I had a friend, Bela, who, along with his comrades, swam the Danube beneath whistling swarms of machine-gun fire during the Budapest Uprising of 1956. You want to tear down some statues, kiddies? He had just helped to topple the giant effigy of mass murderer Stalin and drag his big bronze head into the square where a beautiful old church formerly stood. The church had been arrogantly razed in order to accommodate that 'gift' statue for the pig Stalin's 70th birthday.
Bela was a real revolutionary fighting for the lives and liberty of his countrymen. He and his fellow protesters hadn't been bussed in by some billionaire ex-Nazi who had it in for Khrushchev. No, he was a student in league with a few genuine priests hoping to restore food and some freedom to fellow Hungarians. The folks Bela ran with didn't have video games or cyber-social media to help energize their fantasies. They were genuinely oppressed people who were starving in every sense and living under the thumb of Soviet Russia - a misery that the 'brave' insurgents now only know about through action movies, if they even make that connection.
