Hungary – Back From Budapest & Gyor

I began the week on a Defense Panel in Gyor, barely 10 miles from the Slovakian border and maybe 30 miles from Vienna. I finished further east, in Budapest, still not far from the Slovakian border, but roughly 150 miles from Ukraine. Many thanks to Széchenyi István Egyetem (i.e., the University of Győr) and Piros Pazaurek…better hosts and tour guides are impossible to find!

Let me cut right to the chase…I LOVED Hungary!

Take Budapest, for example. Stunning Hungarian architecture across the city…a perfect example is the Hungarian Parliament building. Primarily neo-Gothic style, but with some Romanesque and Baroque elements, too. Friendly people. Great food. Bustling businesses. Clean streets, no litter, low crime, and I didn’t see a single illegal alien. Just wonderful.

You need to visit to see how a People, in this case, The Hungarians, have really blossomed after emerging from under the boot of Soviet communism. The reminders are still there, because next to the gorgeous Hungarian architecture sits the occasional Soviet-era, dull, grey, and…well….proletarian, industrial-looking buildings, which remain in use, now repurposed as apartment buildings or office buildings.

But one building that REALLY puts things in perspective (and should remind us Americans of the blessings we take for granted) is 60 Andrassy Blvd…it’s now called the Terror Haza, ie the House of Terror, which in 1944 was known as the House of Loyalty, the HQs of the Hungarian Nazi party. In 1945 the communists seized it and it became the HQs for the AVO & AVH…the feared Communist Hungarian State Protection Departments…the Secret Police…the internal Security and Intelligence. I visited it this week. I saw offices with surveillance equipment and huge files of dossiers kept on Hungarian citizens. In the bowels of the building, I walked long, bare concrete corridors with row after row of prison cells, locked with iron doors. I saw various torture apparatus inside interrogation rooms and several stark wooden gallows. Thousands of Hungarians (first Jews, and then enemies of the state) were executed inside this building.

In 1956 the Hungarians revolted. It started on 23Oct when students from the university in Budapest seized the national radio station and urged citizens to assemble at the Hungarian Parliament Building to protest Soviet domination of Hungary. The crowd began shouting a line from a banned, national song, “This we swear, this we swear, that we will no longer be slaves.” They destroyed a statue of Joseph Stalin. Secret police of the AVH responded and began beating and arresting protestors, a protestor was killed, and then things spiraled out of control. An ambulance used by the secret police to carry weapons for government reinforcements was seized by the crowds and the weapons distributed to the protestors. Hungarian Army troops arrived, but many joined the protestors.

Sadly, the USSR responded. Red Army troops and tanks advanced on Budapest to surround it and seize the bridges across the Danube. In total, the soviets committed 17 Army Divisions to crush the rebellion. Hungarian revolutionaries and citizen militias (and even elements of the Hungarian Army, which joined the revolutionaries) fought back with weapons and Molotov Cocktails (BTW an elderly lady who now lives near me was an 18-year-old university student during the revolution. She told me her job was assembling Molotov cocktails that were thrown onto the tops of Soviet T54/55 tanks).

Russian reports estimated the Hungarians had 10,000-15,000 revolutionaries in the streets, and they were joined by a reported 12 Hungarian Army divisions and elements of the Hungarian Air Force. Unfortunately, the Hungarians were outmatched by the sheer combat power brought to bear on them by USSR.

It all ended on 11Nov with a Soviet victory, two weeks after the uprising began. Approximately 2,500 Hungarians had been killed and 20,000 wounded. Lest we forget.

We discussed all the above on our show this week, and recorded it while on the ground in Hungary. We also covered a little analysis on our obviously ineffective national strategy with Iran (There are reasons for the ineffectiveness, BTW…all within our control!), and…NUKES! My guest was nuclear weapons policy expert, and old friend, Peter Huessy. He has forgotten more about nuclear weapons than I ever knew (and I once served as Director of Nuclear Support!). Click on the link to hear the discussion: https://frontlinesoffreedom.com/show-966/