By Bela “Bill” Suhayda
“To the victor go the spoils” is a factual statement. “Winners write the history” is just as true.
So when we want to know what has transpired throughout history, we need to hear from all who lived it, not just the winners. We should examine every side of what has gone on in recorded history.
I just returned from a former satelite country of the now defunct Soviet Union which is also the country of my birth: Hungary. My family and I escaped Russian-occupied communist Hungary in 1956 during the time the Hungarian people engineered the first armed revolution against communism in Eastern Europe. Land mines and snipers on the borders were designed to prevent escapes from the clutches of Hungary’s tyrannical communist government. No one was allowed the freedom of leaving across the iron curtain from any of the satellite countries being forced to serve the Soviet Union. Leaving meant risking life and limb. My family and I were among the lucky ones to make it to the West and freedom.
Hungary has been a country in constant turmoil going back centuries dating to the 600-year wars when the Turks were invading Eastern Europe. They brought death and destruction to all in their path. The Serbs were violently annexing large portions of southern Hungary in the early part of the 20th Century. Duke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austro/Hungary, was sent to negotiate peace when he and his wife were assassinated in a motorcade in Sarajevo. It was a pivotal event that led to World War One.
The treaty of Versailles acted as the culmination of WWI. Versailles and Trianon and their horrific treatment of the losing side of the war doomed Europe to a repeat performance of violence during World War ll. Stalin, Churchill, and Truman at Potsdam divided Europe into East and West after World War Two. The Eastern bloc countries of Europe, of which Hungary was a part, came under Stalin’s boot and communism. These countries were separated from Western Europe by what was termed “The Iron Curtain.” These countries worked as slave labor and a buffer zone for Russia from the West. U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was instrumental in giving Stalin the buffer. It consisted of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria, until 1955, the Baltic States and Hungary.
It’s been suggested FDR gave Eastern Europe to Stalin in exchange for Russia’s help against Japan during World War Two.
The splitting of Europe into communist East and a free West along with paranoia about nuclear weapons on both sides led to what became “The Cold War. George Orwell coined the term to describe the geopolitical stand off between East and West for half of the 20th Century. The devastation of Eastern Europe by the Turks, World War One, and World War Two still determines the Socioeconomic realities of Eastern European nations to this day.
Hungary was consistently on the losing side of all European conflicts including their alliance with Austria and the Hapsburgs. It is no wonder the Hungarian people are suspicious of outside forces attempting to control them. The Hungarians have had outsiders continuously telling them what to do. Stalinist communism did this until 1989 when they were driven out of power in all of Eastern Europe, including Hungary. So it should be no surprise to anyone Hungary and its leader, Victor Orban, stand defiant against a socialist European Union and want to dictate to the Hungarians what they should do and how they should do it.
This article is the first in a series relating to what is going on in Europe and what seems to be a continuation of hostilities between East and West.