A brief word on Lech Wałęsa

So, Lech Wałęsa has once again stepped into a firestorm of controversy by saying that the gay and transgendered members of the Sejm should sit either next to a wall or perhaps behind it. Of course, this has the usual tongues wagging about how Poles are all raging homophobes, because obviously Wałęsa speaks for Poland whenever he talks, right?

The problem is, few people outside of Poland recognize prominent Poles on sight. For example, I don't know how many people in the States could reliably identify this guy:

Bond. James Bond.

 as Prime Minister Donald Tusk or this guy:

Who's almost always PiS-ed about something

as Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the opposition, or this guy:

Bill Murray

as Janusz Palikot, leader of the Polish equivalent of The Rent is Too Damn High Party. These are the guys who are currently very prominent in Polish politics. The problem is, when the American public can't reliably identify this guy:

Uhh, Joe Biden, right?

as John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, who speaks for a considerable portion of the Republican Party, how do you expect them to identify the guys currently seen as important in Poland? Even the Western media, who should know better, assume that because Wałęsa is the only guy they actually recognize without having do do an internet search, he must be somebody important in Poland. The real picture is more complicated.

South of the Border, down Nowy Sącz-way

 

 

Lech Wałęsa won the Nobel Prize for his part in bringing down the Polish People's Republic (PRL). He helped organize strikes in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk and co-founded Solidarność, the trade-union-cum-political movement that eventually became the means by which the serious discontent of the Polish people for the communist state found a voice. Wałęsa also served as the first President of the Third Polish Republic (i.e. the first one after communism), but lost the 1995 elections and actually very quickly fell from political prominence thereafter.

The attitudes of the Poles I've talked to regarding Wałęsa are mixed, and that attitude varies greatly from person to person. Oddly enough, I've talked to both right-and-left-wingers about him, and it's not like he's a polarizing figure in Polish politics. Everybody seems not to think too highly of him. The consensus view, from everybody I talked to, is that he's currently irrelevant and kind of embarrassing. Some hasten to add that he should have retired while he was ahead, sort of like Vaclav Havel. Instead, he keeps trying to be relevant and in the public eye, sort of like Jimmy Carter.

Where I have been hearing disagreement is when discussing Wałęsa's legacy, i.e. how big of a hero he ever was. I can distill the opinions I've heard into roughly three views: 1) he really was a big hero, and deserves a lot of praise for what he managed to accomplish, 2) if he hadn't been the leader of the movement, someone else would have been because Communism was unsustainable, but considering that he still deserves credit and 3) he was just in the right place at the right time, mostly went along for the ride and so ultimately wasn't all that important. Opinions 2 and 3 sound very similar, and lie along a spectrum of opinion.

So, consider this the next time you read an article in the foreign press about how Lech Wałęsa just said something ridiculous, the implication being that everybody in Poland thinks exactly the same way.