"SOLIDARITY" REVOLT - A PRACTICAL LESSON FOR "WE THE PEOPLE"?

courtesy THE UGLY TRUTH

I happen to be old enough to remember how difficult and dangerous it was to get some scraps of truth in the communist Poland. 

Even as late as the 70’s and 80’s you had to have good friends involved in underground publishing to get some independent, political material. Short wave radio was a window of sorts to the world; we listened to “Radio Free Europe” and “Voice of America” which gave some semblance of truth despite the fact that both were propaganda fronts for outfits like CIA. We knew it well but still, this was better than the Polish equivalents of “Pravda” newspaper. No Internet then…

The strikes of 1980 started in selected big factories and spread like tsunami to virtually all big factories in Poland.

Subsequently, the “SOLIDARITY” movement was born in the shipyards of Gdansk and Szczecin. Factory workers and the so called “working intelligentsia” were for the first time united under one banner of the anti-communist Freedom movement. Eventually full 10 million people became members of “Solidarity” out of some 37 million citizens.

“SOLIDARITY” was officially but truculently acknowledged by the communists as a trade union but became a political movement par excellence; it was a political party, a Freedom movement, a school of self-organizing, a great publisher of political literature and more. Least of all was it a trade union.
For one and a half year the communist rulers of Poland and their Soviet masters had to tolerate an abominable foreign body, an island of Freedom in the middle of the Warsaw Pact.
And it all happened despite, or because, we had no firearms. But when I think of it, it was not a bad thing, as explained below.

Revolution in Poland 1980

Those were extremely hot days with constant fear of Martial Law and of the Soviet intervention.
Paradoxically, our “SOLIDARITY” may be seen as a prototype of the “color revolutions” of the recent years.

Just as the “color revolutions”, prior to, and during the Revolution, we got some help from the American and other Western organizations, also from the CIA. Those small investments from the West gave a tremendous return. For a price of a few smuggled copy machines, some printing paper and ink as well as the help to coordinate our efforts via “Radio Free Europe” and “VoA” the Soviet Bloc was trembling on the verge of a major disaster.
Those few paltry xeroxes and printing paper (which were illegal to possess) fell on an extremely fertile and well-prepared ground and had incredibly strong impact. The Polish David was giving a black eye to the Soviet Goliath with an American xerox.
Nowadays, Soros and his ilk have been pumping millions or billions of dollars into Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics in order to stir phony “revolutions” and destabilize Russia, happily with only meager and temporary effect.

We were also emboldened by the very existence of powerful moral supporters in the "Free World" such as the “Polish” Pope John Paul II and the strongly anti-communist Ronald Reagan.

President Walesa 1990

Without this duo, we would probably not have had guts enough to go full speed ahead with “SOLIDARITY” and everything that followed.
The Pope was our blessing. The Revolution started just a year after his first visit to Poland in 1979 when he had drawn millions to open-air masses. It was then that the people became aware how many and how united they were against our phony leaders.

Eventually, 1½ years after the start of our Revolution everything got smashed by an incredibly effective imposition of Martial Law by the Polish People’s Army.

read the whole thing at The Ugly Truth