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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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There was no uprising in Hungary in 1953. There was one in 1956, but it does not seem that this "Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation, Inc." participated in it (I mean, an "Inc." in socialist Hungary?). And the letter that this text mentions is all the way from 1963.
Can't you people read the actual text and check whether this all makes any sense? Can't you just Google one or two key words?
My mistake, I was going off memory and got the year mixed up with the year of Operation Ajax, the Iranian coup.
Yes, I supposed the fact that the CIA was sponsoring a group called "Hungarian Freedom Fighters" does not definitively prove that it was it was in any way connected to partisan activity in Hungary, the way that CIA funded groups were doing all over the globe at this time. Maybe it was pure coincidence!
What was this group? Do you have any info on when and where it was actually active and what were its intents? Do you know anything about this incorporated (???) organisation aside from its name and that it was supported by CIA in 1963?
This is not how any historical event can be meaningfully approached. You're not an oracle, intuitions and insinuations are not proof, please use actual data, show actual connections and explanations of the claims regarding the 1956 revolution.
Isn't it? If an organization exists that has the ability to cover up it's involvement in things like this reliably and very rarely leaves behind hard evidence, and I'm a rando trying to piece together what happened 70 years later, then it seems like circumstantial evidence is the best I could reasonably expect to find. This isn't a court of law where the standard is either, "100%, beyond any reasonable doubt, or they didn't do it."
This shows evidence of a connection - would it be enough to convict in a court of law? No. But, does it shape up to being more likely than not? Seems like it to me. Past precedent shows they could do it and get away with it, and we've got their fingerprints near it, so you can keep imagining that this Hungarian Freedom Fighters org connected to the CIA was, I don't know, selling dinner plates or something, but I'm gonna connect point A to point B myself.
antonim raised a good point, actually. While I wouldn't put it past the CIA to do something like this, the fact is that this vague document is hardly evidence of the CIA funding the Hungarian revolution. Besides, a historian would be far more qualified to look at archival material since they're actually trained to do that.
This is word for word the logic of right wing conspiracy theorists who ascribe every thing they don't like to Jews.
Have you actually tried to piece it together, though? Have you at the very least googled who these people are, what sort of plausible chronology could be reconstructed, anything? Have you noticed that Kiraly, who was involved in the 1956 revolution and subsequently left the country, lived in US at the time of the letter (1963)? Is it not worthy of considering that the HFFF Inc. was based in the US and was founded by Kiraly and similar Hungarians in exile?
There are people with the exact same resources as you, i.e. the internet, already discussing this seriously and digging for more info and trying to figure out what can be reasonably concluded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AHungarian_Revolution_of_1956#JFK_files
In court of law, an admission is pretty solid proof. Your meme says the involvement was admitted. I guess it wouldn't look as convincing or funny if the meme said they admitted they funded some organisation outside of Hungary 7 years after the actual event.
Your arguments are growing thin. Your narrative is actually made up of vague connections with a 7-year gap. I don't even intend to suggest to know what HFFF actually did or whether CIA was involved in 1956 Hungary, my point is only that this is neither admission nor meaningful proof of anything other than that they did fund some dissidents outside Hungary in 1963. (They obviously funded dissidents all over the place throughout the decades, I mean, they'd be crazy not to, and 1956 Hungary wouldn't surprise me either, I suppose.)
See, while trawling through these JFK files right wingers have already found a connection with Jews, as tenuous as it is, and tout it as solid proof it was them who had JFK killed, because after all we already know Jews are nefarious and evil, and clearly any weak connection to JFK's death is good enough - of course (((they've))) scrubbed the proof, etc. so internet randos can go creative. Or maybe some higher standards for proof would be in order...
Really? Can you name 5 world leaders who were overthrown by a secret Jewish cabal the way I can for the CIA, just off the top of my head? I think, maybe, there might be a little bit of a difference there.
This comparison is so fucking stupid that it ends up being antisemitic, because by equating the two you're implying that this secret Jewish cabal both exists and has similar power and influence as the most powerful and well funded spy agency on the planet that has a very long and well documented history orchestrating coups and color revolutions and successfully covering up their involvement for decades, that also, you know, actually exists. Get a grip!
Yes, my meme made use of an existing meme and the phrasing of the original wasn't 100% accurate. I apologize because my username and avatar seems to have caused some confusion, but this is actually an online meme community and not a court of law.
