Solidarity movement in Poland and our connections to it

Solidarity movement in Poland ( wikipedia link )

The article was actually a bit harder to find than what it should have been. That's rather curious because it was a really big deal at the time. It might have been 40 years ago, but that is within my lifetime, and I sure the heck remember it. It was all over the news, and now it takes extra effort to find it in a Google search. Why is that?

The Solidarity movement was given American support. Would it have succeeded otherwise? Guess who was President at that time? Actually, when Solidarity first began, it was while Jimmy Carter was still in the White House, but he was on the way out. The first non-Italian Pope was from Poland--no mere coincidence. Solidarity is given credit for ending Communism in Poland, and might well have been the linch-pin towards the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. All of it was due to the commitment towards freedom in the West.

The Carter Administration said a Soviet military invasion was imminent. If not, there was strong indications of it. However, the Soviets did not invade that time. Martial law was imposed and an effort to ban the union was attempted, but this also failed. Within a decade, the Berlin Wall fell.

The parallels today are unmistakable. Even in the few remaining Communist held territories, like Cuba, there is a resistance to the kind of totalitarianism that is rising in the once "free-world". The parallels are with respect to the kind of coerciveness that was a hallmark of Soviet-style communism. Also with the respect to the monolithic nature of intolerance to any kind of dissent whatsoever. This is eerily like the coerciveness that the left loves so much with regards to Covid restrictions and mandates. Finally, there's the prevalance of conflict and instability. If nothing else, our society is under siege from the constant unreasonable demands of the left, and its implied threats of violence and unrest if unmet.

The freedoms which we once took for granted are under increasing shrill attack. The idea of freedom is also being attacked, by none other than Don Lemon of CNN. He sneered at the word, as if it were some out-of-date notion of a time-gone-by. If those who have seized power, as the Arizona county that refused a lawful subpoena backed up by the judiciary in that state, and succeeded at least for a time, then our days as a Free Republic are numbered.

If it does succeed, the Solidarity movement in Poland will be memory-holed, and so will our history, just as the statues have been toppled. We will step-by-step be subjugated in the same kind of oppressive dicatorship that marked the old Soviet Union and Red China to this very day.

Step-by-step usurpations need to be stopped, and rolled back. A fraudulent election cannot stand, as it is just one more step towards oppression. If oppression becomes the rule, then it is over forever. There won't be any America to help out the "Poles" this time. There won't be any America for Cubans to flee to. Nobody in their right mind comes to a communist oppressed country. They go the other way. But what if there is no other way?