Magyar Egyház, 1976 (55. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1976-12-01 / 12. szám

10

MAGYAR EGYHÁZ

Russia by words and action that they would not interfere with any steps the Kremlin would take in Hungary. The Russian Red Army was then directed by a unified and determined government in the Kremlin to crush all opposition in Hungary and establish a new red puppet regime. As the flames of freedom and independence were put out in Hungary, nearly

300,000 Hungarians departed rather than accept this new red tyranny.

The crucial difference between these two revolutions was the role of outside military heljv Without the active help of the French army and navy, there would have been no Yorktown. The fact that France went to war with Great Britain did not mean that King Louis XVI was interested in the establishment of a republic in the new world. The interest of France was pure and simple — to weaken her natural enemy hy detaching Great Britain’s most valuable colony and so make a new confrontation easier some time in the future.

In the case of Hungary, the nation gained its own freedom and independence but lost it when no nation was willing to provide actual or potential military assistance so that she could preserve it. It was in vain that Radio Budapest appealed to the western world for help in 1956. This should not have come as a surprise to any student of history. For it was the west, primarily England and France, that imposed the Trianon Treaty on Hungary at the end of World War I that dismembered a 1,000-year kingdom without the right of self-determination for the people in the detached areas. In World War II, it was the United States at Yalta and Potsdam that delivered Hungary along with the rest of eastern Europe, nearly 100 million Christians, into human bondage behind the iron curtain. In 1956 the United States stood by doing nothing as the flame of freedom went out in Hungary. The United States in 1975 signed the Treaty of Helsinki to reconfirm its mistaken policy in eastern Europe. Surely, Hungarians should not be naive and expect help from the west. If the United States will not fight to prevent the establishment of a red puppet government in Cuba 90 miles from its shore, it surely will not fight to roll back the iron curtain in Europe and probably will not fight if it moves gradually westward into Yugoslavia. Hungary, through the irony of history, must look east to Red China for its liberation. Just as the absolute monarchy of France was the tool by which a republic was established in the thirteen American colonies so the absolute red dictatorship of Red China may become the tool by which Hungary’s freedom and independence will be restored.

In the meantime, let us remember our dead of the 1956 revolution, honor our living freedom fighters wherever they may be in the world and hope that God will — as we sing in the Hungarian National Anthem -— once again extend His protective arm around a nation and people so frequently the victims of misfortune. We should all pray that Hungary can again become a free and independent nation, that Hungarians living involuntarily beyond her borders under foreign rule can once again rejoin their homeland. Our hope for the future must always be that in peace and freedom each Hungarian in Hungary will be able to worship God, speak his own mind, and enjoy the fruits of his own labor, as we are able to do here today in the United States of America.

☆ ☆

WOULD YOU HAVE SIGNED IT?

We Christian citizens have been trying manfully to fit our unrevolutionary selves into colonial uniforms, but the buttons don’t quite make it to the buttonholes. One puts on weight in 200 years. Besides, we know the muskets and the ideas are not loaded. We march in the security of knowing how the story turned out. Perhaps it would have added a humbling dimension to have paid more Bicentennial attention to those who, driven by convictions as compelling in reverse as those of the founding fathers, bet their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the wrong side. Perhaps we should have learned more about the foundering fathers, whose sons and daughters we also are, who for reasons as pure and impure as those of the Americans who prevailed, fled to Canada, returned to Europe or simply held their tongues. For them, history must have appeared to be less cooperatively predestined than our usual reading of it.

All of which causes me to wonder what I would have done, had I lived then, not knowing how the story would end. Would I have signed the Declaration of Independence? Would you? Would we sign it even now? There are statements in it that are as radical now as they were then, perhaps more so. It speaks, for example, of “governments ... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” I am governed from all directions, but who has asked my consent? Oh, maybe in a roundabout way. Once every two or four years, somebody asks. But if they don’t ask the right question, I can’t give the right answer, for how do I meaningfully choose among unacceptable alternatives?