The International Campaign for Real History

Posted Thursday, October 23, 2003

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The audience of thousands on October 23, 2003A crowd of thousands listens on October 23, 2003 [full picture report]

Speech, Thursday, October 23, 2003

MY dear Hungarian friends. Patriots, freedom lovers, and veterans of the historic fight for freedom conducted by the Hungarian workers and students in October 1956.

Let me address these few thoughts to you. And I apologise that Hungarian is not among the several languages that I have picked up along my lifetime of writing history.

I am David Irving, a British historian. I have spent forty years researching, writing, and publishing the Real History of what happened in Europe this last century.

  • The great tragedies.
  • Not what the governments would like us to believe, but what really happened.

I wrote the English language history of the 1956 uprising. The biggest publishers in Britain, Germany, Italy and France published the book.


WHEN I look back, my interest in Hungary began when I was a university student in London in October 1956.

As an idealistic eighteen-year old student, I joined the huge protest marches, as thousands marched through the streets of London to protest against the failure of the British Government to support the insurrection.

I stood in Trafalgar Square one day and thrilled as Aneurin Bevan, our great Labour leader, thundered at our prime minister Anthony Eden for his treachery.

But Britain, France, and Israel, were more interested that week in launching a criminal war of aggression in the Middle East, in Suez. The British betrayed the Hungarian uprising.

Through Radio Free Europe the United States and the CIA encouraged the uprising, and then they betrayed it too.

How little times have changed!

 

In my view it was that year, 1956, which marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire of terror. And for that, we in the western world thank the heroism of the thousands of Hungarian workers and students who fought the tanks of the Russian army, and the firepower of their own Soviet-controlled secret police, first with their bare hands and then with the puniest weapons.

After this bloody setback, the Soviet imperialist beast tried only once or twice more to impose its will on a foreign country. In 1980 they invaded Afghanistan and - the ordinary Afghan people took back their country from the invaders. Let the American imperialists now take note.

I think the Afghan freedom fighters drew their inspiration from the Hungarians. But let us not also forget the Poles, and the East Germans, who first tried to throw out the Red Army, in 1953.


UprisingIN 1981 I published my book, Felkelés, the first history of the Uprising to appear in the western world. The Hungarian Freedom Fighters Association in London awarded to me a medal for this!

Köszönom! The lesson that my book revealed was this: No matter how strong the enemy, no matter how ruthless the government, the will of the ordinary people can prevail. In the long run.

The final page in the history of your uprising was written in 1989, when the Hungarian people helped East Germany to liberation. Your contribution was vital. You, and not the governments in London or Washington, are the real champions of freedom.

But let me utter another warning here. Others speak of "governments" I speak of the "people".

But who is really behind the government of your country, or of mine, or of Germany, or Australia or any other?

We live in an age where Big Business alone calls the shots. Big Business has replaced the "Big Brother" of George Orwell.

A Big Business which invisibly crosses frontiers and state boundaries. A Big Business which operates silently along digital cable lines and optical fibre networks. A Big Business for which money is the only goal, and greed is the ruthless driving force.

A Big Business which honours no flag, and is not answerable to electors at the ballot box.

It is an enemy which is no less insidious than the visible enemy which the Red Army and its tanks, and the AVO and its guns, presented in 1956.

Is not "Europe" today evolving into just the same kind of huge monolithic empire which Moscow tried to create in the last century?


But there is a difference. In the Kremlin, and in the puppet Hungarian government which Moscow appointed, you could always recognize the faces of the enemy:

Rakosi, Gerö, Farkas, Revai! But the corrupt and countryless men who rule from Brussels have no faces. They have no ideology. They have no national culture to protect. They have only an agenda.

So my message to the brave people of Hungary today, on this historic anniversary, is this. Remember the men of October 23. Do not betray the national ideals and the human values that they fought for. Do not fritter away the fruits of their victories. Fight for your own nation and your history.

The world learned from Hungary's example in 1956. Shine forth as an example again!

[Photos of David Irving's October 2003 Hungarian tour]

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