14: What the Hungarians Say about Western Propaganda
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What the Hungarians Say about Western Propaganda(1)
FRANZ SPELMAN
An almost casual question about the impact and merits of the propaganda broadcasts
provoked an immediate, lively response among the escapees.
A middle-aged schoolteacher from Pecs spoke for the group. A former party member
herself, she had become the head of the local Revolutionary Council. One week before, she
had jumped from an improvised prison-van on its way to deliver her and twenty-six
insurgent leaders to the Foe Utca prison in Budapest, had sneaked back to her home town,
collected thirteen members of her family and friends, and led them over the border.
She repeated what other escapees had said before:
"Don't credit the radio; this revolution was caused by pressure from within. It
was instigated by the greediness of the Soviets who stole our food; by the arrogance of
the party leaders who sat in their villas spitting at us; by the continual provocation of
those long freight trains daily carrying our uranium ore and our bauxite to Mukachevo, the
Soviet border stop. The Soviets reaped what they had sowed. They gave the arms to our
army; they forced our youngsters to read Gorki, Fadeyev, Simonov -authors who described
techniques of street fighting, the prescription for a Molotov cocktail, the art of
building barricades. The radio? Yes, it was important. But the revolution would also have
started if radio had not existed."
A veterinarian from Budapest who had arrived one hour earlier objected:
"But you ought at least to admit that the radio gave the discontented in the party
the vocabulary with which to voice their opposition."
A cannery foreman from the schoolteacher's group put in bitterly:
"Sure, the radio helped us to find out that there could be a better life somewhere
else. When the shooting started, the speakers in their studios in Munich had it easy: just
talking, talking, talking. We did the fighting."
An elderly typesetter from the Szabad Nep - Szikra printing plant in Budapest
spoke up:
"It will be hard to forget the unkept promises. Most of those who believed were
bitterly disappointed. That is how it was with us in Budapest: during the fighting not one
windowpane in our flat was left intact. Our furniture was in shambles. The only thing we
continued to protect was the radio set. My wife put it in a box in the corner and wrapped
our bed pillows around it. That's how much we cherished it. It was our source of hope, of
connection with the outside world. That's how, on November fourth, we heard the
transmission from the UN building in New York, and we cried with joy. There was the
American delegate solemnly declaring that the big United States would never let the brave
Hungarian people down. I speak English, sir, and there was the simultaneous translation by
a Hungarian for all others to hear."
He interspersed a sequence of powerful but untranslatable Hungarian curses.
"On the following morning the Russians struck back. Nowhere in this big, free
world was there anyone who did anything about it. And there was nothing any more we could
do ourselves. How can we ever believe anything again?"
A young man with a sensitive student's face, his dirty, torn sheepskin jacket bulging
from the soiled bandage around his badly wounded left arm, resignedly waved his right:
"Sixteen of us were holding a roadblock, at the Tuekor Utca, in Budapest, that is.
The inhabitants of the adjoining houses sat in their cellars. They had brought us a
Tungsram radio set and rigged it up with a series of extension cords from the wall plug in
an empty shop. There we sat in the cold, waiting for the tanks, listening to jazz.
Occasionally our leader -he is dead now- turned the dials. He wanted to get any station
which would tell us how bad, or desperate, our situation really was. Our own Freedom
Stations were already silent; BBC was talking about Suez; and Radio Free Europe just sent
out talk about how glorious we were. It was then that all of us heard it, crackling out
from three spots at the wave scale, the voice shouting: 'Hold out, Hungarians, hold out!
Help from the West is on the way! You must continue to fight.' It still rings in my ears.
Believing it cost us the lives of five comrades- when the Soviet tanks finally came. The
people who made those broadcasts have blood on their conscience."
I asked: "Now that everything seems lost, do [71/72] you think that the West
should continue its broadcasts to Hungary?"
There was a general protest at the way I had put my question.
"This revolution hasn't been lost. It has only been prolonged," the man with
the wounded arm exclaimed quickly. "It started on its own, and it will continue
without you. But if you stop broadcasting now, you will abandon yourselves. It would mean
that you were giving up what had become a vital part of your own fight which you, in the
West, might still lose." [72]
1. Franz Spelman, from "What the Hungarians Say about Western
Propaganda," Harper's Magazine, CCXIV (April 1957), 70-74.
Copyright, 1957, by Harper & Brothers. Reprinted from Harper's Magazine by Special
Permission.
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