist nature of it, but again confirm what I always said: there were faux-progressive elements combined with fascist elements in an overall counter-revolution.

While it can be agreed that pre-Stalin era leaders such as Lenin probably wasn’t antisemite, what about Stalin? He murdered a number of high profile jewish politicians, maybe this is just a coincidence, he was a paranoia filled psychopath maniac after all. Khrushchev and other people claimed he having antisemite sentiments, although I don’t know if there are verifications for these. While publicly he stated not being an antisemite, his actions seems suspicious. What about suddenly dissolving a pro-communist JAC in the name of imperialism according to him?. And what about this statement? It just seems convenient to call everyone who you don’t like an american agent or any word. But if he really thought they were american agents, it still specifically hurted jewish communities.

Perhaps the Doctor’s Plot where it so happens to be that a higher percentage of them were jews.

Again, quoting my prior comment:

Anti-semitism was punishable by death penalty in the USSR, this is largely Red Scare fearmongering. In fact, the soviets were accused of being jewish supremicists, hence the hysteria around "Judeo-Bolshevism." The USSR was the opposite of anti-semitic:

Source: Works, Vol. 13, 1930 - January 1934 Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954

"National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle.

Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism. In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty."

• J. Stalin January 12, 1931

This is teetering into Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization by painting the soviets as antisemitic. This is really just projection.

These claims didn’t get any verifications, so it either happened or not. This seems to be why this claim didn’t get much popularity in non-communist cirlces, and with independent historians. If true, they were only able to make modest help, all the insurgencies made in all towns and cities were grass-roots movements. It’s either wishful thinking or a heavy bias if one wants to believe in unverified claims.

MI6 trained and both MI6 and the CIA supplied arms for the Fifth Column elements in Hungary. This is a common tactic, these "stay behind" operations and mechanisms for arming far-right death squads was the basis of Operation Gladio.

The CIA indeed broadcasted the Radio Free Europe, but only after they got surprised when the revolution has happened. It is important to note that foreign involvement only supported the revolution, and didn’t organize it or were physically involved with a bunch of troops such as the USA in the Vietnam war, and the USSR in the Afghan war

RFE began broadcasting its propaganda in 1949. Foreign involvement was in aiding, supplying, and arming the far-right, emboldening them to strike. Nobody is claiming that the west physically invaded Hungary, but instead that they provoked the most violent reactionaries into violence, a tried and true method of Color Revolution.

If you are commenting these to undermine the 1956 revolution, then we can also undermine all the insurgencies / revolutions / civil wars if any foreign involvement got into it, even if it was mainly / only by broadcasting radio signals, like these soviet attempts in regime changes or upholding them, or american attempts.

There's a massive difference between soviet aid for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist forces, and the west arming and supporting fascists. My point isn't that intervention is always bad, but instead that the west intervened in ways that furthered imperialism and fascism while the soviets were liberatory and expanded socialism.

The claims of the Arrow Cross Party being involved in 1956 was a propaganda campaign made on false allegations by János Kádár.. This is the source which contains his speeches where Kádár tried to legitimize his regime found on page 460. He (rightfully) executed Mihaly Francia Kiss, a former White Terror member probably as a legitimization of his propaganda, but there is no mention of him being involved in the 1956 uprising. Not in here either.. Kádár never provided proof for these involved Arrow Cross Party members.

MI6, when training the far-right elements, found despondent Hungarians that were supportive of the previous fascist regime. This included Arrow Cross Party members, but not exclusively, and the idea that no Arrow Cross Party member or supporter took place in the anti-communist violence has no proof whatsoever, while there is evidence of their presence.

Any former Cross Party shadow power was neutered by ÁVH’s action in finding political enemies. Also in 1944-45, these nazi scums were executed as well. You can only stay on this belief, if you assume that the ÁVH was ineffective at this mission.

The ÁVH did fail, that's why so many Nazis in Hungary went unpunished, and why the counter-revolution could have begun in the first place.

So your source says "A colour revolution is a term given to a revolution that appears to be led by the proletariat in search of liberal ideals, but is actually coordinated and funded by imperialist interests. ", and the definition for imperialism saying "It is a global system of economic, political, and military domination, with the imperialist powers using a variety of means, including economic sanctions, military interventions, and cultural influence to maintain their dominance over other nations. " by conveniently saying the non-capitalist can’t be imperialist. Cambridge and Wiki includes every ideology too..

Cambridge and Wikipedia define imperialism through liberal, pro-capitalist analysis. Prolewiki takes Lenin's observations about imperialism, which actually take analysis of imperialism to scientific levels. It's like Wikipedia saying trees are plants and stopping at that, while Lenin goes further into it, describing trunks, leaves, and other common characteristics. Wikipedia and Cambridge are of course liberal biased, heavily so, and since late-stage capitalism necessitates imperialism, it obscures this.

Going by this definition the Rakosi led puppet communist party using proletariat-led like slogans and campaigns which won with the blue ballot election fraud with USSR involvement, common people being exiled to Gulags who dared question the regime and instilling fear via ÁVH, forcing all the eastern bloc countries into the Warsaw Pact, etc. seems pretty imperialistic to me, or an oppressor. Same deal.

Intervention isn't imperialism, nor is imprisoning fascists. Imperialism is specifically about international extractionism, which late-stage capitalism necessitates. You think you've made a point by changing the definition of a word, but taking Prolewiki's definitions consistently, the USSR was not "extractionary imperialist," while the west was.

If you want to call your definition "influence imperialism," then this isn't a bad thing. The Statesian north liberating the slaves in the south would classify as imperialism, as would the soviets winning World War II, as would the PLA liberating Tibet.

Fair enough, even if these said journalists are extremely biased, or going against the establishment (rightfully), a healthy government shouldn’t exile or silence people and their media. Let people have all the free informations they can get. Unfortunately a lot of countries silenced media, like the banned communist books in the USA, Stalin removing any journal, article he doesn’t like, and only allowing movies which aligns with the USSR’s interests. Well these are media, but reality also aligned with non-communists, by showing the truths about Gulags, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled there by the USSR. Others: Osip Mandelstam (prison camp), Isaak Babel (executed), Lina Shtern (exiled), etc. Subsequently all the other satellite stated used massive censorship too.

Censorship is employed in all states, by the class in power. It is better for the working classes to restrict the speech of capitalists and fascists than to let them use Radio Free Europe and other such propaganda outlets to spark counter-revolution and tragic bloodshed, but you seem to be arguing that that's a good thing.