Fraternity-Testvériség, 1956 (34. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1956-11-01 / 11. szám
FRATERNITY 7 of that place? No, never. When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go ... it waits for all the rest to go ... it is the last. When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away . . . when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips, of the orators . . . when the boys are no more christened after them but christened after tyrants and traitors instead . . . when I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master — and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves . . . when the swarms of cringers, suckers, dough-faces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment . . . obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people . . . when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart . . . when oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after ... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth — then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.” The souls of men and women, and the instinct of liberty have not been discharged from the earth of Hungary, nor will ever be discharged from it. The dead will not have died in vain. No great deed done in this world is ever forgotten. It lives in memory, it pulses with the blood of every heart, it sends out leaves again from blood-soaked soil; the seeds of its trampled flowers are scattered to the winds to germinate on far-off soil. It always reseeds. The poets celebrate the epic in many tongues. Because one man died for liberty in one place, another, remembering, will die again in another place — tomorrow, after tomorrow, always. What perished in Hungary was not liberty. What perished was Soviet communism, as the Cossacks rode again. No one again will ever be deceived by it. No noble youth will rally to its cause. It is dead and putrefied, and no flowers grow where it lies. “When liberty goes it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go ... it waits for all the rest to go ... it is the last.”
