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No tankie was a slur for the British Communists that agreed with “sending the tanks in” to stop the anti-semitic, fascist colour revolution in Hungary in 1956
Tankie was basically a slur meant to portray those Communists as brain washed knob heads who would follow “whatever the USSR said”
50 years later a load of British docs get released revealing:
Of all the words of paper and pen
How oft do we hear that the tankies were right again?
I mean, importantly though, most of the the ‘tankies’ of Western Europe admitted that they were wrong - that ultimately Khrushchev squashing the revolt was not going to solve any of the fundamental issues that were marring relations between the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Even Sartre, the ‘tankiest’ of them all, admitted that he was wrong.
And I think the idea that 56 was an anti-Semitic color revolution is honestly just not a correct characterization. Of course the Yanks and the Brits were getting involved, but the overwhelming amount of scholarship and primary source research on the uprising has dispelled the myth that reactionary forces powered discontent or manipulated the rebellion. (Happy to refer you to the literature) Sometimes we like to throw around the word color revolution for anything that has a hint of foreign involvement but such distinctions are difficult in a world where big countries are interfering in small ones all the time - you will never get a social movement that is divorced from geopolitical interests. But that doesn’t mean the discontent or the politics behind it all are always completely fabricated. Tiananmen undoubtedly had some foreign reactionary forces melded in, I’m sure, but that doesn’t change that it was also the product of mass discontent caused by shifts in political economy.
But it is also besides the point - ‘tankies’ now is just a weird slur for anyone who believes that violence probably will be necessary in a revolution or just general MLism, but has also twisted to become an insult against people who defend the DPRK or the PRC, because words just don’t have any meaning I suppose. I mean the Dengists fought and beat the Maoists, but modern ones are suddenly the vanguard of the ML revolution or some such.
yeah despite all the lynchings of jews and communists
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.” “Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as ‘Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-semitic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”
“A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported: During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957).
Yes, I’m not denying that there was obviously tremendous anti-Semitism or callous nationalism in the movement. Many Hungarian Jews left for Israel as a consequence of the violence (many left the Soviet Union too, but we’ll ignore that for now - those dastardly ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, am I right? ). What I am saying though is it wasn’t a major driving force, and enough archival research has been done to prove that point. Hobsbawm, who was in fact one of the original tankies, talks about it at length here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n22/eric-hobsbawm/could-it-have-been-different Haaretz discusses the divisions amongst the Jewish community without undercutting he violence: www.haaretz.com/amp/1.4924257
Again the point here is that even people very sympathetic to the Soviet intervention do realize that ultimately how it was played was wrong - that it set up the divisions that would cause the Soviets themselves to collapse. Obviously Hungary was a deeply reactionary place in many respects, I mean the whole region was, but this was hardly just a matter of “the Brits created a color revolution that wanted to murder all the communists” particularly as a lot of the people who went and lynched Jewish officials were supposed Hungarian communists themselves.
