Hungarian Revolution 1956 Quotes

As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.’ But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orbán, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.

During this period, ‘Brits’ were still the main source of labour, but gradually the demographic of the country began to change as world events drove increasing numbers of Europeans to Australia, opening the floodgates and gradually relaxing the White Australia policy. Italians, Germans and Greeks arrived to join the communities established in the late 1900s. Following on were many Hungarians who had escaped after the 1956 revolution, then Czechs after the Soviet occupation in 1968. Gradually people from South America and the Middle East came, many fleeing persecution. In the 1970s thousands of ‘boat people’ from Vietnam were allowed in, and in the 1990s refugees from the Yugoslav Wars. This resulted in a pronounced cultural shift from what was essentially a British, or perhaps Anglo-Celtic, society to a multicultural country. It was a remarkably rapid conversion into what we see now in modern Australia – a nation of people whose heritage can be traced back to 190 countries. In the 2016 census the proportion of the total population born abroad was 26 per cent, but where they come from shows the changes in policy, attitudes and global economics since the start of the twentieth century.

یکی از دبیران حزب به دیدار مناطق روستایی مجارستان می‌رود. سر صحبت را با کشاورز پیری باز می‌کند و می‌پرسد: «بگو ببینم، چه‌کسی این جهان را خلق کرده است؟» کشاورز می‌داند که این پرسش فقط یک پاسخ دارد، اما این را هم می‌داند که آن پاسخ غلط است. در نتیجه، پیش از پاسخ درنگی می‌کند و عضو عالی‌مقام حزب خشمگنانه به او خیره می‌شود. کشاورز سراسیمه می‌گوید: صبر کنید، رفیق. الان می‌گویم. خدا جهان را خلق کرده، البته با کمک کارشناسان شوروی