They came down the exit ramp of the plane and stepped on free soil for the first time in their lives. A little three year old girl, her father and mother, and nothing more but the clothes on their backs and the terrifying memories of an escape that to this day, proves the existence of God so miraculous it still seems.
It was October, 1956 and their homeland of Hungary was in chaos. A reform government had been formed headed up by Irme Nagy, whose purging from the Communist party had been rescinded less than a month earlier. Nagy took restrictions off the press and called for free elections, free speech, and economic reforms.
A group of students took the Prime Minister at his word and protested in the streets for more academic freedom. Police opened fire on the demonstrators killing dozens and wounding many more. The next day, members of the police and army joined the demonstrators and confronted Soviet tanks in Parliament Square. The tanks rolled over the crowd, firing indiscriminately killing 12 and wounding 170.
The next day, Nagy threw down the gauntlet to the mighty Soviet empire. He went on the radio and called for “the far-reaching democratization of Hungarian public life, the realisation of a Hungarian road to socialism in accord with our own national characteristics, and the realisation of our lofty national aim: the radical improvement of the workers’ living conditions.”
Nagy wasn’t finished. In a matter of weeks, he freed the imprisoned and tortured Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, took control of the Hungarian Communist Party, and formed a coalition government that included some non-Communists.
This was too much for Nikita Kruschev who sent in the Red Army and all hell brook loose. There was fighting all over the country as the Hungarian army bravely resisted. But the Hungarians were quickly defeated and Soviet tanks, in a scene that was to become familiar, rolled into Budapest. That’s when the round-ups began. Thousands were executed. Many more thousands arrested and jailed. Nagy himself, after being promised safe passage out of the country from his refuge in the Yugoslavian embassy, was kidnapped, summarily tried, and executed.
The little girl’s father was an officer in the Hungarian air force. One night, hearing that the secret police were down the block arresting a neighbor and knowing that he was probably next, the father took his wife and daughter and began to run. On foot.
They somehow avoided the Soviet patrols and made it out of Budapest. Alternating between walking, hiding, and getting rides from strangers, the trio made their way slowly toward the Hungarian border with Austria. After nearly 3 weeks of exhausting travel, the family showed up at the border tired, hungry, but free of the pursuit of their tormentors.
Austria was only a waystation for most of the nearly 200,000 who fled the nightmare of the Hungarian Uprising. That’s because their ultimate destination was America – a place as far removed from their experience as the surface of the moon. They had been told that America was an evil place full of grasping capitalists and slavemasters who used workers to enrich themselves while keeping them in abject poverty. But they had also heard whispers that America was a wonderful place where it didn’t matter where you came from or who your father was. And that there was opportunity for those willing to grasp it.
From Austria, the family took a train to Berlin where the father got very nervous when he glimpsed Soviet troops patrolling in the Russian sector. But now under the protection of the Americans, the little family could finally begin to relax. In Berlin, they took another train to Bonn where they were issued a visa and residency documents. After a wait of several weeks, they were able to board a plane for the New World. They arrived in Newark on the 17th of December, 1956, officially welcomed into the United States as legal residents.
Today as I write this 10,000 people, mostly from Mexico, are walking across the border as if it didn’t exist which, of course, it doesn’t. The fact that they are Mexican is irrelevant. The fact that American businesses in their desire to keep wages low will welcome them is irrelevant. What matters is the double standard.
The above story is about the family of Zsusanna, the love of my life, who has been in this country now for almost 50 years. For one reason or another – raising her family, being busy with work or one of her many hobbies and causes – she never went through the process to become a citizen. She has now started that process because of what happened yesterday.
Yesterday, I had to comfort her as the Senate Judiciary Committee slapped her in the face by retroactively granting people who willingly and deliberately broke the law, the right to stay in the US without fear of prosecution. What the Senate is saying to millions of people is that they are more deserving, more worthy, than people like my Zsu-Zsu whose horrific escape and flight to freedom was validated when, after going through a torturous bureaucratic process, she and her family were allowed to emigrate. She is not any better than those who sneak like thieves in the night to cross the border. She is upset at what she sees as the injustice of the situation.
Is her lament justified? Most would think probably not. But when she compares what she had to go through to get here legally with today’s immigrant scofflaws having the same thing handed to them on a Congressional platter, she weeps.
What is happening with this flexing of muscles by illegal immigrants is the beginning of a struggle for the soul of this country. Unless something is done to stem the tide now, the kind of rhetoric coming from those who carry signs claiming that California is not United States territory anymore will continue to escalate. And once it goes mainstream, the diversity nuts, the multicultural tyrants, the starry-eyed open borders loons, and guilt-ridden left will coalesce to make that nightmare a reality.
Laugh if you feel the need. But anyone who missed the message at those demonstrations from people who celebrated their separateness from America rather than their solidarity with it should have a bucket of cold water thrown on their pretentious heads. Maybe then they’ll wake up and realize that this battle is not about race, or creed, or ethnicity. It is about the essence of America and whether the country we have known and loved in the past is going to survive another generation.