Again, the difference is I can point to countless times where that actually happened with the CIA and they can't do that with Jews! I stg, it's like, if I hear about a black person who was found strung up from a tree in the 20's, I'm gonna go, "Huh, seems like it was probably white supremacists like the KKK" but apparently you'll then chime in with "wElL hOw Do YoU nNoW iT wAsN't AsIaN sUpReMaCiStS, hUh?" Because one of them is a real thing that actually existed at that time and place with significant power and a track record of doing that sort of thing repeatedly and getting away with it, and the other is a made up delusion.
Antisemitic conspiracy theorists would certainly be glad to send you extensive "evidence" that e.g. the Russian revolution was also supported by Jews, or various other political manipulations that they've supposedly carried out (why only limit it to toppling governments?). Now, as I've talked with these people enough times, I found it is impossible to spend days trying to check all the nonsense they may throw at me, and in general any discussion of any topic ever could be extended into eternity. What is perfectly reasonable is to abstract the individual case and figure out how it may plausibly be explained by itself. Antisemitic nonsense always fails here. In this case, so does your ascription of 1956 to CIA based on this particular document. The wider picture is different, as I've already said, it's simply much more logical that CIA has supported anti-communist movements than that the antisemitic bullshit about the Jews is true. But if your standards are low enough to be convinced by a conjecture as weak as this one, that does lead me to worry about whether your general conviction on CIA's actions is well-founded either.
I mean it is very obvious that you don't want to inquire into this any further or discuss the contents and context of the document, I've simply checked Wikipedia on Kiraly and it looks like I've already done more research about it than you have. All you have are implications, you haven't addressed the chronology, who was active where and when...
This is a good comparison too - "in the 20's", you say, but the document you posted is not from the relevant decade, and is even from a different continent.
Besides, even just ctrl+F'ing "CIA" in the Wikipedia article on the revolution shows that yes, CIA did emit materials that were meant to stoke the Hungarians' desire for revolt. It's literally on Wikipedia, it's no CIA-hidden secret at all! And if they were active that way, maybe they also funded some of the people and organisations in Hungary at the time? That doesn't sound unreasonable to me as an otherwise uninformed person on the topic. But is that idea corroborated by this new document? No.
It's incredible to me how ignorant people are of the CIA's history, to the point of even calling into question whether they were engaged in these sorts of activities in general. This isn't just me saying this or just some fringe group - it's the accepted historical record. The proper propaganda line you're supposed to use here is, "of course they did all those things in the past, but that was a long time ago and they've changed" (despite nobody ever being held accountable and nobody actually doing anything to change it). Deviating into straight up denialism just makes you look ignorant to anyone who's actually informed about it.
If you want a detailed case study of how the CIA operated/operates, I recommend All The Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer, which details the 1953 Iranian coup. Kinzer is a respected journalist who's contributed to the NYT and the Guardian.
Or we could look at different Wikipedia pages that detail the US's involvement in coups and regime changes around the world, all of which will agree with me, that the CIA did these things pretty regularly. You're the one who is deviating from the historical record accepted by actual historians.
Bruh. That was a separate hypothetical. You must be acting in bad faith.
Great! So I'm right, it's just like the meme. The only detail that's in dispute is whether or not the document provides further evidence of involvement.
I'm not from the US and we didn't have a class on CIA history. What you expect, am I supposed to be utterly fascinated by your country's history and read about it extensively just so that we all can be as enlightened as you are?
But I literally haven't done that. If I have, show me the sentence where I did and I'll absolutely take it back. You're reading something into my comments that isn't there - just like you're reading events from 1963 US into 1956 Hungary.
No, I'm not supposed to act like whatever stereotype/strawman you're imagining in your head. You can fuck right off with this sort of "communication".
Thank you for the recommendation. However, if we're going to hurl stereotypes at each other instead of arguments, I can't help but point out that I've seen numerous Lemmy leftists claim that NYT is a liberal propaganda rag. So idk if that's actually a plus for Kinzer.
What does this even mean? You brought it up as an analogy, I pointed out that the analogy has been picked to make your primary claim look more obvious and logical than it really is.
You might finally start to get it! You accused me of doubting CIA's involvment even though I literally pointed out to you that there is different, solid evidence they were involved! Like how stupid of a CIA-involvment-denier would I have to be to do that? And yet you're still failing to understand that this never was my main point anyway!
