Fascism: A Warning

by Madeleine K. Albright

All eyes were on the flower-draped casket holding the remains of Imre Nagy, leader of a nationalist revolt crushed by the Soviets in 1956. Fearing its own population, the quisling Hungarian government had secretly tried and hanged Nagy, then consigned his remains to an unmarked grave in a remote corner of an obscure cemetery. In the summer of 1989, under intense pressure from a burgeoning democratic movement, authorities consented to Nagy’s exhumation and public reinterment, but warned against any attempt to inject politics into the solemn event. With that caution in mind, speakers were restrained throughout the day, as if fearing to acknowledge the revolutionary significance of the ceremony. Hours passed and the audience grew restless. Then the final speaker rose to his feet. He was a tall man with tousled black hair and a short beard; he gazed at his anxious countrymen through twenty-six-year-old eyes. “We young people,” he began, “fail to understand a lot of things about the older generation. . . . We do not understand that the very same party and government leaders who told us to learn from books falsifying history . . . now vie with each other to touch these coffins as if they were lucky charms. We do not think there is any reason to be grateful for being allowed to bury our martyred dead.”