Part Two: A War Against Tankies and Tanks: the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
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I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer. She had been shot twice in the head and in the back. It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression. John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that actually comes out twice a week, that I've been calling a weekly podcast the entire time. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Mia Wong. Hi. Hello, hello, hello. I'm back. We're doing it again. I know. We're doing the revolution. I know. It's funny how excited I am about this failed revolution, but it like...

whatever it genuinely changed an awful lot of things about world history in very positive ways and like what also changed world history I don't have to pivot to introducing Sophie I can just introduce Sophie hi Sophie you're my producer I want a good pivot what do you mean give me a good pivot ah okay uh uh what's that behind you it's a different topic our audio engineer Rory how was that you did it hi Rory hi Rory

Mia, we can't continue until you say hi, Rory. It's my one weird obsession. Oh, I missed it. I'm so sorry. Yeah, I just said it really high. I was doing my full set. I was like, hi, Rory. Yeah, and here's the thing. Zoom fucking gates that out. Yep, yep. Zoom hates women. Yeah, doesn't let me do any of my fun little squeaky things. It's so mean. I'll get a good squeaking in an episode and then nobody else will hear it besides my dogs. Oh, no.

RIP the squeaks. But not the dogs. The dogs are great. The dogs are great. My dog is incredibly happy about the fact that the sun stays out and the weather is warm. In a couple months he will not be as happy because the weather will be too warm. But for now...

Literally, he just spends all of his time sitting in the yard, just staring at the sky, happy. And it rules. That's so cute. And I can see him from the, like when I'm washing dishes, I can see him. I can see my yard from my, I'm just bragging. But like, and he's just like happily staring at nothing. And I'm just like, this is nice. When it gets too warm, just, you know.

Put him in the car and drive many hours. Many hours. Air condition him. Air condition the outside. No, I'm just trying to trick you into bringing Rintra to visit. Oh, yeah. That's true, because y'all's summers are nicer. Yeah. Rintra. Rintra. Woo! Well, I get to do these things because there's a decent standard of living where I live for now, but it's quickly dropping. And actually, that's not true. It's really bad here. Everyone I know is completely broke. But...

Where else there was a bad time that had a revolution? This will sound really prescient a year from now or wildly optimistic. It'll sound naively optimistic or prescient. It's only real two options. Is Hungary in 1956? So you have the Potofi circle, right? And they're like, oh, we should. What if conditions were slightly improved?

And they call for a protest that's a solidarity protest with the workers on trial in Poland for the revolt that I was talking about. The, you know, the uprisings are starting to happen around the, especially the satellite states. They're rarer inside the USSR, although they happen there too. Hungarian officials go back and forth constantly about whether or not they're going to let this happen. So all of these groups at first, and there's a period where they're allowed to do it. So all these groups, including the official young communists, meet up on October 23rd

And they march to the statue of Josef Bem, who was a Polish guy who had joined the Hungarian fight against the Austrians in 1848. And I really like this. I like that the thing that kicks off the revolution is a solidarity march for another country. And I like that the symbol that they go to is the statue for the Polish guy who threw down for the Austrians. That rules so much. As they go off to go throw down for the Poles. Yep, yep.

The minister of the interior was like, oh, shit, we got to cancel this. But then the government was like, oh, shit, it's too late. And so they're like, never mind, you're allowed to do it. And so there's this thing that when the government tells you you can't do something, if you get enough people, the government says, never mind, you're allowed to quite often. Every single marsh that has ever attempted to get a permit that like probably shouldn't have tried to get a permit. It's like I was like doing my flashbacks to the DNC 68, all the permitting bullshit. Like, ah, yes, many such cases. Yeah.

It turns out power concedes nothing without a demand, as Frederick Douglass put it. Sometimes if you demand, they will concede shit. Yeah, no, yeah. If you present force, it doesn't have to be violent force. It has to be force that is capable of mass disruption. That is what puts the state in a situation where they want to negotiate with you instead of crush you. Sometimes it puts them in a position where they want to do both, as is about to happen to all of these people.

So the government, they're like, all right, you're allowed to do it. But they get on the radio and they're like, this is counter-revolutionary. Revolutions, famously counter-revolutionary. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. There's 100,000 people at this march. I am a little bit, I've read multiple sources that say there's 100,000 people. But there's like, they say 100,000 people also for the Polish one. I think this is just a nice round number that people reach for. Yeah, yeah. It's just like a large, yeah, you need a large number. You just, a thousand. Yeah.

Yeah. And they probably don't have like a press helicopter that has like freedom of this press and is like doing the crowd counting and stuff, you know? And that's also always like, it's hard to count crowd sizes. Like it just is. Yeah. No, the way that they do it is that they, you pick like a city block and you count the number of people in it. And then you like count, if it's a March, you then like count the number of blocks worth of people that go through that block. Mm-hmm.

It's really, I used to think about this stuff all the time. I used to go to protests like every day. And everyone's really bad at guessing. Anyway, whatever. I think we all know this. Okay. When I was a young radical and counting lots of protests, I didn't give student protests and protesters enough due. I bought into the lie that mainstream media sells us, which is that college protesters are just like people playing at politics with no real impact.

This is a lie. I think fewer people buy into this lie these days. For example, the day before we recorded this, police broke down the doors of multiple student activist houses in Ypsilanti, Michigan, because students living there had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests. You were close. Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti. We should leave in me being wrong. I think it's funny. Maybe it's not. Do you know what Ypsilanti is famous for?

the cops that broke down the door. So for having a water tower that looks like a penis. Oh, that's funny too. Spent a lot of time there. Hell yeah. Well, you in the future probably have more information about this than I do. But turns out, now that I read history books all day, I know that student protests are invaluable because they're the start of a really large percentage of revolutions. In particular,

Once they connect with the working class. So these 100,000 protesters, they're marching around the big dick water tower. No, wait, no, different time and place. These 100,000 protesters, they start by going to parliament and saying shit like, we want MRA Nog back, basically bring back the new course, right? Because Nog has been set aside, which I think is the name of the Ferengi with working class ethics in Deep Space Nine. But...

I don't know if that's related or not. I like to imagine. This is where we get to the Mia hack and fraud has never seen Deep Space Nine thing and every trans girl has been trying to show it to me and I'm like, would I have time?

