The Great Lech Wałęsa weighs in.
With 41 fellow former political prisoners from the anti-Soviet Solidarity movement, Wałęsa writes President Donald Trump to describe their ‘horror and distaste’ with his behaviour.
A guest post of sorts. With a preamble.
“For the Putin bootlickers here,” former Alberta premier Jason Kenney remarked, “Solidarity was the spark that lit the fuse which ultimately brought down what Ronald Reagan rightly called the ‘Evil Empire’ of Soviet Communism.”
And by God there are a great many Putin bootlickers in Canada, although fortunately they’re a small and backward section of Canadian public opinion. It’s confined mainly to the Tankie Hamasnik “Left” and the hodgepodge of rabble around the People’s Party, the crazy-uncle fringes of the Conservative Party, and quite a few Alberta sovereignist whiners from whose indecency Premier Danielle Smith has tried to distance herself, unconvincingly and not a tiny bit disinegenuously.
My friend Marcus Kolga sounds the warning in the National Post today, in Putin is winning the war against democracy. In the U.S. and Canada, there remains a dangerous impulse to appease authoritarian regimes and downplay the threat they pose. He cites the great Garry Kasparov: “Donald Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state echo Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine — denying sovereignty and rewriting history to suit his ambitions.”
As I’ve tried my damnedest to explain: Trumpism is Putinism. While we Canadians are holding our breath for Trump’s trade war hammer to come down tomorrow, I am not looking forward to the prospect of Rideau Hall Foundation denizen Marc Carney emerging as our unelected interim Liberal prime minister. That foundation, the creature of Whitewasher-General David Johnston, is a who’s-who of Beijing’s best friends and business partners in Canada.
I’d much prefer the job going to Chrystia Freeland, who saw this coming several years ago. Perhaps Canada’s greatest friend of Ukraine, here’s Freeland in 2022, when Putin’s army invaded Ukraine in a war of conquest: “There are times in history when the great struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to one fight in one place. In 1863, that place was Gettysburg. In 1940, it was the skies above Britain. Today, in 2022, it is Kyiv.”
She was dead right. And Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper has been on history’s right side from the beginning. Charlie Angus is in, and even Jagmeet Singh is coming along. My old friend Christopher Alexander is in. Among my colleagues in the journalism trade, Andrew Coyne gets it, and Warren Kinsella gets it. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre appears to get it too.
Anyway, a multipartisan company to be keeping. A good crew. Speaking of which. . .
Solidarnosc, the Solidarity movement, was the first independent trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries. Its brave leader Lech Wałęsa would go on to dance on the ruins of the Communist bloc, becoming the first president of Free Poland and a Nobel Prize recipient.
So let’ hear what Brother Wałęsa has to say:
Mind your tone, Mr. President. It’s you who should be grateful.
Dear Mr. President.
We look upon your meeting with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with horror and distaste. To say you were waiting for him to show respect and gratitude for material help given by the U.S.A. is insulting.
[Note: It was vice-president JD Vance who was first to start demanding a “thank you” from Zelenksyy, who has thanked Americans innumerable times, Vance is not owed one.After the U.S. Congress held up funding to Ukraine for several months before an military aid package finally made it through, Vance voted against it].
Gratitute is owed the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who spilled their blood in the cause of of a free world. For more than eleven years, they fell on the front in the name of freedom’s values and for the freedom of their fatherland, which was attacked by Putinite Russia.
We don't understand how a leader of a nation which is the symbol of the free world is unable to see that.
The atmosphere in the Oval Office reminded us of the kind of discussions that the Polish political police convened in Soviet era interrogation rooms and Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, on the orders of the Communist political police also explained to us, that they held all the cards and we held none [“Without us, you don't have any cards!” Trump shouted at Zelenskyy on Friday.]
They demanded that we stop our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering due to the activities of the Solidarity opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. They took away our freedom and citizens' rights on the grounds that we didn't agree to work with the authorities and we didn't show them gratitude.
