By Peter Annear
BUDAPEST — With CNN and Skynews broadcasts booming in 24 hours a day, the citizens of Budapest — and most of eastern Europe — have now seen with their own eyes the quality of life in the United States. Many here were glued to their television sets as the Los Angeles riots unfolded, wondering just how far the events would go.
Despite the attempt by CNN to play down the underlying causes of the riots and focus almost entirely on the "healing process", to emphasise the anti-Korean attacks, and to conveniently overlook the question of just who the dead were and how they were killed, the real message still got through.
After years of clumsy propaganda from the old regimes about the horrors of modern capitalism (in fact, an attempt to direct attention away from the failures of the domestic bureaucratic system), these days most people here take with a grain of salt reports of poverty, crime and drug abuse in the west. Now, however, some of that cynicism has been dented.
One early response came from a number of activists, mainly intellectuals, members of the Hungarian Left Alternative, who drafted a statement on the significance of the events for eastern Europe.
"Another myth has been shattered", they wrote.
"African Americans living in the ghettos and slums of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, New York and other American cities in their despair in effect went into mass protest for elementary human rights and against the fact that they are defenceless before the absolutism of power.
"American capitalism has shown its real face, little known in eastern Europe — against poverty and wretchedness it knows only one 'remedy', state oppression and police terror.
"But violence can only give birth to violence.
"We Hungarians have lost our last illusions. If American society is unable to help the poor of the United States itself, how will it help the people of eastern Europe?
"We have understood the message of the war in Los Angeles: capitalism with a human face does not exist at all."