Wheeee posted:

anarchists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHckeZoYx04

bedpan posted:

Wheeee posted:

anarchists:

https://youtu.be/r-yUtXTrk68

tankies:

https://youtu.be/JauB3k4-tZQ

bedpan posted:

the CIA was very active in Hungary. . .smearing the popular choice for a PM/president and advocating for a government takeover by a catholic cardinal. this really didn't help the anti-soviet opposition.

liberalism is unhappy with anyone but a nazi.

Hatebag posted:

One of the primary demands of the Hungarian revolutionaries in 56 was institution of multiparty democracy, which they got in 89. Now they're fascist so maybe the soviets were right to invade or maybe the invasion gave the fascists something to organize around. The Hungarian government pre revolution seemed pretty fuckin incompetent though and their security forces were constantly shooting crowds of peaceful demonstrators, so they were bad. The un delegation to investigate the Soviet invasion was lead by a danish nazi collaborator though, so lol

Smythe posted:

what is the most advanced / elite tank. is there a prism tank. is there a mammoth mk2

Hatebag posted:

As far as i can tell most of the cia's involvement was radio free europe broadcasts. i feel like that would not be enough to start a rebellion, what else were they up to?
Something i read said the cia was trying to direct the rebels to hidden weapon caches but they couldn't figure out who to contact lol

quote:

A great crowd had gathered at the Parliament in Budapest two days before, led by student demonstrators rising up against the communist government. The hated state security police confronted a second crowd at the government radio station, where a party functionary was denouncing the protests. Some of the students were armed. A shot rang out from the radio building, the security police opened fire, and the protestors fought the secret police all night. At the Budapest City Park, a third crowd tore a statue of Stalin from its pedestal, dragged it to the front of the National Theater, and smashed it into shards. Red Army troops and tanks entered Budapest the next morning, and the demonstrators persuaded at least a handful of the young Soviet soldiers to join their cause. Rebels rode toward the Parliament on Soviet tanks flying the Hungarian flag. Russian commanders panicked, and in a terrible moment at Kossuth Square a blinding crossfire erupted. At least a hundred people died. Inside the White House, Allen Dulles tried to tell the president the meaning of the Hungarian uprising. "Khrushchev's days may well be numbered," he said. He was off by seven years.

Dulles contacted Wisner in London the next day, October 27. The chief of covert action wanted to do everything he could to help the uprising. He had been praying for a moment like this for eight years. The National Security Council had commanded him to keep hope alive in Hungary. "To do less," his orders said, "would be to sacrifice the moral basis for U.S. leadership of free peoples." He had told the White House he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare through the Roman Catholic Church, peasant collectives, recruited agents, and exile groups. He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The men he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them. There was no CIA station in Hungary in October 1956. There was no Hungarian operations section in the clandestine service at headquarters, and almost no one who spoke the language. Wisner had one man in Budapest when the uprising began: Geza Katona, a Hungarian American who spent 95 percent of his time doing his official work as a low-level State Department clerk, mailing letters, buying stamps and stationery, filing papers. When the uprising came, he was the only reliable set of eyes and ears the CIA had in Budapest.

During the two-week life of the Hungarian revolution, the agency knew no more than what it read in the newspapers. It had no idea that the uprising would happen, or how it flourished, or that the Soviets would crush it. Had the White House agreed to send weapons, the agency would have had no clue where to send them. A secret CIA history of the Hungarian uprising said the clandestine service was in a state of "wishful blindness." "At no time," it said, "did we have anything that could or should have been mistaken for an intelligence operation."

On October 28, Wisner flew to Paris and convened a few trusted members of an American delegation attending a NATO conference on the question of Eastern Europe. Its members included Bill Griffith, the senior policy adviser at Radio Free Europe's Munich headquarters. Wisner, exultant at a real revolt against communism in the making, pushed Griffith to pump up the propaganda. His exhortations produced a memo from Radio Free Europe's director in New York to the Hungarian staff in Munich: "All restraints have gone off," it read. "No holds barred. Repeat: no holds barred." Beginning that evening, Radio Free Europe urged the citizens of Hungary to sabotage railroads, tear down telephone lines, arm the partisans, blow up tanks, and fight the Soviets to the death. "This is RFE, the Voice of Free Hungary," the radio announced. "In the case of a tank attack, all the light weapons should open fire at the gun sights." Listeners were advised to throw "a Molotov cocktail... a wine bottle of one liter filled with gasoline .. . on the grated ventilation slit over the engine." The sign-off was "Freedom or Death!"

That night, Imre Nagy, a former prime minister who had been expelled from the Communist Party by hardliners, went on the state radio station to denounce the "terrible mistakes and crimes of these past ten years." He said that Russian troops would leave Budapest, that the old state security forces would be dissolved, and that a "new government, relying on the people's power," would fight for democratic self-rule. In seventy-two hours, Nagy would form a working coalition government, abolish one-party rule, break with Moscow, declare Hungary a neutral country, and turn to the United Nations and the United States for help. But as Nagy took power and sought to dismantle Soviet control over Hungary, Allen Dulles deemed him a failure. He told the president that the Vatican's man in Hungary, Cardinal Mindszenty, newly released from house arrest, could and should lead the nation. That became the party line on Radio Free Europe: "A reborn Hungary, and the appointed leader sent by God, have met each other in these hours."

