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October 23 – Orbán: ‘We wanted free, independent Hungary in 1956’
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Hungarians in 1956 wanted a “free and independent” country for themselves in the “Europe of nations”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told a state commemoration of Hungary’s anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 at Budapest’s Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music on Wednesday.
On October 23, 1956, Hungarians demanded to be given back their right to decide freely how to live their lives, the prime minister said.
“And even then we wanted a Hungarian, in other words a European way of life for ourselves,” Orbán said. “A free and independent Hungary in the Europe of nations. And there was no contradiction in this, since back then, Europe’s western half was still actually the common home of free nations,” he added.
Orbán said the young revolutionaries who revolted in 1956 had been spurred on by their youth and “belief that they could change the fate of their homeland”.
He said the revolutionaries had felt that if the Soviet system had continued “there would be nothing left of Hungarian life”. They felt that “everything would be consumed by the red sludge: faith, culture, family and friends”, Orbán added.
Seeing that there was no other way out, the Hungarian youth decided to fight back, Orbán said. “They did so with the determination of a person forced to the edge of a cliff who knows they have nowhere to go but the path of fighting for the piece of land that was still theirs,” he added.
“We, Hungarians have but this one homeland; we have no other place under the Sun,” Orbán said.
“Our dreams can only take shape here and it is only here in the Carpathian Basin that we can form this big shared creation we call Hungary and Hungarian culture.”
“All of us together are the homeland,” the prime minister said. “This is the law, as is the adage that a homeland can only exist as long as there is someone to love it and make sacrifices for it.”