Could be.
The role of the Catholic Church was huge. Especially one priest jerzy popieluszko. A little priest from a little church had the entire system shaking.
If you are interested in this kind of stuff here is a documentary about him.
Jimmy Carter foreign policy was an utter disaster on all front. The toilet paper rag washington post hated President Ronald Reagan so much that it defended the soviets against our U.S. President. Please spare us from quoting the Washington Post when it comes to foreign policy or the demise of the soviet union. The same washington post, toilet paper rag kept telling its subscribers that Ronald Reagan would lead to nuclear war. Check it out this exactly what they wrote at the time.
Lech Walesa along with Solidarnosc had two main allies. John Paul II and Mr. Ronal Reagan. Mr. Reagan was so adored that to this day he is considered like a god figure in Poland and the ex eastern block.
Mr. Ronald Reagan brought the soviet union to their knees by one single resolve. Strength and patience. Not one single soldier was killed. He accomplished the soviet union demise by rebuilding an army from the ground up. He made it a top priority to have the best defense possible when carter did everything to diminish our armed forces.
The soviet union is dead but putin an ex kgb agent is trying to revive it.
Why?
There is an inept commander in chief.
Did someone say?
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
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Anyone remember who was president when Russia took over the Crimea? Yes, history does repeat itself when the face changes but the policy doesn’t.
Reagan ain’t no god?
Tell that to the Polish people or the ex soviet nations. Their answers speak for themselves not the washington post toilet paper.
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No god all to human. Willing to play to peoples lowest nature when it suited his purposes. Typical.politician. He wanted to a be a god should have been for equal justice for all Americans. Instead he chose to divide us instead of uniting us.
Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.
Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.
They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote.
It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.”
After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.
That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.
Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.
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Some people deal with facts, some would rather deal with an agenda. Calling Reagan a god is, well, you decide.
Emotion can fog judgement. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
Facts are facts Chris. Sorry you can’t accept the fact that Carter with Z. Brzezinski lead the effort
that persuaded the Soviet’s to back down in regards to Poland. It happened on his watch. If you would actually read the article you would note it gives Reagan credit for the Soviet demise. But it was US resolve with decades of military spending that bankrupted the Russians too.
Brzezinski is probably mostly underrated advisor in decades. He predicted in 1970 the Soviets were falling behind technologically. But he wasn’t infallible and misread the Iranian Revolution and Shah of Iran situation. All leaders have failures too.
You we believe the washington toiler paper post or the POLISH PEOPLE?
Rewriting history is not a fact. It is a lie.
Not sure about that.
Didn’t Poland declare martial law shortly thereafter?
I’m guessing if you asked most Poles, they’d look up to Reagan and Pope JPII.
I know that Lech Walesa was extremely complimentary of Reagan, citing his role in bringing down the USSR.
It is so highly convenient to re-write history in trying to re-establish one of the worst American president of our lifetime. We see this re-writing of history somewhere out West. Yes Hollywood. The land of make belief. Unfortunately reality is not make belief. Actions have consequences.
Here’s how Lech Walesa viewed Ronald Reagan; this was reprinted from a Wall Street Journal article published years ago.
http://www.tommyduggan.com/VP070204lech.html
He says that Poles literally owe Reagan their freedom.
And I would argue that his opinion, as the head of Solidarity and Poland’s former President, is weightier and more persuasive on this issue than that of any of the posters here.
I think you mean “make believe” but accusing Hollywood of writing history is an interesting take.
No one I know confuses entertainment with education.
Again, emotion can fog judgement.
This is what bother’s me about some of my countrymen we sit and give platitudes to a man a leader, who no doubt is beloved by the Polish people for his action against oppression. But this same man the President who suppose to be held in god like esteem by the Polish and even by some American’s . This same man couldn’t bring himself to see the oppression of his own countrymen who have been oppressed and being oppressed and maltreated because they had a different skin color. To be held god esteem as some here pointed out, last time i Iook the Judeo-Christian ethic was about alleviating the suffering and oppression of ones fellowman. He do that for black people? As far as I know be didn’t fact he was just the opposite. He opposed Martin Luther King being a national holiday, he opposed putting sanctions on The apartheid regime of South Africa who were oppressing black people I guess they had to be Polish to be help or be outraged at there oppression by there government. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. Democrats over rode his veto on all these matter’s.
For your consideration,
When Pope John Paul II later met with Zbigniew Brzeziński, he anecdotally said to him: “Professor, since it was you who elected me, you have to keep visiting!”
And a wiki summary of the sequence of events that I think is accurate:
Deeply concerned Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP) leaders, who had initially been lenient, slowly began to consider suppression of the popular movement on their own. On 22 October, Polish defense minister Jaruzelski started planning for martial law.[3]
United States intelligence, by this time, had an accurate idea of the Warsaw Pact’s plans. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski persuaded President Jimmy Carter to disclose the Warsaw Pact military build-up publicly and to warn the Soviet Union of its consequences.[3][4]
Please note, I’m not claiming the Carter admin was a resounding success. It had notable failures in judgement on Iranian Revolution, the poorly executed and risky hostage rescue attempt, and
dealing with the energy crisis and inflationary shocks to the economy. But you also have to
acknowledge the successes such as Camp David Accords, Salt II, handling Polish crisis in 1980,
and implementation of the CIA policy of arming the Afghan rebels. History is never full of heroes
who didn’t have failures too. It’s messy.
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Totally agree! Things are rarely black and white or simple.
There’s probably a ton of good and a ton of bad by all 46 Presidents but one measure is legislation signed into law that improved the lives of Americans and not all 46 are on equal footing on that count. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
Anyone else notice how mostly civil the disagreements are? It can be done.
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Hold my beer…LOL
As I said, Solidarity’s own leader credits Reagan with Poland’s freedom, NOT Carter.
The debate about who did more for Poland against Communism ends there.
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Can we agree it was a combination of people and circumstances?
To say Reagan single-handedly broke up the USSR is like saying Lincoln single-handedly kept the Union intact or FDR single-handedly defeated the the Nazis or JFK single-handedly put an American on the moon.
Like someone posted above, Reagan chose to start his campaign where he did for a reason and I sincerely doubt the reason was sympathy and sensitivity for black people. Oh, and Iran/Contra, anyone?