Freedom Breakfast: what do we owe the heroes of 1956?

Seventy years after Budapest rose against Soviet rule, the Freedom Breakfast honours those who led the uprising and asks what their example demands of Europeans free to speak.

On 22 October 1956, students in Budapest drew up 16 demands: free elections, freedom of opinion and of the press, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The next day they marched. Within hours, the statue of Stalin lay in pieces in the street, and a nation told to be content under communism showed otherwise.

The uprising was crushed. Soviet tanks returned on 4 November; some 2,500 Hungarians were killed, and around 200,000 fled into exile. Imre Nagy, the prime minister who sided with his people, was hanged in 1958. By any short-term measure, the revolution failed. Yet it destroyed the claim that communism ruled with consent, and when Hungarians gathered to rebury Nagy in 1989, the regime that had executed him was already finished.

For several years the Freedom Breakfast was a fixture of MCC Brussels’ calendar. On the 70th anniversary, FSI Europe, launched by the team behind MCC Brussels, carries the tradition forward.

Nobody in Brussels today risks a tank, a prison cell or the gallows for speaking their mind, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. Free speech, free elections, and a nation's right to govern itself are still not settled for good. Each generation has to decide whether to defend them, and they are lost more often through quiet acquiescence than through force.

The Freedom Breakfast honours people whose courage none of us can claim. Stand with us to remember them, and measure ourselves against the standard they set: notice injustice and say so, at a cost far smaller than what they paid.

We cannot match what they did. We can refuse to forget it, and we can choose to speak. Join us.

Event in partnership with Foundation for a Civic Hungary.