Yeah. It's okay. It's fine. It's 90s TV. There's like so many good, like Xena or Buffy or Deep Space Nine. Like there's like so many good, like you can see where good stuff came out of it, you know? Yeah. Actually, I like Deep Space Nine more than anything else I just said. Yeah. Buffy has structural issues, but you know.

The list of demands, besides, of course, a season two of Firefly, which no one's demanding anymore because whatever. The list of demands of these protesters in 1956 is to quote and paraphrase from the Mouvement Communiste report, the Belgian and French communist report, which, by the way, it's in the sources. It has some of the most complete, like,

Here's a list of every council they set up. Here's a list of all of the militants. Here's a list of all of these things. It's very sourced and it's very backed up, these claims about like, you know, it was mostly workers or whatever. Anyway, okay, their list of demands. They want new party leadership elected. They want Nog as prime minister. They want multi-party elections. They want to get the Russian troops out. They want economy led by people who specialize in economy and not the communist party.

Which makes a lot of sense, right? You're like, we're all in an economic tailspin. We're like, what if instead of picking the economy based on ideology, we picked it on how we get to eat the most bread, you know? Relax agricultural quotas and support independent producers. A review of all political trials and releasing people.

And this one's interesting. They wanted to use the 1848 Hungarian flag, which is the red, white, and green stripe, but without the red star and crossed hammer and wheat that the communist one had. And they actually win this the next year, I believe. But nothing I've read... Just one demand. I know. Nothing I've read says, and then they won their demand. But as I was trying to like read about the flag, I was like,

Wait, in 1957, it switched over back again. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So they win the most symbolic one. And they want freedom of speech in the press. And so they've got this march. And they go to the radio station because that's where propaganda was getting sent out over the airwaves. And I've read that they tore down a Stalin statue on the way. I've read that they split up into two different groups. And one group went and tore down the Stalin statue and one went to the radio station.

Both of these things happened. Couldn't promise you the linearity of it. They reach the radio station and the AVO, the secret police that's been around since Nazi times and before, are guarding the place. And for a while, it seems like no one will be allowed in. Then finally, the police let a delegation inside. They're like, all right, you can send a couple people inside. And then two hours go by and they're like, where are those people we sent in? Oh, oh, oh.

And the crowd was like, well, what the fuck? And so they maybe lunged forward and the AVO opened fire with machine guns. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Oh, God. The crowd grabbed the machine guns and started shooting at the station. 200 protesters were killed. 40 cops were killed. And the revolution begins.

Also, I just want to point out that this is like a perfectly American 2024, 2025 moment of like every time a Palestinian encampment would send a negotiator to negotiate with the university that arrest the negotiator. It's like the only the worst people in history do this shit. I know. It's like us and the Soviets. I know. Great, great stuff. Great stuff.

The British did a lot of like, yeah, the thing that like in my mind was always an exaggerated thing for fiction, which is you get together a peace conference where you invite all of the enemy leaders, especially if they're sort of like the Scottish clans or whatever. Right. And you bring them all in one place and then you just poison them all and murder them all or whatever. I always thought that was like hack fiction shit. No one was that evil. I've read across that run across that like at least three times. We'll study in the British Empire. Yeah.

It's like the worst people in all history. Yeah. Finished American Soviets. God, really terrible. I know. We hate it. We hate it. I know.

And so the Hungarian army was sent to put them down outside the radio station. And the soldiers were like, actually, you can just have our guns instead. Yeah. I would rather not start massacring a bunch of my friends. Like, fuck this. And so some of them like gave the crowd their guns and then left. And some of them were like, no, I'm actually just like with you and I'm using my gun, but on your team. Uh-huh. Eventually they seized the radio station. Yeah.

And do you know what they started advertising? I mean, broadcasting? Demands to buy the products and services that support the show? They were ahead of their time. They were supporting... Wow, wow. The first podcasters. I know. Yeah. Before this, no one had mattresses. Or therapy. Or gambling. Anyway. The origin of the modern world, truly. Here's some ads.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal. So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood... She had been shot twice in the head and in the back, behind the heart.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.

Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man. I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression. John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

And so, yeah, they were like, we're having this revolution now. And at this point, workers had been part of this first march, but it was largely a student-ish, like youth march kind of thing, you know?

But as soon as it kicks off, the workers are like, all right, let's do it. And fortunately, they've all been industrializing. So they all work at like gun factories and shit. Yep. And so they're just like, here, we brought you all the guns we made. Here's a fucking tractor trailer full of guns. Hell yeah. Those rules. And then they all start building barricades.

Of course, according to the communist press at the time, these folks weren't revolutionaries. They were armed bandits. Oh, they didn't even have the Nazi line yet? They were on armed bandits? Oh, yeah, yeah. Wow, incredible. Incredible. Yeah, no, it took them a while to develop the technology of calling them Nazis. Wow. Yeah, no. And it's funny because I like the armed bandits one because this is the... As far as I can tell, this is like code for people who dislike our authoritarian rule, but specifically...

When communists and socialists and anarchists dislike their rule. Yeah, because this is the thing I said about Makhno, like during the Russian Revolution. I was like, wait, hold on. I've seen this one before. Yeah, no, and you can still find it today on twitter.com when it redirects to X. It's people claiming that fucking the Ukrainian anarchists and probably these people are all bandits. But as you pointed out, now they've moved on to calling these people Nazis. Except I'm getting ahead of myself because do you know what the communists first said about all of this?

Nothing's happening? Nothing's happening. Very correct. I got in one! Got in one! Despite 450 people being arrested, 200 protesters killed, 40 cops killed, by day two, the communist press buries the story, or to quote internal documents, Comrade Khrushchev recommends that we not cover the situation in Hungary in our press until the causes of everything have been well clarified. Oh my God.

Can't say anything because we don't want to get it wrong.

So just not tell anyone. Yep, yep, yep. Great journalism practice. Yeah, yeah. Simply do not report on massacres. Yeah. Because we don't know what caused them. Like, who knows where those bullets came from? They could have, like, flown out. They could have flown backwards. Who knows? Look, magic for the sky. Capitalist demons. You never know. Bullets can come from so many places. They've been celebrating and shooting into the air, and they just fell down. They fell down. Yeah. Yeah.