The CIA's radios falsely accused Nagy of inviting Soviet troops into Budapest. They attacked him as a traitor, a liar, a murderer. He once had been a communist and so he was forever damned. Three new CIA frequencies were on the air at this hour. From Frankfurt, exiled Russian Solidarists said an army of freedom fighters was heading for the Hungarian border. From Vienna, the CIA amplified the low-wattage broadcasts of Hungarian partisans and beamed them back to Budapest. From Athens, the CIA's psychological warriors suggested that the Russians be sent to the gallows. The director was ecstatic when he briefed Eisenhower on the situation in Budapest at the next National Security Council meeting on November 1. "What had occurred there was a miracle," Dulles told the president. "Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms." But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides. It was waiting to see which way the wind from Moscow blew. The Soviets were sending more than 200,000 troops and some 2,500 tanks and armored vehicles into the battle for Hungary.

On the morning of the Soviet invasion, Radio Free Europe's Hungarian announcer, Zoltan Thury, told his listeners that "the pressure upon the government of the U.S. to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistible." As tens of thousands of frantic, furious refugees poured over the border into Austria over the next few weeks, many spoke of this broadcast as "the promise that help would come." None came. Allen Dulles insisted that the CIA's radios had done nothing to encourage the Hungarians. The president believed him. It would be forty years before transcripts of the broadcasts were unearthed. In four brutal days, Soviet troops crushed the partisans of Budapest, killing tens of thousands and hauling thousands more away to die in Siberian prison camps.

The Soviet onslaught began on November 4. That night, Hungary's refugees began besieging the American embassy in Vienna, begging America to do something. They had barbed questions, said the CIA station chief, Peer de Silva: "Why hadn't we helped? Didn't we know the Hungarians had counted on us for assistance?" He had no answers. He was bombarded by commands from headquarters to round up nonexistent legions of Soviet soldiers who were throwing down their weapons and heading for the Austrian border. Dulles told the president about these mass defections. They were a delusion. De Silva could only guess that "headquarters was caught up in the fever of the times.

Smythe posted:

what is the most advanced / elite tank. is there a prism tank. is there a mammoth mk2

Pablo Nergigante posted:

Wheeee posted:

Pablo Nergigante posted:

SplitSoul posted:

Not only was Alsing Andersen a collaborator, he actively defended the policy and denounced any form of resistance. He was acting chairman of the Social Democrats from 1942 until the end of the war and became Minister of the Interior for exactly ten days in 1947 until everyone remembered what a shitbag he was. Then in 1957 he became President of the Socialist International.

Disagreements over Hungary also resulted in the coming founder of the Socialist People's Party, Aksel Larsen, being expelled from the Danish Communist Party. He immediately began working with the CIA to rat out his former friends in return for expensive dinners and cash bribes.

Never trust a Social Democrat.

bedpan posted:

the following is from Legacy of Ashes. I've copied the entire section on Hungary because it is a good read

Smythe posted:

what is the most advanced / elite tank. is there a prism tank. is there a mammoth mk2

Smythe posted:

what is the most advanced / elite tank. is there a prism tank. is there a mammoth mk2

Red and Black posted:

Pablo Nergigante posted:

Lady Militant posted:

the metal gear ray isn't a tank it's a tank-hunter (because metal gears are walking nuclear battle tanks u see)

Smythe posted:

are there cool tanks irl or is it still the abrams which is the most elite. ud think thered be sweet tech tanks that have like quadcopter drone fleets that dock on their root and zip off to bomb poo poo or net things or shoot trackers for sweet giant missiles to home in on and stuff. or a tank that has some kind of laser weapon.

Wheeee posted:

tanks, much as with most of America’s military, are really only well suited to a scenario of total war in which you’re just fuckin going balls to the wall

turns out they’re just expensive fat turds in current asymmetric warfare trying to police insurgencies

Wheeee posted:

tanks, much as with most of America’s military, are really only well suited to a scenario of total war in which you’re just fuckin going balls to the wall

Hatebag posted:

This guy sounds like a real rear end in a top hat! Not as bad as the nazi who was a nato chairman in the 60s, but pretty bad

That's pretty much what i thought. The cia had one guy in budapest and nobody cared what he said or did. I don't think you can really credit the cia with hungary 56, the Hungarians basically saw that poland was able to successfully agitate for greater autonomy in October 56 so they tried to do the same. Then the security forces started shooting and Khrushchev decided the answer was more shooting. The cia didn't even have the wherewithal to get the guns!
Compare that to a successful cia fascist coup like Indonesia or brazil where they had a bunch of guys bribing army officers and providing material support, making plans and providing signals intelligence.

Smythe posted:

are there cool tanks irl or is it still the abrams which is the most elite. ud think thered be sweet tech tanks that have like quadcopter drone fleets that dock on their root and zip off to bomb poo poo or net things or shoot trackers for sweet giant missiles to home in on and stuff. or a tank that has some kind of laser weapon.

Larry Parrish posted:

im not even sure what they use modern tanks for, really, besides intimidating people. artillery does the same job without putting the crew in danger.

bedpan posted:

in the US, they are a jobs program to a degree unlike other weapons systems job programs. we have thousands and thousands of the things with thousands more in production.

Lady Militant posted:

the metal gear ray isn't a tank it's a tank-hunter (because metal gears are walking nuclear battle tanks u see)

Pablo Nergigante posted:

Okay fine how about Sahelanthropus.