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Budapest '06 vs. '56: A Guide for Clueless Foreign Hacks
While we are now on record as being totally bored with the street theater of the past few days, unfortunately our view has not been universally embraced. More specifically, we've gotten several reports of foreign journalists arriving in Budapest with orders to gin up stories about the parallels between this week's events and the bloody anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. While we're always happy to see people publishing dumb shit, even we have our limits. So as a public service to these naïve hacks and their even more clueless editors back home, below is a handy guide to the similarities and differences between '56 and '06. Oh, and while you're at it, it's "Gyurcsány" not "Joorchaani" and "Budapest," not "Bucharest."
| 1956 | 2006 |
| Revolutionaries face off against heavily-armed infantry with orders to shoot to kill | Protestors face off against lightly-armed rent-a-cops with orders to go home before someone gets hurt |
| Revolutionaries willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause | Protesters not willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause, especially because they aren't exactly sure what their cause is |
| Revolutionaries left lying dead in the streets | Protestors left lying drunk in the streets |
| Dozens of tanks set on fire | Several cars set on fire |
| Many crowds in excess of six figures | Many in the crowds have incomes in excess of six figures |
| Uprising against externally-imposed, single-party dictatorship | Uprising against government democratically elected five months earlier, two weeks before another election |
| When the dust settles, defeated revolutionaries spend winter in the snows of Siberia | When the dust settles, defeated protestors spend winter in the snows of Austria |
| Shop windows broken but revolutionaries find nothing in the stores to steal | Plenty in the stores to steal, but protestors don't bother breaking the windows, and just buy the stuff instead |
| Massive bread lines are formed | Massive lines to take camera photos are formed |
| Revolutionaries accused of being pawns of cynical, right-wing reactionaries | Protestors pawns of cynical, right-wing reactionaries |
| Ordinary Hungarians sit cowering in their homes, griping about the Russians | Ordinary Hungarians sit cowering in their homes, griping about the protestors |
| West declines to intervene, distracted by events in the Middle East and fearing global nuclear war with the Soviets | West declines to intervene, distracted by events in the Middle East and because they basically don't give a crap |
| Foreign correspondents covering the conflict cleverly slip undetected across the western frontier under cover of night, allowing them to escape detection by the murderous Communist secret police | Foreign correspondents covering the conflict cleverly convince newspaper's administrative department that there are no budget flights available, allowing them to accrue valuable partner points on the airline of their choice |
Photo above right courtesy of Zachary Tipton.
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