Reply #56: Sometimes an, "Army Of One" can defeat a "super-power"... [View All]

[Hubert Flottz]

Walesa, Lech

(lĕkh´ väwĕn´z) , 1943—, Polish labor and political leader. He worked as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdañsk but was dismissed in 1976 for his antigovernment protests. In 1980 striking workers at the shipyard won his reinstatement, and he assumed leadership of the independent trade union Solidarity. A moderate, he gained numerous concessions from the authorities before his arrest and internment in the military crackdown of 1981. He was released in Nov., 1982, and in 1983 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry?id=49815

Lech Walesa


Lech Walesa, THE FLY, FEISTY, MUSTACHIOED ELECTRICIAN from Gdansk, shaped the twentieth century as the leader of the Solidarity movement that lead the Poles out of communism. It is one of history's great ironies that the nearest thing we have ever see to a genuine workers' revolution was directed against a so - called workers' state. Poland was again the breaker for the rest of the Central Europe in the "velvet revolutions" of 1989. Walesa's contribution to the end of communism in Europe, and hence the end of Cold War, stands beside those of his fellow Pole Pope John Paul II, and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Lech Walesa's life, like those of Gorbachev and the Pope, was shaped by communism. Born to a family of peasant farmers in 1943, he came as a young man to work in the vast shipyard that the communist state was developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of the workers' protests in the 1970's and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age of thirty-seven, to join the occupation strike. With his electrifying personality, quick wit, and gift of the gab, he was soon leading it. He moved his fellow workers away from mere wage claims and toward a central, daringly political demand: free trade unions.

When the Polish communists made this concession, which was without precedent in the history of the communists world since 1917, the new union was christened Solidarnose (Solidarity). Soon it hasd 10 million members, and Walesa was its undisputed leader. For sixteen months they struggled to find a way to coexist with the communist state, under the constant threat of Soviet invasion. Walesa - known to almost everyone as Lech - was foxy, unpredictable, often infuriating, but he has a natural genius for politics, a matchless ability for sensing popular moods, and great powers of swaying a crowd. Again and again, he used these powers for moderation. He jokingly described himself as a "fireman", dousing the flames of popular discontent. In the end, martial law was declared. Walesa was interned for eleven months and then released.

Yet Solidarity would not die, and Walesa remained its symbol. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. With support from the Pope and U.S., he and his colleagues in the underground leadership of Solidarity kept the flame alight, until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin bought new hope. In 1988 there was another occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which Walesa again joined - though this time as the grand old man among younger workers. A few months later, the Polish communists entered into negotiations with Solidarity, at the first Round Table in 1989. Walesa and his colleagues secured semi free elections in which Solidarity proceeded to triumph. In August, just nine years after he had climbed over the shipyard wall, Poland got its first non-communist Prime Minister in more than fifty years. Where Poland led, the rest of the Central Europe soon followed - and the Soviet Union was not far behind. More...

http://www.4to40.com/legends/index.asp?article=legends_lechwalesa


This brave man really did what REAGAN tried to take all the credit for! Lech Walesa started the process that led to freedom from the iron grip of the USSR, for eastern Europe and East Germany. The War in Afghanistan and Mr.Walesa caused the USSR to begin to crumble from within. I've never seen Lech Walesa's name on a political chat board. Almost never hear Mr.Walesa name in the MSM.

Reagan just mostly did wild west photo ops like Buckaroo Bush does, then took credit for "freeing Europe"! TOTAL BULLSHIT! Mr. Gorbachev, bring down your walls", was like Bushco's Rubber Turkey Tour or the Top Gunnish "Mission Accomplice" stunt!

YES, one person CAN make a BIG difference and YES, that one person can be YOU!