America’s Long History of Sitting Out Russian Invasions
4th March 2022
By now, my colleagues in the media may have convinced you that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a “transformative” event, a challenge by a reactionary dictator to the “liberal international order,” if not an end to one historical epoch and the beginning of a new one. The world has turned upside down, nothing will again be the same, blah, blah, blah.
When millennials make such apocalyptic observations, I can understand. Like Founding Father Thomas Paine, they assume that each day marks the “birthday of a new world.” But what about baby boomers like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who were in high school in 1956 during the so-called Hungarian Revolution, which was very much like what is happening in Ukraine today?
Back then, popular resistance against Russian military power was applauded in the West and encouraged by Voice of America and the CIA, while American officials and pundits predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. The brave Hungarians and their Western supporters even had their own Volodymyr Zelensky-like hero, Imre Nagy, Time’s Man of the Year in 1956, who led the struggle against the Soviets and ignited hope that the good guys might win and the world might begin anew.
Had he followed these events, young Friedman would have later learned about the tragic end of the Hungarian uprising, which was repressed by the Soviet military and which killed 2,500 Hungarians and compelled 200,000 Hungarians to seek political refuge abroad.