Today the lesson is on learning from history.
On Oct. 23, 1956, the people of Hungary rose up spontaneously to overthrow their communist government. The people revolted because they were without freedom, were being kept in dire poverty and saw no hope ahead.
The government did fall. But the Soviet Union sent in 6,000 tanks and 150,000 troops, crushed the revolt at great loss of life and installed another puppet regime on Nov. 4. Hungarians again had a prison for a country.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the people of the United States sympathized with the rebels but declined to take any action on their behalf other than to accept 21,500 refugees.
As Soviet tanks were rolling over unarmed civilians in Budapest, British and French planes were bombing airfields in Egypt and preparing a military invasion. Israeli troops invaded Egypt simultaneously. French and English troops also landed. The action was called the Tripartite Aggression.
This was not war, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden explained, but a police action.
Alarmed that Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal on July 26 and was pursuing what they considered hostile policies, Britain and France demanded international control over the canal to assure that oil would still flow from Saudi Arabia to Europe. They decided to resort to force to gain their objective.
But what the world would accept in 1856 wasn’t acceptable 100 years later. President Eisenhower announced that the U.S. would not send military forces to the Middle East. He did, however, call for the United Nations to take action and the U.S. began to lean heavily on Britain and France to withdraw.
Egypt had quickly collapsed militarily but Britain and France did withdraw their forces by the end of the year and Egypt retained control over the Suez with pledges to keep it open to world shipping. World opinion, led by the United States, triumphed in 1956 over this attempt to revive colonialism. It was an historical turning point.
FIFTY-FIVE YEARS later, Egypt is making history in another way. It first passed from being controlled by colonial powers to establishing its own authoritarian governments. This year it made still another transition from top-down government to bottom-up revolution; from an atmosphere in which the people were afraid of their government to today, when government is afraid of its people, as an Egyptian scholar observed last week. A new constitution and a new form of government lie ahead.
Things are changing throughout the Middle East because the people of Egypt proved that revolt can be accomplished in today’s world with very little bloodshed. Hosni Mubarak didn’t order his troops to crush the rebels. Massive demonstrations in Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Algeria and Tunisia have been met with varying levels of violence, but none have approached the machine guns and tanks that the Soviets threw against Hungary’s rebels in 1956.
It may be too early to herald a new era, but what didn’t happen in Cairo and is not yet happening in the capitals of the other challenged authoritarian governments in the Middle East offers grist for exciting speculation. Because blood is not running down the streets, because the demonstrators are still demonstrating and their governments are still equivocating, this may not be a false dawn.
The lessons this past half century have been teaching offer a glimmer of hope.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