If I believe that the Earth is flat, but then I have a dream where I see that the Earth is actually round, and then I start believing that it is round, does that mean I'm "correct"? Technically maybe yes but based on wrong information/reasoning!
Yes, if fact, I do! The CIA had an extensive impact on the entire world, it's the same way I have at least a general familiarity with the British Empire, even though I'm not from the UK, and that happened even further back.
What an incredibly stupid line of argument. Ok, then go read fucking Grover Furr, for all I care. The point of recommending Kinzer (besides the fact that his work is good) is that he's respected in the mainstream liberal sphere. Obviously, far-left authors like Furr (who I haven't read and don't recommend) or Michael Parenti (who I have read and do recommend) also talk about the CIA's role in coups and color revolutions.
A very, very, very basic concept in evaluating information is to consider what the source is saying relative to the source's bias. If an ancient history commissioned by a king talks about the king slaying a three lions at the same time with his bare hands, we should treat that claim with heavy skepticism. If that same work talks about the king having a big ol' wart on his nose that everyone made fun of, that part's probably true, because it goes against the author's bias.
No source is perfect or without bias, and I'll happily critique the NYT all day long, but when even someone who writes for them agrees with me, I'll also cite them, because that's all the more compelling.
If you understood it was an analogy, then nitpicking that the date used in my analogy "wasn't even in the same decade as my source" is utterly irrelevant.
Except that my reasoning wasn't wrong. I saw something that suggested there was a connection between the CIA and the uprising, and, based on my prior assumptions of how likey that was and how compelling I considered the evidence to be, I concluded that the connection was there. You jumped in to challenge that it wasn't 100% proof, but also, there is other evidence that does prove it. So my process seems pretty reasonable.
It's funny that you open the comment with, "What, do you randomly expect me to be so fascinated with your country's history that I take a class on it?" while also criticizing me for not doing a thorough enough investigation into Hungary, a country I'm not from and have no connection to. If you're a leftist, you have to be an expert on the history of the entire globe, as well as economics and all sorts of other fields. But if you're a liberal, you can just go along with the status quo understanding nothing and everyone's fine with it.
So you've at least silently dropped the accusation of my denial of CIA's involvment in anything. Good, that's some progress.
Indeed, I did literally declare that it is based on stereotyping as a response to your making a stereotype out of me...
It sure might look like it if you ignore that the uprising happened 7 years earlier and that the organisation CIA supported wasn't based in Hungary. But it looks like you ignored that while reading the document, so the connection seemed much stronger than it really is.
This is literally no "evidence", you yourself said it just suggested a connection, it isn't even close to evidence of it, and your meme straight-up says it was admitted.
That's simply not the point I was going for, you've misread it or I should've been more clear. My point was this: your analogy used a time and place where the event is nigh impossible to be ascribed to any other entity than KKK and similar; on the other hand, the event of CIA supporting Hungarian dissidents that is described in the document did not happen in the time and place that is the focus of your theory.
No, it is not even remotely reasonable to provide mere indications, weak proof, or non-proof, while you have easily available and already generally-accepted proof at your disposal.
Lol, "thorough investigation", that's not what I asked of you (again, my first comment: "Can’t you just Google one or two key words?"), you didn't even check Wikipedia and couldn't get the year of the revolution right, and, as I said above, made your whole conjecture while likely ignoring the actual content and context of the letter.
But you've just justified your lack of investigation into the topic by saying that you don't have any connection to Hungary, while simultaneously also making a statement on Hungarian history...
And in principle the discussion of whether something did or didn't happen has little to do with whether one is a leftist or a liberal or anything else. If I'm wrong about something, my politics matter fuck all, I'm simply wrong, and the actual facts will speak for themselves.
If it suggests a connection, that's synonymous with it being evidence.
Again, we've been over it, yes, my meme wasn't 100% accurate, it was based on an existing meme.
Your whole line of criticism is pedantic whining and after this I'm done entertaining it. Literally how many times have you brought up one simple typo, that was only off by three years anyway? Would you also bring it up this many times if I mixed up they're and their? Maybe you would, if you're that kind of annoying pedant, but if you ask me this nonsense has more to do with latching onto something, anything that you can use to punch left.
Just like you justified your lack of investigation into the CIA while also making statements about CIA history.
It does matter if you try to enforce a hypocritical double standard where I have to be exactly right about everything and you don't need to know basic historical facts.