oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]

Yeah, there isn’t really a huge amount of evidence for CIA involvement in 1956. MI6 involvement seems a bit more likely, but the evidence is barely better, and even if they were involved, it’s pretty clear that the uprising was native in character (i.e. Kruschev in internal meetings referred to socio-economic issues as the cause, the MI6 guy says the uprising itself was a result of other events, and CIA documents like CIA-RDP60-00594A000100090005-2.pdf refer to it as spontaneous, and indicate they were caught off-guard, with only one Hungarian officer).

The antisemitic pogroms and ‘fascistic elements’ are probably real and were widely reported on, and it’s a lot better of a rebuttal to Hungarian revolution arguments. The number of deaths that resulted is relatively low too, even the suppression of small communist uprisings like the Jeju uprising involved several times as many deaths, without even mentioning the extremes like the Jakarta method. Of course any amount of death is bad, and it should’ve been stopped pre-emptively and peacefully (e.g. reducing economic austerity, less de-Stalinization), but Kruschev was leading.

“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956). This pretty decent writeup by a Hexbear goes over some details and gives more quotes.

The legality of the invasion is dubious at best, but that’s in many ways beyond the point. The UN didn’t rule on it thanks to the USSR’s veto, and because the Suez crisis was ongoing at that very moment, weakening any Western claim to the legal/moral high ground. The people uprising did attack Soviet troops that were already occupying Hungary, but that’s a pretty weak self-defense argument. And the USSR did kinda use force against Hungary’s political independence, a violation of the UN charter (of which both parties were a member). Again, it doesn’t really matter, I don’t think people really care if an invasion is legal or not.

Not even your lord can save you now.