Rain from the sky. Yeah. And Nog, who the crowd was ostensibly supportive of, he did not start off supportive of this revolution. He was immediately put into power to mollify the rebels. So they actually get one of their demands like right off. They're like, all right, Nog's in charge again. Partly because like Nog's like not their guy. You know, like the Soviets, they're like, we didn't like your new course thing. We put in a strong guy.

But Nag wasn't anti-communist or something like that, right? Yeah. And so immediately he's in power and his whole line for the next week is like, stop fighting. We will punish anyone who revolts. The revolution is over. We won. Go home. No one listened to him.

That rules. That rules. Because that shit works sometimes. I know. People sometimes will be like, hey, it's over. You've won. Go home. Go home. And then the refreshing continues. But good for them. Good for them. And it's interesting, too, because this is the line by which people are able to kind of spin a web of deceit around the Hungarian Revolution, is that they're able to kind of be like, oh, it all sort of revolved around Nag. He's the leader of it and all of this stuff. And it's a way to ignore the workers' councils that are about to get started. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's also like they dragged him kicking and screaming into this revolution. Totally. Totally. And he probably knows this is the end of him. Yeah. Yeah.

Russian forces show up right the fuck away by day two, October 24th, because they were stationed about 50 miles away already because Hungary was already an occupied nation. Yeah. Which, by the way, I just want to point out like how unhinged like having other countries station their armies in your country is not a normal thing. That is only a thing that happens to like colonies and countries are being occupied. Like that's like.

I feel like it just has not... God mentioned here. But Mia, the United States does that all over the world. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Totally on a military basis in all of these countries. Completely reasonable and normal. But if you don't like the USSR, that means you like the United States. I am going to become the Joker. Yeah, no. Because I imagine you sign this Warsaw Pact and you're like, all right, we all got each other's backs. And you're like...

You know what it is? It's just like the end of season four of Lower Decks is what it is. But I don't want to spoil it. But if you watch season four of Lower Decks, you'll know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I just watched that episode last night again. Hell yeah. But yeah, they're like, oh, we're all equals. And you're like, just kidding. Some people are more equal than others.

So people start fighting. There's hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers from the USSR suddenly in Budapest and around the country. And people just start fighting them. And they come really close to pulling it off. For the first week, they win the first week. They're dismantling tanks with kitchen utensils. I do not know what that means, but I ran across it. Rules. Yeah. Yeah.

just imagining someone with like I mean you know so like the immediate thing is like okay yeah they're unscrewing bolts with knives or something but now I'm like now they got a rolling pin they're going like this they're just whacking it they're just whacking it yeah get out of here that rules

And it just specifically said they're dismantling tanks with kitchen utensils and gasoline. I suspect that gasoline was more useful in this process. Probably, yeah. Yeah, gasoline, very useful substance for dismantling a tank, as many people have learned. Yeah, there's a lot of Molotovs going on, and they're not mollified by Nog. And honestly, they kind of don't like him very much anymore at this point. And when it really becomes a revolution, isn't just that they've had some of their demands met,

It's that the workers and students get together and set up a revolutionary council, which is made up of representatives elected by local councils from all of these different workplaces and shit like that. That rules. That rules. It's so awesome. I didn't know the students were involved in this. That's so cool. Yeah, I don't know as much about student councils during this. I know about the students' involvement in setting all of this up. And I know about...

Later, they're going to have soldier councils as well. But yeah, so they get together and the Revolutionary Council calls for a general strike. And they're like, do not put down your weapons. Hell yeah. Do not be mollified by Nog. And the general strike sweeps Budapest and much of the country. And I've read it described as total, like just incredible. Yeah. The Revolutionary Councils are built from delegates coming from the Workers' Council, Soldiers' Councils, and Peasant Councils.

They go around and disarm all the secret police. They start sending delegations to Nog, who's like, yes, yes, yes. Well, please, we'll make it better. Just put down the guns and let us be in charge of you again. I swear, you know. People from the countryside started delivering food directly into the city, bypassing the state apparatus of food distribution. They finally did it. They finally did the thing Kropotkin said in The Conquest of Bread, where you have to get people from the countryside to send food to the cities. They finally did it. Someone finally did it.

I guess the anarchists in Spain did it. But like, wow, it's amazing. It's amazing. The whole thing, they could have saved the Russian Revolution from the beginning. They actually did it. Yeah. They really are doing the Russian Revolution, but like, they're actually like doing it. Like, they set up the councils. They're like allying with the peasants. They have food moving into the cities. Like, it's amazing. I know. It's like...

I was like, what if the Russian Revolution didn't suck? Yeah. Wow. And what's annoying is because if the Russian Revolution had done it this way instead, it wouldn't have had the Red Army as its enemy. And so they probably would have won, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And so some folks started divvying up the land. They sort of, a lot of places de-collectivized, but like back into smallholders and things like that. Other places were like, fuck yeah, our collective is finally in charge of itself. Yeah. And had like bottom-up control of the collectivized farms. Mm-hmm.

One newspaper, The Observer, wrote, quote, Although the general strike is in being, there is no centrally organized industry. The workers are nevertheless taking it upon themselves to keep essential services for the purposes which they determine and support. So yeah, the general strike people are actually working. They're just working for the revolution. To continue the quote, Workers' councils and industrial districts have undertaken the distribution of essential goods and food to the population in order to keep them alive.

It is self-help in a setting of anarchy. That rules. Yeah. That's so cool. And it's also, it's a really interesting look at, a question that I get a lot is like, if everyone goes on strike, how are you going to feed people? And the answer is, you don't just go on strike, you take control of everything. Yeah. This has happened a bunch of times in long-term general strikes around the world, including the Seattle 1919? 1919, yeah. General strike, they continued like all the essential services, right?

There's a great FDR line where he calls, this is like after Seattle, but like he calls, he calls the U.S. It's like the, I forget how many states they had at the time. It's like the 48 states and the Seattle Soviet. Is it still like this? Hell yeah. Yeah.

So as the revolution goes on, more and more of the Hungarian army is defecting and they get like whole like fucking leader people with all the troops and they're like starting to like get mortars and shit. Not a lot of them, but like they're starting to get some heavy weaponry. Yeah. And the Soviet troops keep massacring unarmed demonstrators because it's a weird mix, right? It's like there's a kind of a war going on, but there's also just like big unarmed demonstrations happening everywhere, you know?

