Doing It Themselves

As the British and French, bowing to the U.N., began withdrawing their forces from Suez with consequences which may in time bring down both their governments, a new wave of fighting broke out in Hungary, and the U.N. showed itself impotent to stop it.

In the U.N., as in the U.S., no one but a Communist could be happy about the world's inability to help Hungary more. Most Americans understood, if not all others did, that the U.S. failure to respond decisively in Hungary was not out of indifference or cowardice, but from the conviction that all-out assistance to Hungary ran the risk of starting World War III.

Taking Chances. Some argued that if the U.S. had made a determined armed intervention, the Russians would not have gone to war over Hungary. It is a possibility. But had these critics sat in the National Security Council, responsible for the decision, could they have said: "There is a 40% chance--maybe even 50%--that the Russians will not strike back. Therefore I will press the button"? Such a decision would involve not only American skins, but the lives of all the men and women of Moscow, and the lives of all those Europeans who live in between, including the Hungarians.

This kind of fear of war, if it guided every American action in places remote from vital Russian interests, would paralyze decision and leave no alternative but to surrender every time Bulganin blusteringly threatened trouble in the Middle East or vowed to send guided missiles over the English channel. Such a fear did not paralyze U.S. policy in the Middle East, as Eisenhower's reply to Bulganin showed. It is only in the area now Russian, where the Communists might be expected to fight for what they could not risk losing, that the assessment became subtle and difficult.

This consideration was the reason for the measures which the U.S. took: airlifting of refugees, relaxation of immigration laws, donations to rescue committees and the Red Cross, pressures in the U.N. All of these may be unsatisfactory substitutes for armed aid, but the U.S., acknowledging their inadequacy, still found them all well worth the doing.

But what were the people of the satellites to think? Had they nothing more to hope for and no one to count on? There were many who had heard the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe lending them encouragement. A close scrutiny of propaganda broadcasts would undoubtedly show that no promise had been made to come to their aid if they started something, but desperate people might not have noticed this final omission. The real lesson of the June 1953 revolt in East Germany and of the Poznan riots in Poland last summer was that the U.S., for all its sympathy (a quality easy to ridicule when it is not backed up by something stronger) was not prepared to go to the rescue of an armed uprising in any satellite. On the technicalities the U.S. might not be guilty of false encouragement, but could hardly be happy to leave it at that.

Prod & Nudge. Yet it would be wrong to say that for the people of the satellites there was no future in protest. It is precisely their resistance that makes possible the belief that the whole Soviet regime must in time come tumbling down, destroyed by its own cruelties, repressions, rivalries, indecisions, failures. And should the Soviet empire collapse in this way, the whole world and not just the U.S. could be grateful that it was achieved without the mutual devastation of nuclear war. In the crumbling, many innocent people would be hurt, crushed, killed. Having denied itself the ultimate weapon for helping Hungary, the U.S. was honor-bound to use every method it knows--economic, social, diplomatic and undiplomatic--to alleviate Hungary's difficulties: not to become disheartened by the seeming futility of bringing moral pressure on the Russians, to do more to isolate Russia as a moral leper, to succor all the victims, to prod and nudge Russia into an accounting and to a halting.

All this would not be much for self-congratulation. Though it is a hard saying, the success of the Hungary revolt remains in Hungarian hands. One important side effect of this condition is that the Hungarians have "clean hands"; even the Russians cannot say with a straight face that the uprising is just a conspiracy thought up by Allen Dulles and fought by a handful of reactionary landlords. This is an entire people speaking, and speaking proudly for themselves.

They continue to resist not only because they are brave, but because they have to. The workers' councils, the citizens' groups, the army units dare not let the Kadar regime regain full control of the country. They cannot overthrow the Red Army, but their strength lies in the fact that neither can the Russians mine coal in army tanks. Some kind of agreed or understood armistice between workers' council and regime, protecting the Hungarians against reprisals in return for a resumption of stability, is what the rebels must continue to fight for. One thing the U.S. and U.N. cannot do is to regard the battle as over and opportunity past, for it is not, and ways of helping have not been exhausted. Has Dwight Eisenhower, with his immense world prestige, used all available resources to bring pressure, inside and outside the U.N., on Soviet Russia?

In time the Hungarians themselves may say, to nobody's comfort, what Field Marshal Mannerheim proudly said about his Finns: "Nobody gave us our liberty."

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