On July 14 in Gdansk, Poland, Polish officials unveiled a statue of Pope John Paul II and former President Ronald Reagan based on a famous photo by Scott Stewart of the Associated Press. As a news story notes, the statue honors “two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple Communism 23 years ago.” In the United States, a nation plagued by a faulty short-term collective memory, much of that story has been forgotten, or was not known in the first place. It requires some knowledge of one, Josef Stalin.
“Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder, and the Poles were the preeminent victim among the Soviet nationalities,” writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin blamed the Poles for the failure of collectivization, which led to the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, a wide-scale purge of “anti-Soviet” actors from within and without the Party, including an attempt to eliminate what Stalin called “this Polish filth.”
In 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed the Treaty of Non-Aggression, or Nazi-Soviet Pact, and invaded Poland simultaneously, launching World War II. After the war began, the Soviet Union murdered more than 4,000 Polish officers in the Katyń Forest in 1943, stripping watches and wedding rings from the victims before their execution, just as Hitler’s SS had done with Jewish prisoners. After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite. A series of Soviet stooges ruled the nation, including Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, a “Russian general in a Polish uniform” as U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger once called him.
But even in a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, Jaruzelski did not rule unopposed. In 1978, Karol Jozef Woityla, a Pole, became Pope. He believed that Communism was an evil and sought to inspire Poles to resist the system based on their faith in God, a strong appeal in the historically Catholic country. In Gdansk, Poles launched Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet Bloc. The regime responded by imposing martial law. The Pope inspired his countrymen to resist that too, effectively answering Stalin’s question about how many divisions the Pope commanded. In light of his involvement in the Polish resistance, Pope John Paul II is an obvious candidate for the statue.
And, I would argue, so is a non-Pole, Ronald Reagan, who knew a thing or two about Communism.
In a 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Reagan had the clarity to describe the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The Poles and other occupied nations knew the truth of his words by their own experience, so Ronald Reagan duly became their champion. He stood up to the Soviets, championed dissidents, strengthened American defenses and fortified the Western alliance. The Left denounced him as a warmonger and worse, but he stayed the course. In due time, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and Communist rule collapsed in Poland and all over Eastern Europe.
Ronald Reagan was a clear choice for the new statue in Gdansk over and above other American presidents who served during the Cold War. They did not choose President Gerald Ford, who famously claimed “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” That kind of fatuous statement by a U.S. president only disheartened the Poles. Neither did the Poles choose Jimmy Carter, a sanctimonious champion of human rights who, instead of resistance, chose to pursue a stance of appeasement during a time of aggressive Soviet colonialism.
While Reagan’s “evil empire” speech inspired the victims of communism, it infuriated the American Left, which had long denied the Katyń massacre until the Soviets themselves admitted culpability. For its part, the Religious Left was more concerned with denouncing Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars,” than protesting Soviet oppression in Europe. The nuclear freeze movement constituted a large part of the Religious Left’s activism at the time.
At that time, the Religious Left also promoted “liberation theology” in regimes that had fallen to Communism like Cuba and Nicaragua. Their dictators were sometimes viewed as liberators, promoters of human rights, and even harbingers of the kingdom of God. It is no surprise that the Poles are not putting up statues commemorating the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, or theologians such Jose Miguez Bonino and Gustavo Gutierrez.
Oppression calls for resistance, not appeasement, much less justification as part of some bogus theology. Therefore, political and religious leaders should oppose oppression and champion freedom. That stance may be costly but liberated peoples will remember.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of From Mainline to Sideline, Hollywood Party, and The Generation That Knew Not Josef.
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