Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Haunted by History, Hungary Redux?

Fred Kaplan in Slate opines on Georgia.

His comments remind me of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, at least of the post-mortems in the U.S., though they don't seem to show up in the wikipedia article. As I recall, the Dems blasted John Foster Dulles for comments seeming to call for the "rollback" of the Iron Curtain and Radio Free Europe for broadcasts by exiles. The gist was that, in our hopes for democracy, we had said things and forgotten the realities. The "liberals" inside Hungary heard what they wanted to hear, that the West was with them body and soul, while the reality was that we were with them in spirit, but the flesh was unwilling. Ike and Dulles knew better than to do anything militarily.

It was a lesson in realpolitik, which left schoolboys throwing molotov cocktails at tanks.

See this link to The Moderate Voice for a discussion.

No comments: