My comment on Niall Ferguson’s article Aftermath: the fall of the Berlin Wall — and its lesson for China 30 years on in The Sunday Times, 3 November 2019.
“With a few proletarian exceptions — Lech Wałesa is the most obvious”
Wałęsa is a Communist stooge. The whole Solidarity movement was engineered by the Communists themselves. The leading so-called ‘dissidents’ came from the Communist inner circles.
One of those ‘dissidents’ is Adam Michnik, whose name is missing from the article. He is the son of a convicted Soviet agent, Ozjasz Szechter, who apparently was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Western Ukraine. He acted on Soviet Union’s behalf against the Polish state and was convicted in the 1930s.
Why omit this name from the article? Michnik was and remains key figure in Polish public life.
“the dissidents who led what Timothy Garton Ash called “the Refolution”, a mix of reform and revolution, were bourgeois intellectuals: Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, for example, or Bronislaw Geremek in Poland.”
Timothy Garton Ash failed to even register a surprise, let alone ask questions about the mechanics of the ‘opposition’ to Communism.
Bronisław Geremek was a Communist party member.
I suggest the motto for the The Times: Don’t ask, don’t tell.