And so, of course, they're shooting the workers in the strike. This is always the most horrifying element of this to me. Because when you're fighting the Nazis, you know from the beginning that these people want to kill you. That's what they are. They're Nazis. But there's just something viscerally horrifying to me about just the communist parties feeding the working class to the machine guns. Yeah.

I don't know. It just brings me to such a profound sense of grief and just like horror that like you're doing this to the people that you're supposed to be like liberating. Like what the fuck is wrong with you people? God. There's going to be a good quote about that later from one of the people who fought in this revolution onward. On April 26th, the rebels do what all good revolutionaries do and they open the prisons.

And if you read some reports that are kind of trying to like whitewash the whole thing, they're like, and then they freed all the political prisoners, which is true, but they did that by freeing all of the prisoners.

That rules. That absolutely rules. We love that. Yeah, no, it's way better that way. They freed 17,000... Because also, you're in an authoritarian regime. I think all prisoners are political, period. But when you're in an authoritarian regime, they're extra political. Yeah, and people... The longer you've lived under one of these regimes, the easier it is to understand. Because you could just watch your fucking neighbor being dragged off. But in the US, there's this...

I don't know. People are really precious about there being a justice system that sends guilty people to this punishment they deserve instead of the thing that actually happens, which is just like we're torturing a bunch of people. Yeah. I think about this comic all the time, some webcomic that was like, oh yeah, don't go into my basement. There's a guy down there. And you're like, wait, what? And you're like, ah, I'm trying to steal my car a while ago, so I'm just keeping him locked in the basement. You're like, that sounds monstrous.

And they free 17,000 prisoners in total, a quarter of whom are quote-unquote political prisoners. The rest are quote-unquote civil prisoners. From the freed prisoners, they learn about all the torture and nightmarish conditions in the prisons. Yeah. And meanwhile, so the tanky line on this revolution is that it was all a CIA plot and or fascists and or, you know, before it was armed bandits and before that it wasn't even happening, whatever. I looked into this as much as I could. I wanted to figure out where the like...

Colonel of truth might be. I spent way too long in this particular part of it. I wanted to spend more time about them dismantling tanks with kitchen utensils, but it was not a CIA plot. There are a ton of recently declassified documents from the US and the USSR about this whole revolution. The CIA had only one agent in the country. Eisenhower was sympathetic to the rebels, but didn't actually want to help because he didn't want to turn the Cold War hot.

There was one avenue of Western intervention in the revolution. Free Radio Europe. Free Radio Europe was a series of propaganda radio stations that would broadcast over the Iron Curtain with very specific state-controlled plans to disseminate specific propaganda. Which is a very, you know, it's the kind of thing that we got mad at the Soviet Union for doing. We were doing too, right? Yeah. We. That gets air quotes. Yeah.

There was a scathing internal report in December 1956, which is after the revolution is more or less crushed, about how the Hungarian section of Free Radio Europe kind of went rogue and off script from what they were supposed to do.

I don't know if this is the US just trying to cover its ass, but this is an internal scathing report, not a public one. So I think they were genuinely annoyed about Free Radio Europe Hungary being like, yeah, revolution, here's how to dismantle a tank. Like, you know, like... Yeah. Partly because it's a lot of people who had lived in Hungary who had had to flee who were running these radio stations. Yeah. So they're probably...

going off script free radio europe pushed the revolution hard and they did so unjustly and by lying as well they broadcast lots of specifics about how to defeat tanks and fight guerrilla insurgencies but they heavily implied that western help was on its way that if the rebels centralized their military structure nato would show up and throw down and it'd be a real war and they would have allies in it this was never going to happen this was false hope so that's the like

I can genuinely say like that was foreign intervention. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But it's also like, you know, you can see what they're trying to do here, right? Which is like they don't like NATO doesn't actually want a state run by workers councils. No. Like appearing there. Like that's also a really bad end for them. So, you know, they're trying to be like, well, if you like, if you make like a Western style army, like we'll help you. And it's like, yeah, totally. Yeah.

By October 28th, they've negotiated a ceasefire because they did really well without Western help for a long time. They negotiate a ceasefire. Most of the Moscow loyalists in the government take off to Moscow and they fucking defeated the Soviets. And it seems at that moment, the real decision is like, do we take moderate reforms from Nog or do we keep fighting to win it all? Do we want actual freedom and bottom up organization or do we want like socialist democracy? That seems like there are two options on the table.

By October 30th, the Soviets have left Budapest and the revolutionary councils with reservations are like, fuck it, we'll take Nog. We'll take Nog with multi-party democracy, all of our demands, et cetera, right? And during all of this, the borders finally open up to Yugoslavia and Austria. Since Austria is neutral, most people want to leave to go that way.

Western journalists of various stripes come into the country to cover what's happening Which I got to admit is I gotta be fucking brave as shit right because you're like oh the borders open You're pretty sure the border is only open for a moment right yeah for a little bit of time It's like yeah, we're going into a war zone to do something not the smartest, but yeah Someone's got to do it like it's like darting under like a closing garage door. You know like I

And it's one of the most important things that came out of the revolution was the fact that Western journalists of different political stripes, including communists, went there and saw firsthand what was happening. Now that there's freedom of press, like literally they've only had this revolution for a week. There's suddenly 25 daily papers. And they really are communist.

Anyone who argues these people aren't communists. I know. Simply does not know Paul. Right. Probably half of them are just like the Hungarian worker socialist party of Hungary. Hungarian socialist workers party, which is a different entity. They hate each other. They have an ancient one day old enmity with the Hungarian socialist workers party. Yeah.

The new government cabinet is made up of a couple people. The communists, who are former Communist Party, but they're no longer calling themselves that, have three members. The small owners have two members. There's one peasant seat and one social democrat seat. That's the, like, I don't know if that's what it was going to stay, but that was their, like, oh, shit, we're doing this today, you know? So, not a right-wing revolution when you could, like, maybe be, like, the two small owners, but, like,

Probably not. They might just mean that you can actually have a small business in a socialist society if you like don't employ wage labor and whatever. Anyway, what does this new government do? Well, they actually go all the way with it. They formally announced that they're leaving the Warsaw Pact on Halloween. Well, it gets announced in the morning, but the meeting was on Halloween. Hell yeah. They announced that they're leaving the pact to become a neutral country and they beg the UN for help.

