Europe Responds with More Sophistication and Better Understanding than the Trigger-Happy Cowboys Do…

Another myth was that European governments, which now praise Solidarity as the movement that precipitated the collapse of the communist system, were right behind the movement

writes Judy Dempsey in the International Herald Tribune

Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford, said West Germany in particular was obsessed with maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union, believing this would lead to closer ties between the two Germanies. But then, other governments were not so forthcoming with support either.

"There were always 'ifs' and 'buts' or 'maybes' or 'let's wait and see,"' said Gienek Smolar, organizer of the international conference held Monday.

The United States, due to President Jimmy Carter, who put great store on human rights as a part of his foreign policy, did support Solidarity.

Daniel Fried, a U.S. assistant secretary of state for European affairs who had close links with Poland at the time, said that "when we supported Solidarity, we were criticized by the Europeans for being naïve. Yet in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was about to collapse, there were very few American officials who believed that history was about to turn."

There's good and bad in this article.

It points out that the ever-wiser men, women, pundits, and leaders of Europe always know how to respond better (and with more understanding and more sophistication) than the American cowboys.

However, Dempsey manages to put all the credit with Jimmy Carter while ignoring Ronald Wilson Reagan and how the international community responded to Jaruzelski's crackdown two years later.

Peter Schweizer, author of Reagan's War, does not overlook this. (Notice the difference in tone of the international community's reactions with regards to America — in Iraq, in Vietnam — and the Soviet Union.) He reminds us that when Moscow sent the Red Army into Afghanistan, France and Germany responded placidly that they were faced with what they termed the "Afghanistan incident".

In Europe, everybody stayed away from Reagan, Margaret Thatcher said, and once martial law was declared in Poland, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt pronounced it "necessary" while Genscher likewise justified it.

Meanwhile, the official US statement in January 1982 following the imposition of martial law was: "We in the West have a responsibility not only to preserve our own freedom but to nurture it where it does not exist."

"Schweizer's conclusions are buttressed significantly by his research in newly opened secret archives" writes Curtis Edmonds. "We learn, unsurprisingly, that the peace movement in West Germany was supported and controlled by the East German secret police."

Offering a toast at 10 Downing Street in June 1982, Thatcher praised Reagan "for putting freedom on the offensive where it belongs."

While pundits [and members of the peace movement and the above-mentioned "allied" governments] denounced the "evil empire" speech, political prisoners in Russia spread the word in their dark, damp cells. They tapped on walls and quietly talked through toilets to share what Reagan had said. Natan Scharansky remembers feeling energized and emboldened; Reagan had given them hope.