The Good News In Poland

In addition to the anniversary of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings, this August marks another, much happier, anniversary. It was on August 14, 1980, that the workers of the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, began a strike that was eventually joined by most of that country's industrial workers and resulted in the recognition of Solidarity as the first independent labor union in a Soviet bloc nation.

In the last year, events in Poland have moved much faster than anyone could have imagined. Every sector of the society, even the rank and file of the Communist Party, has become mobilized in a struggle for social, economic, and political democracy that the Poles have come to call their "renewal" movement.

The initiative for the renewal movement has consistently moved from the bottom up; the leaders have had to hustle to avoid falling behind their followers. And the movement's demands have gone beyond immediate economic issues to strike at the very roots of a system based on privilege. The Polish people don't have a theory to explain what they are doing, but it is clear that the guiding impulse of their movement is a radical, but non-ideological, populism that is revolutionary in Poland and probably would be here too.

The amazing success of this grassroots, nonviolent uprising has often been the only good news in the papers in the last year. But not all the news from Poland has been good; for almost a year the Polish people have lived under the threat of a Soviet invasion.

The Poles seem caught in an unbreakable bind that forces them to choose between watering down their demands to the point that they are co-opted, or pushing ahead for their rights and being crushed by the USSR. But so far they have avoided either of those pitfalls. The leaders of the renewal have skillfully tailored their public statements and demands to keep from needlessly provoking the Soviets, but they have also refused to back down even when the danger has been the greatest. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa expressed the feeling of the people well when he said of the Soviet threat, "Tanks can't make us work."

The Poles have been able to stand up to the Soviet Union not because they are ignorant of the possible cost, but because last August millions of them experienced a miraculous moment of liberation. It was the moment that comes when the objects of history become its subjects, and people who have been treated like machines stand up and assert their humanity. Nothing has been the same for them since.

The Polish people have learned that to be ruled by their fear is to be complicit in their own oppression and to betray the experience of liberation that came upon them a year ago. So, despite the Soviet divisions perched on their border, the Polish people carry on, pressing for new and more far-reaching demands as quickly as the last ones are met.

There is a lot we in the U.S. can learn from the Polish renewal movement about social change and the efficacy of nonviolent tactics, but probably the most important thing we can learn is hope. While our dangers seem less immediate than those in Poland, we too live in a very threatening situation. Nuclear war is more likely than ever, the first signs of a new round of political repression are appearing, and our government is making war on the poor at home and in the Third World. But when we look at the power, hope, and victory over fear that has come to oppressed people in places like Poland, we have visible evidence of the redeeming and freeing activity of God in our world. And that is the good news that you won't see in your local paper.

Danny Collum was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.