So this is the other thing about the like U.S. intervention. They fucking begged for U.S. intervention. That's all they wanted. You know, I'm not I'm sure everyone, but this is their Hail Mary. They've taken control of their own government. But Russia has a lot of fucking military. Yeah. Yeah. And international help is not coming. The Western nations leave Hungary and the Hungarian people to the Red Army.

But do you know what would have saved them? The products and services to support this podcast? All bulletproof. If you wear... Nope. Probably can't say that. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. You know what? Maybe the ads are unrelated to the content. Y'all ever thought about that? I think about it all the time. It keeps me up at night. Here's the ads!

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal. So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood... She had been shot twice in the head and in the back, behind the heart.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.

Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man. I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression. John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

So, the revolutionary council system doesn't just give up because it's important and endorse Nog. It's not like, oh, we've endorsed Nog, like time to dismantle, that's all we were going to do. They're like, no, we are going to create essentially a dual power system. We are going to continue to have this as a sort of political entity.

They get together and they put together a nine-point program, including things like the factory belongs to the workers and the supreme element of authority is the workers' council elected democratically by the workers. Shit like that. Holy shit, they're doing communism. I know. Look out. Oh my God. To the horror of the Western and the Eastern world, they're doing the thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Nog is like, yes, yes, yes, yes, probably. Please just go back to work. Just please go back to work. And then the workers' councils, they're like playing nice with the government, but I think they're trying to just like flex a little bit. They're like, all right, we're going to return to work on November 5th. Guy, fox masks suddenly appear on all their faces now. Yeah.

At the same time, on October 31st, Moscow seemed to give up. They published a statement that read, quote, the Soviet government is prepared to enter into the appropriate negotiations with the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and other members of the Warsaw Treaty on the question of the presence of Soviet troops in the territory of Hungary. And then later that same day, they're like, no, never mind. Let's just kill them all.

Great, great stuff from the Soviets. It's incredible, incredible organization. And we have their like meeting notes from when they got together and decided to kill them all. Oh my God. And they were afraid of losing. There's two things they were afraid of. They were afraid of losing face in front of the world because on October 29th, the UK, France and Israel had invaded Egypt in the Suez crisis in order to regain control of the Suez Canal, which I will pretend like I know more about, but I don't.

Oh, I will say, if you want to go read into that, it is a very, very funny example of like France and the UK as these like dying empires having a temper tantrum and trying to be like real big boys one last time and then just getting absolutely rolled. It rules. It's like it's really, really it is the closest thing the British did to Brexit before Brexit. Like it's like their last imperial temper tantrum before they cease to be a relevant world power.

So, poor timing for the Hungarians if that happened, because Russia is now like, oh, we really extra can't lose face to the West right now. But, so they're afraid of looking weak, but in the same document, this is not the way they phrased it, but thanks to the terrible internal echo chamber of Communist Party politics, the Communist officials were afraid of losing face in front of...

themselves the other soviet leaders oh my god they were like oh i i can't be the because they just survived the great purge right they're like oh if i don't not only tow the party line but like push it i'm gonna fucking die

This is a terrible system. Like, don't organize the Great Purge. No. Like, if there's a Stalin, you can just shoot him. Like, he'll die. Like, if you shoot him with enough bullets, the man will die. You don't have to do the Great Purge. You can skip it all. No, he's made of steel. I could get a really big bullet, is the thing. I'm reversing rounds. Yeah, just a little green tip. Go right on through there, yeah. Yeah. And, like...

It's why echo chambers are dangerous because echo chambers allow you to take whatever is the most radical position and it will continue to the, you'll push your own little Overton window further and further. And it's why like radicals of all types, including anti-authoritarians need to stay in contact with people who disagree with them. You need to talk to people. It's the, it's the social equivalent of touch grass is you should probably talk to your neighbors. If your idea, if you're, if your neighbor isn't like a right wing bigot,

And if you're afraid that your idea sounds really wacky to your neighbor, that doesn't mean that you're wrong. But it means you need to think about it. You know? Like, you still might be right. The ideas that I have are absolutely wacky by society's standards. But, like, I'm immune to echo chamber effects, fortunately. Because the only person around me doesn't talk. He barks a lot. I've actually decided I hate airplanes because of my dog who barks at airplanes all day. That's my real...

I'm not so sure I don't hate airplanes, but Rintrol does. I figured it out, though. I probably already said this on air. I think the reason he barks at all the birds in the airplanes is that he's like, one of his million working dog mutt things is keeping chickens safe from hawks. And so, like, when he was around a bunch of chickens, I was afraid he was going to do a murder on the chickens. But instead, he was just trying to herd them, which did not work. Ha ha ha ha!

Chicken anarchists and narco-chickenism. Yeah, but I think he would absolutely keep them safe from hawks because no hawks come near my... Well, they circle overhead because I live in the middle of nowhere. But anyway, what also circles... This isn't an ad pivot. What also circles around Budapest are Russian tanks. Good transition. Terrible thing. Yeah. Russian troops started circling Budapest on November 1st.

There's more of them this time. Last time it was hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers and they won. Not the Russians, but the Hungarian people. This time there are 6,000 tanks and 200,000 soldiers. Oh my God. Which is a lot. Yeah. What's the population of Budapest at this point? I don't know. Oh wait, I did know because they incorporated it. It's like a million and a half because one of the things that they did is incorporated a bunch of the surrounding suburbs all into one city. Yeah.

Yeah, so that's like... Don't do math on air. I just had an episode where I said don't do math on air and now I'm attempting to do math on air. One in six... It's like a sixth of the population under... There's like one soldier for every six random people in Booth Fest. Good lord. On November 4th at 4.15am 1956 the Russian tanks roll in. This is like the moment of tankyism. At 5.20am...

Nag announces this on the air, that this invasion is happening. A couple hours later, he flees to the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. He doesn't flee the city, he goes to the embassy of another country. And for a week, the revolutionaries fight like hell. By November 3rd, the Russians have taken over the country, more or less, and a Soviet puppet named Kotter takes his oath of office, despite the fact that Nag never resigned, he was just hiding in the embassy.

