Live not by Lies

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? Gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense—and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want and they put sane people in asylums—always they, and we are powerless. Things have almost reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children—but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tounges tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven't the strength?

hold the wrong opinion in the US, and you will merely be bullied.

But speaking truth to power in many places in the past and even in some places today and and you will face more than being unfriended on facebook or having a sign stolen from your front yard.

So how many people today will remember the 1956 Hungarian uprising? from Austin Bay:

On October 23, 1956, Hungarians began Eastern Europe's only Cold War armed rebellion against Communism. Unfortunately, their attempt to free themselves would falter and fail, defeated by Russian tanks.

But we took the risk; 21st century Hungarians remind our forgetful world. We put lives on the line in a fight for basic freedoms — free speech, freedom from fear of a totalitarian government and its savage secret police.

On October 22, 1956, students in Budapest announced they would rally the next day to protest government injustices. The next day, 100,000 people showed up to cheer as students read a document with 16 demands addressing political and economic issues...

writer James Michener's book A Bridge of Andau is the classic report on the uprising.



and this blog about geography includes an explanation of what went on at that bridge

Then came the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, crushed by Soviet forces. Hungarians supporting the revolution or those simply fleeing violence escaped towards the border, running up against the canal. They found a single modest wooden footbridge, the Brücke von Andau (German) / Andaui-híd (Hungarian) as a passageway to freedom. About 200,000 refugees fled from Hungary and perhaps 70,000 of them used the Bridge at Andau (map) until the Soviets destroyed it. The bridge wasn’t replaced until decades later, reconstructed in commemoration of its historical importance on the 40th anniversary of the revolution.