A little background to this piece. I didn't write it. It was written by a friend of mine and sent to me. I thought it was so good that I asked if I could post it here and he agreed.
So here it is, with permission, after the fold.
The Hungarian Dilemma
By NeapTide
A short time ago, the Hungarian people found out their elected officials had lied to them and they reacted in a very decisive manner. They couldn't believe it had happened in their democracy and they took it to the streets. It seemed that the government had been fully knowledgeable that the economy of Hungary was unsustainable and needed reforming but they didn't tell anybody. They pretended it was okay.
I have to wonder how we, in the world's most time-honored democracy, would react if we were to find out our government had lied to us. What if our government were running up unsustainable debts in full knowledge that our children would be the ones to suffer? What if, instead of cutting costs and asking sacrifice from those who could afford it, they decided to give themselves huge tax cuts, exponentially aggravating the problem? And what if they knew it all along and didn't tell anybody? How would we, the conscientious citizens of the United States of America, react?
Clearly we would kick up a fuss that would be heard from here to the dwarf planet Pluto. There would be no stopping us in our righteous furor. We would demand justice and insist that the culprits be thrown out. Some Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson or Sam Ervin would come in to clean house.
I wonder how the Hungarians would react if the government had done something even more heinous. What if the government had lied to them in such a way as to draw them into a war on false pretenses? What if that war resulted in the loss of thousands of Hungary's finest young people and even thousands more innocent civilians in the theater of battle? What if, instead of obeying the international laws that apply to the treatment of prisoners, the esteemed Hungarian government, was discovered to be exporting prisoners to Moldova or Belarus or one of those other unusually named places, where the citizens were less squeamish about the treatment of captives?
Surely the Hungarians would do more than just storm downtown Budapest. They would revolt in fury and not stop shaking the houses of government until they were crumbling on their august foundations. They would not only remove the dissembling bureaucrats, but like restive Egyptian dynasties of old eradicate the very memory of the faltering administration, tearing their photographs from the walls and shredding them with the latest technology.
If the Hungarians would revolt so, I can't even imagine how our citizenry, being schooled to the highest level of democratic traditions, would react to such a deception. We would surely crank up our protests to even higher decibels. Not only would the hegemonist overlords be eradicated, but also their records would be consigned to a time capsule in the deepest bowels of the earth so that the future generation that finds them will be impressed by the way their ancestors ensured that it would never happen again.
Well, clearly this is all wild speculation. To think that the US government would ever stoop to prevarication or even stretching the truth is absurd. We have all the safeguards that our forefathers installed in the constitution to protect us. We have, for example, habeas corpus, meaning that a prisoner has a right to see the light of day, in a courtroom, with a lawyer, to answer charges. None of us will be spirited off to Moldova or Belarus without understanding the charges or seeing the evidence against us. None of us, or anyone else on the planet. We are so sensitive to the rights of humanity that we would fight to the death to stop such abuse.
Why, if any abuse were to go on, the terrorists - those who wish to send us back to the dark ages - would have won. If we were to shirk our commitment to true democracy for one minute, we would have bowed to those retrograde forces. All the true principles we fight for would become null and void. We might as well be crying into a well and rending our clothes in futility if those precious truths were abrogated.
It is too bad about Hungary. Thank God it will never happen here.