Myths and fantasies in The Times

Comment on the article Regimes have learnt not to fear street protests, by Roger Boyes in The Times, 27 October 2020. Polish version: Mity i fantazje w The Times.


Lech S Borkowski The Times 28 October 2020
Lech S Borkowski, comment in The Times, 28 October 2020

“The democratic uprising that I accompanied most closely, the rise, fall and rise again of Solidarity in the Poland of the 1980s and 1990s, still has some useful pointers for today’s revolutionaries.”

Mr Boyes must have been reporting from Po La Land, not Poland. Solidarity was created and controlled by Communist political strategists. Millions of people joined once they had the impression this would be tolerated by the authorities. My father, a worker in a clothes making factory joined as well.

As a first-year student of chemistry, I took part in a two-week student strike and sit-in at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. However, both workers and student strikes have been engineered by the Communists themselves.

He surely must have known, that one of key ‘opposition’ figures was Adam Michnik, son of a Soviet agent working diligently in the 1930s on increasing support for the future Soviet control of eastern Poland. Michnik’s mother had a PhD in history and was a devout Communist as well. His half-brother Stefan was a Communist military judge and is responsible for murdering many Polish officers who fought against Nazi Germany and resisted the Communists post-WWII.

The Communist authorities manufactured a fake fall from power. Adam Michnik became the editor in chief of the main newspaper in Poland.

My pianist wife was fired from her teaching job in the State School of Music in Zielona Góra, Poland. She was the best piano teacher of the school. Her grandfather fought against Nazi Germany in 1939, was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1940-1941, then fought with the Polish forces on the western front. When he returned to Poland in 1947, he was immediately arrested and imprisoned.

I was fired from my job at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań also in 2015, where I was an associate professor of physics. I have a PhD from a well-known American university. My parents and many members of my mother’s family were prisoners of Communist concentration camps after WWII.

The Times is publishing myths and fantasies about Poland.

@LechSBorkowski

P.S. The Times held my comment for about 5 hours before releasing it eventually. The newspaper arrested information which should be common knowledge. Interesting parallel to imprisonments pointed out in my comment.
@LechSBorkowski