We are shocked that you treated President Zelenskyy the same way.
The history of 20th century shows that every time that the USA wanted distance from democratic values and from its European allies, it ended with a threat to the USA itself. Woodrow Wilson understood that; he decided to bring the USA into the First World War in 1917. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR also understood that the war in defense of the USA couldn’t be fought only in the Pacific, but also it would also have to mean waging war in Europe in support of allies, who were attacked by the Third Reich nations.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial effort, the collapse of the USSR empire would not have happened. Reagan understood that in Soviet Russia, and in the countries colonized by the USSR, millions of enslaved people were suffering. Among them were thousands of political prisoners, who paid with their freedom in their sacrifice in the defense of democratic values. President Reagan’s greatness was in many things, including his undestanding that there could be no wavering in the fight. He understood the USSR as the "Evil Empire."
We won that fight. A monument to President Reagan stands across from the US Embassy in Warsaw to this day.
Mr. President, material help - military and financial - cannot be equated with the blood spilled in the name of Ukraine’s freedom and independence, and the freedom of the whole world. Human life is priceless, and it cannot be measured financially. Gratitude is owed to those who sacrificed their blood and freedom.
For us, the people of "Solidarity", former Communist political prisoners of a Soviet client state, this is clear.
We appeal to the Americans to hold themselves to the guarantees that they gave along with Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The guarantees were obligations in writing to defend the immovable borders of Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear arms. Those guarantees are without conditions. They don't contain a single word about treating such help as an exchange for commercial benefits.
Signed. . .
Lech Wałęsa, political prisoner, Solidarity leader, president of the Republic of Poland.
Mark Bailin, political prisoner, editor of independent publishing houses.
Severn Blumstein, political prisoner, member of the Workers' Defense Committee.
Teresa Bogucka, political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and Solidarity.
Gregory Bogut, political prisoner, activist of democratic opposition, independent publisher.
Mark Borowik, political prisoner, independent publisher.
Bogdan Borusewicz, political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk.
Zbigniew Bujak, political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Warsaw.
Władysław Frasyniuk, political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Wrocław.
Andrew Gintzburg, a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Richard Grabarczyk, political prisoner, Solidarity activist.
Alexander Janiszewski, political prisoner, Solidarity activist.
Peter Kapczyski, a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition.
Mark Kossakowski, political prisoner, independent publicist.
Christopher Krol, a political prisoner , independence activist.
Jaroslav Kurski, political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition.
Barbara Swan, political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Bogdan Lis, political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk.
Henryk Majewski, political prisoner, Solidarity activist.
Adam Michnik, political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition, editor of independent publishing houses.
Slavomir Najniger, political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Peter Niemiecka, political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses.
Stefan Konstanty Niesiołowski, political prisoner, independence activist.
Edward Nowak, political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Wojciech Onyszkiewicz, political prisoner, member of the Workers' Defence Committee, Solidarity activist.
Anthony Pawlak, political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and underground Solidarity.
Sylwia Poleska-Peryt, political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition.
Christopher Push, political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Richard Push, political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Jacek Rakowiecki, political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Andrew Severn, political prisoner, actor, director of the Polish Theater in Warsaw.
Witold Sielewicz, political prisoner, printer of independent publishing houses.
Henryk Sikora, political prisoner, Solidarity activist.
Christopher Siemien Krski, political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses.
Grayna Staniszewska, political prisoner, leaders of Solidarity of the Beskids region.
George Degrees, b. political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition.
Joanna Szczęśliwy, political prisoner, editor of Solidarity underground press.
Ludwik Turko, a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity.
Matthew Wierzbicki, political prisoner, printer and publicist of independent publishing houses.
I'm 57. Never in a million years could 20-year-old Gabbo have envisioned a future in which millions of American conservatives would support a Russian authoritarian, yet here we are.
We watched a morally reprehensible meeting between a man without a suit and a suit without a man!!