The battle is fierce. It involves men and women both. One worker said, quote, They gave out arms to whoever wanted to fight. When the person was tired, she left her combat position and went home, keeping her weapon or not. Everything rested on commitment and confidence. The average fighter's political position was, according to one witness, quote, Yugoslav socialism plus the workers' councils.

I don't know enough about Yugoslavian socialism. It is confusing to me because I haven't done an entire episode about it, but it's like non-Soviet. Yeah, it's like less repressive, more like...

It's like a weird kind of system of co-ops with a strong state element to it. So there's more workers' control there. This is the one that played up that wanted to be friends with the United States and shit? Yeah, yeah. But because of just a bunch of stuff that happens, there are workers' councils there that run things, but they're not completely in control, and there is still a central government. And so they're actually weirdly...

They end up taking a lot of anarchist principles where, like, if you read books about it, they'll talk about, like, Yugoslavian self-management in, like, a very sort of anarchist sense. And this was, like, one of the – this is actually, like, the tendency that's, like, the closest to, like, the revolution in Algeria I was talking about where they formed the workers' councils was they were looking at this. But also, like, the thing about it is, like, it is also a market economy. So they are also, like, competing against each other. So it's a very weird – a very, very weird system. Yeah.

That also was being held together by subsidies to a large extent. But yeah, it was like one of the things that was considered as like the other pole against the US and the Soviets was like this system of like, yeah, you like sort of have democratic stuff. You can manage your workplace. Yeah. I think that this would kind of what they mean in this context when they say Yugoslav socialism is that like non-Stalinist socialism plus these workers' councils.

The military leader, as much as there was one, and this actually might have been only for one fighting unit. The way that a lot of this was written was fairly confusing. There was a 49-year-old delivery driver named Yano Sabo, and he had fought in the 1919 revolution and was a fierce anti-Stalinist. He said, quote, this is the quote I promised you earlier.

Quote, the Russian soldiers that we kill are as much heroes as we are. It is the crime of the leaders which makes us fight against each other. And if that doesn't sum up my position on authoritarian communism, I don't know what does. God, what a line. Oh my God. That is, that is really something. Yeah.

And he got the same due as most of the Bolsheviks who fought in the revolution. He was executed by communists. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. This is the perennial problem of communists is that you will be killed by other communists. Yep. For the crime of doing communism. Yep. Or just the crime of disagreeing with someone, which, you know. Whichever.

The further in you go, the more likely it is you're getting killed. I guess this is a brief resurgence of the old days of being killed for the crime of doing communism versus the middle period of being killed for being a slightly wrong kind of Bolshevik. Yeah, for being friends with Stalin, but in the wrong way. Yeah, yeah. Pissed off Beria. Yeah.

So a ton of the rebels in the Hungarian Revolution were veterans of the Russian Revolution and or the Spanish Civil War, but most were under 20 years old. So most were new to this. They fight like hell, but they are outmatched and they are alone. The miners in the north of the country, where they actually have some hills, hold out the longest, as do the densest workers' neighborhoods in the major cities. The last stronghold in Budapest is a hospital that is taken by force on November 16th.

The workers' councils keep organizing despite the military force being defeated. They try to coordinate better and better despite losing the war. A lot of Red Army soldiers defect over the course of this revolution. Oh, I never heard that part. It makes sense. I mean, it's funny because every time I hear about the Red Army putting down actual workers, I hear about them defecting, you know, but not...

Not enough of them. Yeah, not enough of them. It's just a few. Which is funny because it means that the Red Army is famous for a couple things. One, you can't invade the country. Two, they'll just send zerg swarms of people that they don't care if live or die. And three, they defect a lot. Yeah, because it sucks, it turns out. Thinking the army sucks. And then usually they're sending you after people who actually are closer to your own ideology than the people who are trying to get you killed.

I remember I read an account, and this is going to be badly sourced, it was an account talking about the troops they sent in who literally, the thing that they were told by their commanders was that they were literally fighting a resurrected version of the SS, and that the actual Nazis from World War II had taken control again, and they get there and they're like, what the fuck?

Like, hold on, why are we shooting workers? Yeah, or like, march on those mines and kill the miners. And you're like, wait, what? Hold on. I read some Marx a while ago, and I think it says something about not doing that. No, in order to liberate the proletariat, you must liberate them from life with bullets. This is called socialism. Yeah, totally. Back to weird Christianity, yeah. Oh, man.

So there were right-wing and anti-Semitic components to the revolution. They were never anything approaching a majority force within it, as best as I can tell by reading a lot of different sources, including Jewish sources that I think would have wanted to be anti-communist. The primary source for the idea that the whole thing is a nationalist anti-Semitic revolt comes from not the tankies,

Famous Holocaust denier David Irving. What? David Irving is the guy who invented the thing? I don't know if he invented it, but at least the way it's talked about comes from a poorly sourced book he wrote in 1981 about the Hungarian Revolution. Oh my god. Oh, why is everything David Irving? He's the fucking firebombing a Dresden guy. I know. Why is the worst guy? Oh my god, I hate him so much.

Oh, David Irving jump scare. I was not prepared for this. Oh, no. Oh, this is like opening your door. There's just like a barrel of shit there. It's the worst surprise ever. And it also means that when people are like, oh, it's anti-Semitic, this revolution, which is like one of the things that tankies will sometimes try and claim about it.

You're just literally repeating David Irving, Holocaust denier. Yeah, it's worse than the Holocaust denier. Like, great, great stuff. Incredible things here. Yeah. Oh, good God. Oh, no. And so there was anti-Semitism in the ranks of it. However, Jews fought on both sides of the revolution. Like, one of the things is that... I mean, it's funny because almost no one in this story is religiously Jewish, right? Most of them are communist atheists. But, like, whatever, all that shit is complicated. But, so...

a lot of the communist party leaders who had fled were Jewish, but so were a ton of the people running these workers councils and doing all of the fighting and like,

And Jews were also in the secret police or somewhere were getting killed. But then as you pointed out, there's like the famous photo of the like, we killed a Jewish person, but it's actually a Christian who was a Christian police guy. Like, okay. Like, yeah. And so I believe that there was some anti-Semitic graffiti. The only real, the thing I can point to that was anti-Semitic that happened comes a little bit later. And it was not, it was actually after the revolution failed.

