Skip to main content

Revealing State Secrets

Lech Walesa may be in many ways a flawed man- certainly his strangled syntax in Polish contributed to his demise as President- however he has never lacked courage.

He climbed the fence of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980 and led the strike that brought free trade unions to Communist Poland and ultimately created the conditions for freedom across Central Europe.

Walesa was arrested during the crackdown that led to martial law in 1981 and spent a year in gaol. He was and is a genuine hero for a lot of people across the world.

Yet the current regime has criticised Walesa for permitting some members of the former regime's security services to keep their jobs- no wonder he called his successor "a blockhead".

The twins have not taken kindly to this- under a law they themselves passed not long ago, "defaming" the President of the Republic carries a five year prison sentence. I don't think that these idiots would actually put Walesa on trial. If they did, they would make a hero of him a second time.

Perhaps though the trial is not about defamation- calling President Kaczynski an idiot might well be classified as "revealing state secrets", were it not for the fact that everyone knows it already.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Consul, bylo "wraca do Europy"...zawsze mamy "wraca z Europy..." Kaczynscy sa *****!!!!
3:33 am
Anonymous said…
What have we learned from history of our own nation... certainly not to debate with class. Is indeed Polish democracy "too young?" Wasn't our Constitution a model for other nations? And now, 300 years later, an elected clown follows an elected communist as the coutnry leader. Sad, sad times....
9:06 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The past and the future of Kosova

The declaration of independence that the Parliament of Kosova approved on February 16 th has been greeted by the international community with a certain weary resignation. The seventh country to have been carved out of the wreckage of Yugoslavia now takes its first toddler steps in the face of a certain amount of international dismay. We are told that Serbia has lost the core of its history- yet, how true is this? The province is named after the word for a blackbird in Serbian- Kos - in fact it is named after one particular battlefield: Kosovo Polje -the field of the Blackbirds. The battle took place on June 28 th 1389. The battle took place at a key time for South East Europe, with the Ottoman Sultan Murad seeking to surround the declining Byzantine State and advancing into Europe. The army that faced the Ottomans was led by a Serbian princling , Lazar Hrebljanovic , and the various rulers of the petty states that emerged from the Serbian Empire of Stefan Dusan who had died in 1...
14 comments
Read more