UPDATE
Would Congress or a Republican administration ever endorse irredentism? The White House and elements of congress already have. The disastrous Akaka Bill aims at creating a race-based, sovereign, territorially-endowed entity in Hawaii, and its precedent would threaten the mainland’s cohesiveness. That Akaka stands a real chance of being enacted is proof Americans need to get a two-handed grip on Washington before the White House and Congress wreck our nation. (HT: Maggies Farm)
Gee. Anyone else want to laugh about giving California back to Mexico?
Bryan Preston has a thorough and superb round-up of student agitation on the issue. The revelation yesterday by Michelle Malkin that the school district was paying for busses to pick kids up who demonstrated off campus was an eye opener. Our tax dollars are being used to agitate for separatism.
3:22 pm
There’s a lot of necks in Washington that need wringing about now…
3:23 pm
Brainster was right—superb!
3:24 pm
It is time for everyone who cares about this issue to make their feelings unmistakeable to our elected representatives. Only fear of losing their cozy little nook in D.C. will kick their lazy butts into action. ALL of Congress is up for re-election and is, therefore, the logical place to start. 1/3 of the Senate is similarly at risk and again, subject to pressure from their employers – that would be us! I am so thoroughly sick and tired of spineless Congressmen and Senators in the Congress who will kowtow to the looney left and ignore the American citizens who pay their salaries! Perhaps a threat of unemployment will stir them to action?
3:26 pm
And to Zsusanna, the love of your life, some of us remember what it was like in those days. I was a sophomore in high school and we had students like Zsusanna enrolled in our school. We heard their stories and were horrified by them. So I am glad that you are here, dear lady.
4:40 pm
And now, let’s take a look at what became of one such illegal immigrant from south of the border:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0328-28.htm
scofflaw, or hero?
4:51 pm
One hero. Who got a green card making him legal.
And I had to laugh at the quote the moonbat pulled completely out of context. Of course, he didn’t address the substance of the point about advocating lawbreaking while chasitising the President for his imagined crimes.
And those people were not demonstrating for “immigration rights.” They were demonstrating to exempted from the law – two different things.
7:06 pm
My husband is British. We went through the whole legal immigrant visa process, and he recently acquired citizenship.
I have NO SYMPATHY for illegals. I don’t care that they want a “better life.” I don’t want anyone in my country whose first action is to break the law.
7:20 pm
Thanks for writing this post Rick, it was very touching, as well as disturbing.
Many on the left, today, think of America just as the propagandists described it in Hungary way back then: “They had been told that America was an evil place full of grasping capitalists and slavemasters who used workers to enrich themselves while keeping them in abject poverty.”
10:32 pm
Kosovo California
Rick Moran trashes the illegal aliens demanding special rights here in the US, noting the irredentist element to it.
What is happening here is the first stages of what I will call the Kosovo Syndrome. Kosovo, as you may recall, is considered the cra…
9:36 am
Now that the facts are out. The anti-american spanish stations organized and led the anti-american protests this week. Now the FCC should do it’s job and remove the broadcast license of every station involved. Messages to the FCC will help push them along. Also the teachers unions are guilty of brainwashing your children, not teaching them. Time to dismantle the so called teachers unions that are providing a hiding place for all the anti-american, anti-education, educated idiots. The latest release of data on the teachers unions show they are nothing but organized crime units. Ripping off the dues of the members and paying themselves 500% more in dollars than the average teacher they are supposed to represent makes, + the millions of dollars in travel and other rip-offs they charge off to the teachers. Organized crime is alive and well, just disguised as teacher unions.
10:28 am
[...] Right Wing Nut House, “A Slap in the Face” [...]
12:19 pm
Why not tax immigrants? A thousand bucks or so at the border crossings (if they’ll pay this to the Coyotes to smuggle them in, why wouldn’t they pay it to the U. S. Treasury instead), and give them SS numbers and work permits on the spot. Then put a surtax on their wages (10 percent of all they earn on top of the usual taxes. Still a good deal of them). With all the extra revenue, U. S. could cut gasoline taxes (keep those SUVs a’rollin) and balance the budget,too.
12:25 pm
ADDENDUM: This would keep the riff-raff out. Anyone who can scrape up a thousand dollars in Mexico has to have something between the ears (well, OK, maybe a gun in his belt).
1:46 pm
‘If you go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao,’
…you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.”
In my single year in Boy Scouts, I learned that flying the flag upside down is a distress signal, so this display is perhaps unintentionally correct. I hope the big demonstrations of illegals ensures…
6:57 pm
I teared up like a baby being told he was bad.
I was born here, my parents were born here, and my grandparents didn’t remember moving here, that doesn’t make me more American than anyone else, and in many cases, I’m ashamed at how so few understand that America is more than a random designation of birth, but rather an ideal that we should all work towards. The idea of freedom and liberty for all, but the fact that freedom and liberty requires efforts of individuals to be free, not the ability to hold out an empty cup and expecting it to be filled.
