Hungary, Budapest – On Sunday, October 23, Hungary celebrated the start of the ’56 uprising. In front of the Hungarian parliament, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish President Andrzej Duda gave a strong speech against the current policy of the European Union, about Christianity and about the deep friendship between Poland and Hungary.
In front of thousands of people gathered on the place Kossuth, in the center of Budapest, Hungarian PM Orbán and Polish President Duda made a speech welcomed by Hungarian and Polish citizens. President Duda first talked in front of the crowd. The Polish President started his speech by saying few words in Hungarian. Hungarians “have always been friends” and they can always rely on Poland, “even in difficult moments of the future,” said Andrzej Duda.
Poland is “proud and grateful” that it was able to provide aid to the Hungarian revolution, Duda said, and noted that his people had sent 44 tonnes of medicine and medical equipment as well as 800 litres of blood to Hungary shortly after the uprising broke out. “Poles are proud that the grandchildren of 1956 heroes have, symbolically, Polish blood in their veins”, the president said. In Hungary’s freedom fight “thousands died, but after some decades, finally, you recovered your freedom through much suffering and sacrifice,” Duda said. He also voiced his conviction that “through hard work both Poles and Hungarians will achieve the living standards of western societies”, reports Hungary Today.
Concerning the traditional friendship between the two countries, Duda said that they together “carry on the thousand-year-old Christian tradition in Europe”, and insisted that those traditions were just as important as freedom. “God bless Poland and Hungary, glory to the heroes of the Hungarian revolution,” Duda said concluding his address.
“Protect Brussels against Sovietisation”
Then, Prime Minister Orbán gave his speech. The European Union must not be turned into a “modern-age empire”; the community must not be replaced by a “United States of Europe”, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Sunday. Viktor Orbán said that “freedom-loving peoples of Europe must save Brussels from Sovietisation”.
“We, Hungarians, want to remain a European nation, rather than become an ethnic minority in Europe,” Orbán insisted. “It is only our national independence that can save us from being devoured by an empire,” Orbán said, and argued that it was that very “national idea” that had saved Hungary from being integrated into the Soviet Union. As descendants of 1956, Hungarians “cannot let Europe cut the roots that had once made it great and also helped us survive communist oppression,” Orbán said. He added that Europe could not be “free, strong, and respectable without the revitalising power of nations and two thousand years of Christian wisdom”. The prime minister insisted that Hungary had chosen “the hard way” when it “preferred children of its own to immigrants, work to speculation, earning a living to becoming a slave of indebtedness, and protecting borders to surrendering”.
Hungarians will always fight for freedom and will achieve it “even in the most hopeless of situations,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the state commemoration marking the 60th anniversary of Hungary’s anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. “We, Hungarians, have a talent for freedom, we have always known how to use it. He warned that freedom is “not a final state but a way of existence; just like swimming: you stop doing it and you will sink”. The question is always this simple: whether we decide on our own fate or other people,” he added. October 23 is a day on which Hungarians should be proud, the prime minister said.
History puts Hungary in the mainstream of disputes on the future of Europe every 30 years, the prime minister said. He argued that in 1956 Hungary attempted to “shift the Iron Curtain east of our borders”, then in 1989 the country opened its western borders “so that Germans could find a way to Germans”. And most recently, Hungary “had to close its borders to stop the influx of migrants from the south”, he said. Hungary will not falter “even if those whom we are trying to protect attack us from behind”; we have “the courage to face injustice… and Europe can always rely on us,” Orbán said.
The angry left tried to sabotage the event
Few hundreds of liberal activists and far-left extremists tried to disturb the speeches, using horns, whistles and rattlers, to protest against Orbán but were eventually kept outside the crowd attending the ceremonials, and failed to cover the loud speakers. Few of them managed to get into the crowd and whistled in front of the journalists’ podium. The provocateurs got attacked by elders and security staff evacuated them, providing good pictures for the journalists, more interested by these provocations than by the commemoration.
