awhile back, David Shemano:
Do you (Jim) or anybody else on this list have the opinion that the
US was ready to go to war over Hungary in 1956 but for the fact that the revolutionaries were insufficiently racist, Christian and anti-socialist? Just curious.<<
I responded:
... I think that the Hungarian revolution (to the extent that I understand it) was too radical, too socialist for the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower to support (except verbally). Those worthies' ideal government was anti-socialist, pro-capitalist, and Christian, but not [necessarily] racist. However, they were willing to tolerate racism, I'd bet, just as they tolerated racism in South Africa and in the southern U.S. Further, they may have been willing to _exploit_ anti-semitism (as the author suggests) in order to win a battle against the USSR. Of course, this would have had the likely effect of encouraging anti-semitism to have a wider and/or deeper role in Hungarian society. The Dulles brothers were from the Protestant eastern establishment (though John Foster's son converted to Catholicism). My experience indicates that anti-semitism and other kinds of racism are very common in that establishment. My east-coast relatives were on the edge of that establishment and were quite anti-semitic (though they were Catholic). Some of them still are.
I forgot to mention: back in the 1950s when the abortive Hungarian revolution happened, racism was much more socially acceptable in the US than it is today. (It's like eugenics, which was very popular -- even among liberal and socialists -- until Hitler actually applied its teachings. Anti-semitism was also more socially acceptable back in the 1930s than nowadays.) -- Jim Devine / "Intel and AMD giveth, but Microsoft taketh away." (Anon.)