It is a slap in the face, it has been every time the government has washed it’s hands in this way, punishing people who aren’t Citizens, but who know the Idea of America more than many who are.
4:14 am
The Council Has Spoken!
First off… any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here. Die spambots, die! And now… the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are A Slap in the Face by Right Wing N…
8:45 am
[...] The Watcher’s Council has announced its picks for the most outstanding posts of the preceding week. The winning Council post was Right Wing Nut House’s post, “A Slap in the Face”. This post notes that the proposals for dealing with illegal aliens that are making their way through the Congress are a slap in the face to the legal immigrants who have played by the rules. Tied for second place were the Education Wonks’s post, “Walking Out on Their Futures?”, about the poor priorities of students who cut their classes to demonstrate on behalf of illegal aliens and Watcher’s Council tiro Joshuapundit’s post, “What Bush Need to do to Come Back”. [...]
9:03 pm
> Gee. Anyone else want to laugh about giving California back to Mexico?
Ummm, are we entirely sure this would be a bad thing?
8:03 am
Council Links
The latest council winners have been announced:
Ali Eteraz, a muslim(?), has an
12:58 pm
The Council Has Spoken!
This week the winning Council post came courteously of Rightwing Nuthouse who eloquently explained the difference between immigrants who come to America to be new Americans and those who come here to use and abuse our hospitality by giving us
7:42 pm
When I think of the 15 months, multiple INS permissions, and $20K it took to get my sons here from Romania, I get a little ticked at people asserting a right to come here.
Legal immigrants are in general, among the biggest opponents of illegal immigration.
2:06 am
The Coalition of the Willing
As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what we consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… though I don’t actually vote unless there happens…
7:07 pm
Watcher’s Council Results
The winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are A Slap in the Face by Right Wing Nut House, and Open Letter To Reformist Muslims by Unwilling Self-Negation. The full results of the vote may be found…
2:53 pm
[...] VINCE AUT MORIRE VODKAPUNDIT WALLO WORLD WHAT ATTITUDE PROBLEM? WIDE AWAKES WIZBANG WUZZADEM THE COUNCIL HAS SPOKEN: THE “TWO FOR ONE”EDITION A SMALL RAY OF HOPE IN IRAQ KISSING US WITH CONTEMPT CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS #39: THE HALL OF FAMEEDITION WHY COOLER HEADS MUST PREVAIL ON IRAN OOPS! MY BAD IT’S TIME: MEDALS OF HONOR FOR THE PASSENGERS OF FLIGHT #93 A REAL SCOOP BY ED MORRISSEY DREAMS AND MYTHS: HOLLYWOOD AND 9/11 NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS MATT STOELLER BRAVELY STICKS HIS TONGUE OUT AT THE RIGHT A FEW RANDOM THOUGHTS ON BLOGGING, THE MEDIA, AND HOW WE GOT OURSELVES INTO THIS MESS I’VE GOT MAIL HOW I SPENT MY SUNDAY MORNING WITH C-SPAN, TAYLOR MARSH, AND MAPQUEST TWICE A VICTIM BAGHDAD AS IT IS, NOT AS WE WISH IT TO BE QUICK HITS (RATHER THAN THE USUAL BLATHER) MEDIA ALERT COHEN: TRIVIALIZING THE MOMENTUS AND COMPLICATING THE OBVIOUS IMAGE IS SUBSTANCE IN IMMIGRATION DEBATE CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS #38: THE “HEY DUDE! WHERE’S MY COUNTRY?” EDITION CRASH! A SLAP IN THE FACE A BATTLE OF WITS IRAQI BLOGGER UP FOR LITERARY AWARD “24″ (52) ABLE DANGER (10) Bird Flu (5) Blogging (76) Books (7) CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS (64) CHICAGO BEARS (9) CIA VS. THE WHITE HOUSE (6) Cindy Sheehan (11) Ethics (50) General (272) Government (30) History (50) IMMIGRATION REFORM (4) Iran (13) KATRINA (26) Katrina Timeline (4) Marvin Moonbat (14) Media (75) Middle East (24) Moonbats (44) Open House (1) Politics (152) Science (14) Space (12) Supreme Court (19) War on Terror (104) WATCHER’S COUNCIL (39) WORLD POLITICS (38) WORLD SERIES (14) Admin Login Register Valid XHTML XFN [...]
12:27 pm
[...] A Slap in the FaceRight Wing Nut House [...]
12:16 pm
Your story of Zsu Zsu, ask her what happened to the other 7 brothers and sisters that came over from Hungary… and the sister that is still there. Your portrayal humble, yet not exactly entirely correct… There was not only three of them coming over from there, it was an entire family.
5:52 pm
Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!
10:34 am
[...] Brainster points us to this post regarding immigration. A must read. From California: “…one strike and you’re out.” [...]