How one man’s folly helped to snuff out a nation’s fight for freedom
No other day since history began has shown more clearly the eternal unquenchability of man’s desire to be free, whatever the odds against success, whatever the sacrifice required”.
Monday will be the 50th anniversary of the abortive Hungarian rising of 1956. Much has changed since then as we witnessed the demise of the British, French and Soviet empires, the most turmoil within the Catholic Church since the Reformation and the emergence of an Ireland we could not have dreamed of before the advent of the Celtic Tiger.
In one way, the 1950s was a decade of high idealism in this country. Thousands of young men and women entered religious life to serve humanity, but it was also a decade in which they and the Irish people as a whole were shamefully betrayed by religious leaders who were more concerned about their own positions of prestige and privilege than protecting the most vulnerable children from physical and sexual abuse by paedophiles and sadists in their midst. It was the twilight of de Valera’s Ireland.
To the east there was a brief chink of light that seemed to portend a new dawn. The old guard was changing. Winston Churchill finally stood down in Britain in 1955 and was replaced by the popular Anthony Eden, who had waited his turn. Churchill had hung on because he feared Eden would be a disaster, and he was right about that.
In Russia, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of Stalin at the Communist Party’s 20th congress in February 1956. This had reverberations in Poland and in Hungary, where things came to a head later that year. Mátyás Rákosi was ousted as party leader in Hungary in July 1956 and replaced by Erno Gero, but he was unable to stem the rising tide of discontent.
On July 26, Eden was furious when Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal. Nasser came to power in 1954 and hoped to set himself up as leader of a pan-Arab movement.
Blinded by the ghosts of appeasement, Eden saw Nasser as a new Hitler who was going to take over the Middle East unless somebody stopped him. Eden promptly called military adviser Basil Liddell-Hart to develop a plan to seize the canal. Liddell-Hart presented four different plans to Eden, who rejected each. Then he presented a fifth, which was what Eden wanted.
In fact, the fifth plan was the same as the first plan, and when Liddell-Hart pointed this out, the overwrought Eden threw an inkwell at him. In response, the irate aide “picked up a government-issued waste paper basket, and jammed it over the prime minister’s head”, according to historian Robert Bowie.
In the following weeks and months, Eden conspired with the French, who connived with the Israelis to attack Egypt and move on the Suez Canal in order to allow Britain and France a pretext for seizing it.
Meanwhile, public unrest was growing in eastern Europe. On October 23, a student rally was held in Budapest in support of Polish efforts to win autonomy from the Soviet Union, and this sparked a mass demonstration. At Gero’s request, Soviet troops were called into Budapest next day and the demonstrators battled them and the security police. Crowds emptied the prisons, freed Cardinal József Mindszenty, sacked police stations and lynched some of the secret police.
On October 25, the Communist Party purged Gero, appointed Imre Nagy as prime minister and Janos Kadar as party secretary. Nagy — a communist who had personally taken part in the execution of the Russian Czar in 1918 — announced the abolition of the one-party system and dissolution of the secret police. He also appointed a government with communists and non-communists and promised free elections.
On October 30, the Soviet Union announced it was withdrawing its troops from Hungary at the request of the new government. This was the first great test of Khrushchev and his dismantling of Stalinism at the time. On the same day the British and French announced they were going to seize the Suez Canal and began attacking Egyptian air defences.
The Israelis had attacked Egypt on October 29, but the only person who was fooled by the orchestration of events was Eden in thinking that people would be deceived.
The Americans were caught by surprise, which may not have said much for the competence of the CIA, but in fairness it should be noted they were busy watching their opponents in eastern Europe. Apparently, they did not anticipate the craven stupidity of their friends behind their backs.
FROM the American standpoint, the timing of the Anglo-French attack could not have been worse.
“Anthony, have you gone out of your mind?”, a stunned President Dwight Eisenhower asked Eden. Eisenhower feared the British were going to alienate the people of the Middle East and that “Asia and Africa would be consolidated against the west to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation”.
It was a week before the US presidential election in which Eisenhower was running for a second term. He had been promising to roll back communism, so the Soviet announcement of their withdrawal from Hungary could hardly have happened at a better time. But the actions of the British and French, in collusion with Israel, took the international spotlight off Hungary.
On November 1, Nagy announced that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact. He proclaimed neutrality and appealed to the UN to support them. Janos Kadar fled to Moscow next day, and the day after that Soviet troops surrounded Budapest and announced the formation of a new government under Kadar on November 4. Would the Russians have invaded Hungary if the British and French had not moved on Suez? The Americans allowed a run to develop on the British pound and the Eden government was promptly brought to his knees, denounced at home and renounced abroad.
“We had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and crookedness”, The Observer complained in a famous editorial. “Sir Anthony Eden must go. His removal from the premiership is scarcely less vital to the prospects of this country than was that of Mr Neville Chamberlain in May, 1940”.
On November 6, as the Americans were going to the polls, Eden announced that Britain was withdrawing from Egypt. Just as he had gone in without informing the Americans, he announced his withdrawal without informing his French allies.
Politically, Eden was a victim of his own folly. Britain suddenly realised it was no longer a great power. Nasser thrived in the adversity. The biggest victims were the people of eastern Europe as the brief light of hope would be snuffed out for over 30 years.
Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslavian embassy, Mindszenty in the American embassy, and some 200,000 Hungarians fled to the west. Around 500 of the Hungarian refugees were housed in Knockalisheen camp in Co Clare. The gesture was well intentioned, but it was not one of our finest hours. Conditions at the camp were primitive and, as a poor country, we had little to offer except our own delusions.
We were helping fellow-Catholics escape religious persecution but, on reflection, we should now realise we were still a suppressed people ourselves, only we were suffering under our own indigenous form of religious persecution.
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