The Mail from Budapest (1993) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#11

Post by mandevil » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:21 PM UTC

mmjaa wrote: post #7

This kind of worship of heinous warmongering is disturbing. Is HN really the audience for military-industrial agitprop designed to boost the CIA in the eyes of the general public? It is, literally, one of the most evil organizations that was ever built.

Errr, sorry for asking, but what exactly in this story is boosting the CIA? This is a story about the Czechoslovak counter-intelligence and the Hungarian military intelligence network a decade before the CIA existed. No American of any kind makes an appearance.

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#12

Post by ableal » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

Tripped over the CSR acronym in the second paragraph ("Austria was weak, Poland cool toward the CSR, and Hungary antagonistic.")

From the context, must be Czecho-Slovak Republic. Wiki agrees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakia

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#13

Post by dang » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

mmjaa wrote: post #7

This kind of worship of heinous warmongering is disturbing. Is HN really the audience for military-industrial agitprop designed to boost the CIA in the eyes of the general public? It is, literally, one of the most evil organizations that was ever built.

HN is for articles that are intellectually interesting. Please don't take threads onto generic tangents and flamewars. Other CIA-related topics have had interesting discussion here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#14

Post by oakhaven » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

Nice story, would make a good history movie, they are running out of those in there. So far the topics of cz historical movies are:

- Hussites - early protestant church (based in Prague) turned mercenary army after Vatican burned their leader at stake

- How trendy it was to be "Czech" before WWI, when part of the Austrian empire

- How silly was WWI from the czech point of view (Svejk)

- Legions in the White army in WWI

- How great it was during the first republic (1918-WWII)

- How bad it was during WWII, the Munich betrayal

- How bad/silly it was just after WWII

- How bad it was during the communist rule (1948-1989)

- How silly it was during the communist rule

- Another betrayal, by the Warsaw pact armies in August 1968

- How wild it was during the 90s

.. and most of those are pretty drained.

I googled the topic in czech and not much popped up.

Thanks for the link, it was a good read!

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#15

Post by efrafa » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

oakhaven wrote: post #14

Nice story, would make a good history movie, they are running out of those in there. So far the topics of cz historical movies are: - Hussites - early protestant church (based in Prague) turned mercenary army after Vatican burned their leader at stake - How trendy it was to be "Czech" before WWI, when part of the Austrian empire - How silly was WWI from the czech point of view (Svejk) - Legions in the White army in W…

I highly recommend movie "Pelisky"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167331/

The movie is comedy making fun of communist Czechoslovakia in the late sixties.

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#16

Post by Gusen » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#17

Post by bgilroy26 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

oakhaven wrote: post #14

Nice story, would make a good history movie, they are running out of those in there. So far the topics of cz historical movies are: - Hussites - early protestant church (based in Prague) turned mercenary army after Vatican burned their leader at stake - How trendy it was to be "Czech" before WWI, when part of the Austrian empire - How silly was WWI from the czech point of view (Svejk) - Legions in the White army in W…

What is your favorite historical Czech movie? Which one do you think was the best executed?

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#18

Post by KRS-Won » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

Anyone have the TL;DR?

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#19

Post by smcl » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

KRS-Won wrote: post #18

Anyone have the TL;DR?

In the build-up to WW2 the Hungarians had a spy network within Czechoslovakia that was completely compromised by a Hungarian colonel who was predictable and careless with how he distributed communications to them. It's really quite a decent read

Re: The Mail from Budapest (1993)

#20

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 3:36 AM UTC

These things are always carefully rewritten to try to soften the essential ugliness of the whole endeavor, but the effort never quite succeeds. Some of it must be to avoid distracting from the drama of the story, but the rest must, I think, be simply the habit of deception. Re-reading, carefully, we can find the chinks where the truth has been sealed off.

The most essential activity of spycraft, always and everywhere, is extortion. It may be in what we think is a good cause, but spycraft doesn't care. In this case, all these people executed or driven to suicide got there in service of protecting what was, in the end, a doomed republic, betrayed not by spies but by its own hope that appeasement might mean peace. They incidentally handed over to Germany all the armament built to defend themselves. Germany used Czech tanks, and probably no small number of Czech soldiery, to invade France.

I predict it will turn out, in the fullness of time, that the coroner who ruled Epstein's death was suicide was compelled to that conclusion, not by the facts, but by some threat, from somebody served by his death. No republic is defended by the compulsion, but the overwhelming majority of people taught the practice were taught in service of government. Once taught, they go on to a career of it, somewhere.