It’s not just about Walesa

Lech Walesa has always denied that he used to spy for Poland’s communist regime. Now those denials have led to a perjury charge, with prison a distinct possibility.

The current accounts of this long saga contain no mention of any new evidence unearthed since I wrote about ‘agent Bolek’ almost five years ago (http://www.alexanderboot.com/meet-bolek-the-polish-saint/).

What they do contain is shoddy analysis barely scratching the topsoil and not even trying to delve deeper. Just one short paragraph from The Times illustrates this point exhaustively:

“He has long battled claims that he acted as a paid informer in the 1970s, prior to leading the formation in 1980 of Solidarity, the trade union that went on to play a key role in the fall of the communist regime. The success of Solidarity inspired similar popular revolutions in neighbouring states.”

That’s about it. The rest is simply a rehash of the evidence against Walesa, mainly the graphological analysis of the signature on secret police documents from the 1970s.

Those who pay little attention to affairs in the former Soviet bloc may or may not find such accounts mildly interesting. Others, however, may be tempted to ask some probing questions.

In that forensic spirit, let’s look at the sequence of events one can infer from the cited paragraph:

Point A, 1970s: Walesa is a paid agent of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, the Polish branch of the KGB. Point B, 1980: Walesa inspires and leads Solidarity. Point C, late 1980s: Solidarity sets the stage for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The task before us is as straightforward as it can be rewarding. If we can establish a causative link between Point A on the one hand and Points B and C on the other, then we’ll debunk the established interpretation of the post-Soviet history of Russia and her former satellites.

So, did Walesa still act as an agent of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (which is to say the KGB) when inspiring and leading Solidarity? If so, was Solidarity a KGB op? If it was, then the whole ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’ and its bloc, which, according to Francis Fukuyama, spelled the end of history, takes on a whole new dimension.

Our press isn’t equipped to answer such questions, nor even to ask them. Such inquiries would challenge the current orthodoxy, and our hacks prefer to play safe, lest they may be accused of spreading conspiracy theories.

Journos suspected of that faux pas would lose credibility at the Groucho, Garrick and every other watering hole for the media powers that be. And that fate is worse than death.

There exists, after all, some hope of coming back from the dead. But there’s no coming back from the proverbial Coventry for the poor sods losing their status in those West End clubs. Suggesting that reality may not agree with the version of it endorsed by duly accredited institutions would be breaking a gentlemen’s code, like ‘brown in town’ (wearing brown shoes in the city).

The assumption to live by is that anyone mentioning a large-scale conspiracy is away with the fairies. From there one is supposed to deduce that no real conspiracies have ever existed – they are all figments of someone’s inflamed imagination.

But that assumption is manifestly untrue. History abounds in conspiracies, including one that England is going to commemorate with fireworks tomorrow. And the whole history of communism, from Marx to Putin, is one contiguous and demonstrable conspiracy.

Communists – or, to be exact, evil forces inscribing communism on their banners – see the world as a continuous war between good (them) and evil (everyone else, but especially the West). Like the Hundred Years’ War, it ebbs and flows, going through acute and chronic periods. But it never stops.

What makes this war a conspiracy is its unilateral character. Only one side is fighting it, with the other being blissfully unaware, at least during the chronic periods. This state of ignorance must be encouraged and maintained for the communists to gain an upper hand.

That’s why they’ve always employed the tactics of the secret police tradecraft: espionage, sabotage, assassination, deception, disinformation (which Russian word of Latin origin has penetrated Western languages like a spy).

And who could use such secret police tactics better than the secret police itself? Hence the KGB, under different names and guises, always fought for supremacy against the Party.

Only the KGB had in its own estimation the subtlety to soften up the West’s resistance the better to dominate it. And presenting an image of liberalisation – what later got to be known as glasnost and perestroika – has been the KGB’s tactic from its very inception.

Practically every item in the programme associated with Gorbachev and Yeltsyn was first outlined by Stalin’s secret police chief, Beria, directly the dictator died. But Beria jumped the gun. Having found him too rash and his proposals too hasty, his Politburo colleagues killed him.

But, as the standard Soviet eulogy used to go, “our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on”. The KGB eventually triumphed when its head, Andropov, settled in the dictator’s chair. He immediately initiated the programme of deceptive liberalisation, which was carried to a logical conclusion by his disciple, Gorbachev.

Hence, rather than the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy, the collapse of the Soviet Union was merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB – and to the subtler methods long favoured by that sinister organisation.

That explains the subsequent events more persuasively than the cock and bull story of the Soviets suddenly seeing the light of democracy.

Loosening or even temporarily abandoning the reins in Eastern Europe was a logical aspect of that tectonic shift, and it was easy to do because the populations of those countries never wanted to be bossed by the Russians anyway.

Still, someone had to go ahead and actually do it all against possible resistance on the part of the die-hard communists and perhaps the army, never an institution in love with radical change.

Hence the KGB and its branches in the bloc set up a series of resistance groups, of which Solidarity was the most prominent. People, tired of communism, flowed in. And the communist parties hardly put up any resistance, which is why their chiefs were allowed to retire quietly.

The only exception was Romania, where Ceaușescu proved slow on the uptake. He had to be brutally murdered with his whole family for others to get the point.

The armies also might have demurred. Hence the defence ministers of five Eastern European countries suffered simultaneous cardiac arrests in the same month of 1984. KGB spy schools teach that, if coincidences number more than two, they aren’t coincidences. But Western commentators never learned that lesson.

I’ve been interpreting those events in the same vein since they were still unfolding in the early 90s. Yet too many academic and journalistic careers were being made on the remains of a collapsed Soviet Union for my, admittedly not very loud, voice to be heard.

At some point, the KGB, fronted by Col. Putin, abandoned subterfuge and openly took over the Russian government. At least 80 per cent of its current members are Putin’s hard-working colleagues – but Western commentators still haven’t cottoned on.

This isn’t just a matter of academic, or journalistic, interest. For the West may be in dire danger, made even deadlier by its own insouciance. But still our leaders (and their mouthpieces) treat Putin with sycophantic ‘understanding’ or even unbridled sympathy.

This is the subtext of the story of Lech Walesa, ‘agent Bolek’. Even if it’s mere speculation, which I’m sure it isn’t, the papers owe it to their charter at least to comment on it. Instead they indulge in the insipid reportage along the aforementioned ABC lines.