Jews fought on both sides, which is the easiest thing to believe ever for anyone who has ever read about Judaism and Eastern Europe, and especially Eastern European communism. The repression is mounting wherever the Soviets control. Suspected rebels are hanging from bridges everywhere. Jesus Christ.

Cotter, the guy in charge, meets with the new Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest on November 14th. And the workers say, we want the Soviets to leave. We want secret ballot multi-party elections. We want democracy. We want socialist control of the factories. We want to legalize the unions. We want freedom of press, association, and religion. And Cotter is like, nah, fuck you. I've read a couple different versions of this, but I did find one that's quoting him directly. He said...

You have the right to not recognize my government. That doesn't matter. I am supported by the Soviet army and you're free to do what you want. If you don't work, that's your business here in parliament. We will always have food and lighting. So he's like, I'm going to win is what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah. He also said, basically, you can't have a national workers council because we already have a workers government. Oh, then on November 22nd,

Nog agreed to leave the embassy because he was promised that he would be okay. Oh, don't do that. No. No, they're going to do it. You can't do this. No, Nog. This is like the same thing as like, what's his name? Pergovian? Pergovian? Is that his name? Oh, I don't know. The guy who led that weird Wagner rule, like got on an airplane to Africa. It's like, don't get on that plane. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, C.L.R. James writes this about...

Walter Rodney, who's the guy who wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and he knew C.L.R. James, people who don't know C.L.R. James, he's a weirdly very influential black Marxist writer and historian. He's also like

All of his friends, basically, in the Pan-Africanist group that he's part of the founding of, go on to liberate the colonies in Africa. And so he knew Walter Rodney, and he wrote a speech about it, and it was like, Walter Rodney, buddy, why the fuck did you get in that car? They were obviously going to kill you. Like, buddy, why did you do this? And it's just like, I don't know. People throughout history keep doing this, and they keep dying, and it's really horrible and tragic. I mean, on some level, you're like...

I bet he's probably like, well, at some point, I got to leave this embassy. You know? At some point, they're either coming in to get me. Like, I don't know. I don't know what was going through his head. But he was arrested and he was flown to a secret prison in Romania. He was convicted of treason and he was hanged with the ostensibly nice Khrushchev saying that he was killed, quote, as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries. So, like, very explicitly, the lesson is that

Do not try to be a socialist country not under the control of the Soviet Union. It is a bear threat. He was buried in an unmarked grave with his hands and feet tied up in barbed wire. Jesus Christ. And I don't know whether they did that before they hanged him or not, but in which case it's very Jesus-y. That's, yeah, what? Oh my God, like...

By November 1957, the workers' councils were destroyed. They actually held on for about a year, but their organizers kept getting arrested and often executed. Yeah. All told, somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 Hungarians were killed in the fighting. Jesus. And about 3,000 to 7,000 Russians were killed. 22,000 people were convicted for participating in the revolution, and at least 229 were executed. Wow.

Around 200,000 Hungarians left the country while the Iron Curtain was down, which is actually one of the main other things that they accomplished. These 20,000 to 50,000 Hungarians who died in that fighting helped get 200,000 people out of the country. Like, they didn't retake their country, but they helped get 200,000 people out of this nightmare country. The border wasn't fully closed again until March 1957. Yeah.

And this diaspora is called the 56ers. When asked, there was like a poll. The majority said the reason they left was because of fear. Because of, this is not surprising, but you know, it was fear of reprisals and imprisonment and deportation to the USSR or within the USSR. A huge percentage of the people who'd been in the workers' councils fled. At one point, I think the only Western military action of the entire revolution was

A Hungarian fled across the border to Austria, and a Soviet soldier came after him, crossed the border to try and keep this guy from running. So an Austrian soldier shot the Soviet soldier dead. It's the only Border Patrol person I've ever heard of where I'm like, I like you. 20,000 of the people who fled were Jews, which is very disproportionate. Best as I can tell, based on what I've read,

Most Jews weren't fleeing the supposedly anti-Semitic revolution, but because they were part of this revolution and they feared the return of Soviet control. But the one anti-Semitic thing that I can point to that happened was...

Once they were in the refugee camps, there were anti-Semitic riots when Hungarian non-Jews decided the Jews were getting special treatment or whatever the fuck. Jesus fucking Christ. They were like, oh, you're getting first pick a country because we're weird and never change fucking anti-Semitism. Yeah. But...

I actually read a lot about the refugee camps, and they're kind of the best case scenario that I've ever read about. And people are like, there was a humanitarian worker. I was like, never in my life have I seen people being like, all right, who wants Sweden? Get on this bus. Who wants Germany? Get on this bus. And the cool people award for the week, besides the Hungarians who did this revolution, goes to Austria.

Austria went into overdrive to help people escape. They declared that they were going to offer asylum as early as October 28th, like only a couple days after the revolution started. Oh, wow. They set up 257 refugee camps and volunteers poured in. These were like not concentration camps, basically, as far as I can tell. Volunteers like poured in both from Austria and internationally to help the refugees. Yeah.

And this was, they were a neutral power. This wasn't a NATO power. And they had a socialist minister of the interior. And yeah, so the revolution failed. People learned the truth about the USSR. Peter Fryer was a journalist for the Daily Worker, a UK Communist Party magazine. Oh, I was wondering where we're going to get to him. Yeah, it's only got a couple of line or so in it. Yeah, yeah. He wrote what he saw and about the censoring of his reports because the Communist Party of the UK was like, no, you can't say any of that shit.

And he was kicked out of the Communist Party. And now we all know what tankies are because they're the people who are like, but I like censoring Peter Fryer's reports. Ever since, the world has tried to deny that it was a revolution led by workers' councils. The USSR wants us to believe it was capitalists. The US wants us to believe it was capitalists. The revolution has been recuperated by Hungarian nationalists.

At the 50th anniversary commemoration, the officials didn't mention the workers or their organization and reduced it to trade unionism.

But if you want to know the ins and outs, there's among the sources in this episode and the show notes, there's a Libcom article with Storming Heaven in the title that has more than you want to know about all of the... Yeah, it's so much. It's great. Yeah. And it has down to the details of the points of unity of like this council versus that council and the organizational methods. It's amazing. Yeah. That's the Hungarian Revolution. Hell yeah. You know, there's a lot of...

