[Long Thread]

Ok, so a very certain @/historic_ly illiterate podcast has been long-posting about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and their distortions of history have been horrifying.

I thought I'd go through each Tweet systematically and debunk it.

Please, spread this far and wide. It drives me crazy that historical revisionism like that can be churned out and gobbled up by hundreds of gullible people.

I will continue to add to this daily, as there's so much to unpack here.

1) That is not the "fascist flag of Hungary," but the *republican* one. The key thing there is lack of a crown on the CoA: that's the symbol of Hungary's previous two democratic republics in 1918-19 and 1946-47. Fascists in fact hated that symbol as one of liberalism.

2) The emblem imposed on the flag in 1949 was universally hated. It was a Soviet-type symbol with no connection to any Hungarian iconography, undemocratically forced upon the country by a usurper regime which ruined the country for a decade.

Nothing wrong with tearing it out.

3) That coat of arms is in fact based on that of Lajos Kossuth, national hero of Hungary and leader of the Revolution of 1848-49. That's why the 1956 Revolutionaries chose it: to draw a parallel between the two revolutions. It's an explicitly *democratic* symbol in Hungary.

Again, I don't see the problem. After years of forced ideological education, most people hated that stuff and saw it as a bunch of hooey.

4) Let's address a disingenuous point here. The Revolution was peaceful until violence was used against it. It began when masses of people peacefully marched for change, but were fired upon by the state security forces: to which the man in lynched in the photo belonged.

But the people fought back, supplied with arms by sympathetic soldiers and arms factory workers. It spiraled out of control, and the state security forces were not large enough to contain it. Thus, Soviet troops were summoned.
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora2/ora2_e.htm

No one has claimed it was peaceful after security forces started massacring people. It became a violent uprising after that. When the state uses violence like that, people have a right to fight back violently. The incident in the photo was a week after the first shots.

The ÁVO (Hungarian secret police) was vicious in their represion and surveillance of the population. When the sh*t hits the fan, people like that will inevitably get splattered the hardest. No different from Castro's men killing Batista's policemen: which that account supports.

This is the Parliament Square massacre on Oct. 25, 1956. Soviet troops and ÁVO opened fire on a peaceful crowd. 100+ innocents were killed. You can bet that the people were not nice to the perpetrators. http://www.hungarianreview.com/article/20140115_bloody_thursday_1956_the_anatomy_of_the_kossuth_square_massacre