Hello everybody,
This forum is all about the real history of Marxism/Communism. Many people in the West just hear a few things, but ehey have never ever really experienced that abject terror that is Communism. I am a Hungarian American, born in the U.S. but now living in Hungary. Communist thugs made life impossible for my linguist professor grandfather (who spoke 11 languages and gave presentations in the U.S.), and was outlawed simply because he visited abroad. My own mother could not come home to his funeral, since they would most surely have arrested her for dissidation to the U.S. in 1976. My father was also almost shot dead in the 1956 October uprising. Everybody remember who the man of the year was in 1957? The Hungarian freedom fighter. A well earned reputation. College students fighting Communist tanks with hand made grenades...
Disinformation is widespread, even in modern Hungarian society about the dark history of Communism, and "the past 40 years", which is by now a well-known term here in Hungary. That's why I would like to air this museum's homepage to give everyone a history lesson.
A good website about the House of Terror in Budapest to tell us all a little about Marxism. Without being busted up by an interrogator's brass knuckles. Also in English:
http://www.terrorhaza.hu/index3.html
An excerpt about "the Network":
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The Network - the World of Secret Agents in Hungary
„Net, network“. Simple words. Once upon a time all they signified to our hard-working forefathers, was the respectable trade of fishing. Our children, of course, associate these words with the world wide web of the Internet.
But for us, adults, and even more so for our parents´ generation, „network“ means something totally different. It means spiritual and physical oppression, terrible memories and the lack of freedom.
A dictatorial regime, a moral lightweight, with as little substance and authority in the eyes of honest people as a feather, had fastened itself with the steel wires of the network to the peaceful ground of Hungary.
With the steel wires of the Ministry of the Interior’s network.
Whether we were aware of it or not, this network enmeshed our lives. As one of the forces of the dictatorship, it functioned in secret, run by a dysfunctional regime. Some people were enmeshed by blackmail, others entangled themselves and their careers into the dreadful web, whence there was no escape without dire consequences.
Network. Stealthily insinuated spying devices. Secretly shadowing agents, reporting to the internal affairs authorities. Networks of reports, of commands. Webs of fake friendships.
Anyone could be caught in the net, but only those could cast this net, who belonged to the vicious web. Teachers were watching their pupils. Pupils reported on their teachers. Even agents were watching each other. Nobody knew who was watching whom. Those who admitted it were punished by the network. By tightening a thread in the net.
This is how the system worked.. In the wake of network reports: arrests, imprisonment, later „merely“ dismissals, ostracism. In keeping with current practice.
The records of marked people were kept in marked files. "They" wanted to know everything about them. Those who were to be roped in, were doubly marked.
This was the way we lived. This was the age that some people today are not ashamed to look back to with nostalgia.
This was our life.
However, alongside our parents’ and our own generation, a new generation is growing up. He who possesses knowledge also carries responsibility: young people must not live in ignorance. This exhibition was created for them as well.
So that nobody should ever be able again to spin the steely web of the network that has shattered so many lives.
Mária Schmidt