I guess in some sense, I have like girl who's read a book about China. This looks like China brain. But, you know, I think there's a really interesting thing that happens here where, again, like all of, you know, the establishment of workers councils to control production gets described by the liberal press as liberalization.

Yeah. That's not what liberalism is. Hold on. Hold on. Liberalism does not support the formation of the workers' councils to seize control of the means of production. That is, in fact, communism. You see this tendency play out throughout the course of the 20th century where people

Like, the actual thing that's happening is that there's, I mean, you know, you can say, like, four or five currents, but there's always, at all times, in the capitalist countries and in the communist countries, like, a third current they're fighting against, which is the tendency, which is the workers' councils. And this is a bunch of what, like, the uprisings in France during, like, May 68, and this happens in Italy a bunch of times in 68, and again in, like, 77, and in all of these different countries, like Spain and Algeria, and, like, all of these different places. Yeah.

There are these revolutions. You see this also in, like, the Prague Spring and Czechoslovakia. Like, all of these places form workers' councils. And everyone goes, oh, these are liberal capitalist revolutions. And they're not. They're, like, they're revolutions that are about, like...

Like they are communists right there communists they want communism They are but you know But they take all the things that they were told about communism about communism being the workers control the means of production very seriously And they're like okay. How do you do this you do this by you know managing production democratically through councils and this tradition of like the Annihilation of memory like I wrote a piece a few years ago um called when communists crushed the international workers movement and

That's like sort of looking at this stuff. The thing that this reminds me a lot of is the way that Tiananmen is remembered. We're like Tiananmen is also a protest. It starts with a student protest and then very quickly just unbelievable numbers of workers show up. Right. And, you know, you have some similar things of workers trying to arm themselves. And if you read the reports of like

What these people are talking about in the interviews they're giving like they are also talking about like democratic control in the factories And this is just gone for the mainstream accounts of it Everyone remembers like chairman as a student protest that was for liberal democracy Yeah, and this is like the last of those kind of things where you know because it's convenient for every side right for it to have been sort of like pro-western like capitalist pro-democracy protests

There's a whole lineage of movements that is just that we're not that we're never that didn't really want that. And like gentlemen, at least you can point to the students and go like, well, some of them wanted that. But right. You know, there's this whole lineage of these things that are workers movements that just get erased because it's politically inconvenient for everyone. And because, you know,

The idea that like you and the other people at your workplace who do the work should run it is so dangerous that everyone is willing to just like throw aside all of the ideological differences they have with each other and be like, fuck it, eat shit. No, it makes sense. I mean, it's like one of the things I've always realized, and not that these people are anarchists, but in this, you know, anyone who desires state power and authority is always going to hate people who...

Yeah.

I believe that the real threat right now is fascism, right? Fascism has captured the state power of the United States. It's the most powerful military the world has ever seen. That's bad, you know? But I think a lot of it for me gets summed up in that quote from the 49-year-old truck driver who, you know, was a military leader of the revolution, which is that, like...

When I think about the average fascist, I'm like, well, this person isn't in it for good reasons, is doing a bad thing for bad reasons. And when I think about the average tankie, I am thinking of someone who is doing a bad thing for good reasons. And I think that that difference matters. And I think that what we can try to do is challenge them on being like, well, don't do these things that keep happening historically, but

Where you all do really bad things. Stop doing the really bad things. Yeah. And... Go ahead. What I say to this is, like, this is... Like, these are conversations that are very difficult and suck, but, like, I kind of... I almost weirdly think about it as... It's almost like... It's like de-radicalization work in some sense, right? Yeah, totally. Or something that you do on a personal level with the personal relationships you have with people, but also...

you know, like, some of the people who I trust the most in my life are people who either, like, used to believe this stuff or believe some of it. Yeah. And you can...

You know, you can do a lot of work to make sure that someone who's in it for the right reason and also has come to hold a bunch of very weird beliefs from like a bunch of shit on Twitter can be someone who you can trust to like watch your back as the fascists descend. And that's a really valuable thing. And like both sides of this revolution are communists. So you can't hold one side up and then say, and I therefore hate communists. Right? Because you're like...

well, I just said I like one side of this, you know? And so we can challenge people to be the right side of this. And I think for me, the answer is political pluralism. Like, I think that, you know, one of the things is you pointed out like, okay, so there's like sometimes capitalists within these movements or whatever. And there's capitalists and right-wing people within this movement. Absolutely. Just actually to a less degree than I actually thought going in. I still support the revolution because I'm like, well, I believe in political pluralism, but

But I think that one of these things that they're fighting for is like non-forced collectivization. They're like, we want to collectivize because we want to collectivize. Yeah. Not at gunpoint. Yeah. Yeah. And like, and if someone wants to go their own way and have a small farm where they're not exploiting anyone, let them do it because the systems that you create to prevent someone from doing that are so much more evil than

Then whatever harm is caused by a small producer, you know, and I don't know. Well, and I think there's another principle there where it's like in a functional society, you can have political disagreements with someone that don't end in people being marched off to prison cells and execution blocks. Right.

Right? Like, that's a thing that you should be able to have. And that's not a, like, you must let Nazis exist. But also, like, I don't know, like, look what's happened to Eastern Europe after the Soviet bloc fell. Like, were they successful in destroying Nazism in Eastern Europe forever? Like, no. Yeah. You can't actually kill people's ideas. And you shouldn't kill people for their ideas. Even if they're awful, terrible ideas, you can only prevent them from doing terrible things because of their ideas. Yeah. Yeah.

But anyways, that's the moment we're in now. We are now in the people with terrible ideas have taken power. We need to stop them from doing it. Absolutely. And we need to make common cause with the people that I just spent two hours trash talking. Hooray! And so we have a podcast about this. It's called It Could Happen Here. It's every day. It's actually like there's so many episodes. You can listen to them. It's great. It's on wherever fine podcasts are sold.

So distributed that one. Yeah, I'll sell you it could happen here for three bucks an episode just Venmo me and I will send you an mp3 file I would see about as much as that money is as I would if someone if the fucking company was selling it So like you know No Censored by the corporate media well

That's it for this week. And when we come back next week, we will have more cool people who did cool stuff. That's always the outro we use. I don't know what you're talking about. Bye, everyone. That was weird. I liked it. Thanks.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer. She had been shot twice in the head and in the back. It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression. John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.