Zsolt Németh took a 1956-style approach to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, writing “Ruszkik haza! Legyen béke! (Russians go home! Let there be peace!”) Below the post he commented “peace is in the interest of the entire world!”Continue reading
In a major address delivered in Warsaw on Saturday, US president Joe Biden drew parallels between the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the subsequent anti-Soviet uprisings and the situation of today’s war-torn Ukraine. According to Biden, the fight for democracy and freedom did not end with the fall of the Iron Curtain.
“My message to the people of Ukraine is the message I delivered today to Ukraine’s Foreign Minister and Defense Minister, who I believe are here tonight: We stand with you. Period,” said the president. He added that the brave resistance of the people of Ukraine is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people. But these principles have always been under siege and every generation has had to defeat democracy’s mortal foes, the president stressed.
“Today’s fightings in Kyiv and Mariupol and Kharkiv are the latest battles in a long struggle: Hungary, 1956; Poland, 1956, then again 1981; Czechoslovakia, 1968,” President Biden emphasized.
“Soviet tanks crushed democratic uprisings, but the resistance continued until finally, in 1989, the Berlin Wall and all of the walls of Soviet domination — they fell. They fell. And the people prevailed,” the US President continued, adding that the struggle for democracy was not over.
“Over the last 30 years, the forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe. Its hallmarks are familiar ones: contempt for the rule of law, contempt for democratic freedom, contempt for the truth itself.” Today, Russia has strangled democracy, said Biden calling Putin’s desire for “absolute power” a strategic failure for Russia.
The war waged by Moscow is “an example of one of the oldest of human impulses: using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control,” the President said.
Featured photo by Evan Vucci/AP/MTI