catholic church from day 1, imo.

I knew a bunch of Polish guys in the US. He never was perfect. My own dad was a labor leader in the US (he marched against Ford in the 30's next to Walter Reuther but never rose to the occasion due to family responsibilities. He was very much for equal rights and integrated his local union, but I will never forget him yelling at me for listening to Johnny Mathis - who was a "fag". I told him I liked his voice, wasn't going to marry him, sheesh. anyway, there are people raised in ignorance., they have to grow and Poland is not quite as far as the US.

Do I like or support his position - no, but I take it from where it comes from culturally. I do not write off people who say ignorant stuff, I just expect them to change. I am not sure this is a fire storm in Poland.

I still believe that Lech was pretty brave in his youth standing up to the communists.

But Reagan and the Pope spent only a few minutes reviewing events in the Middle East. Instead they remained focused on a subject much closer to their heart: Poland and the Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe. In that meeting, Reagan and the Pope agreed to undertake a clandestine campaign to hasten the dissolution of the communist empire. Declares Richard Allen, Reagan's first National Security Adviser: "This was one of the great secret alliances of all time."

The operation was focused on Poland, the most populous of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and the birthplace of John Paul II. Both the Pope and the President were convinced that Poland could be broken out of the Soviet orbit if the Vatican and the U.S. committed their resources to destabilizing the Polish government and keeping the outlawed Solidarity movement alive after the declaration of martial law in 1981.

Until Solidarity's legal status was restored in 1989 it flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and John Paul II. Tons of equipment -- fax machines (the first in Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers, word processors -- were smuggled into Poland via channels established by priests and American agents and representatives of the AFL-CIO and European labor movements. Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.

Lech Walesa and other leaders of Solidarity received strategic advice -- often conveyed by priests or American and European labor experts working undercover in Poland -- that reflected the thinking of the Vatican and the Reagan Administration. As the effectiveness of the resistance grew, the stream of information to the West about the internal decisions of the Polish government and the contents of Warsaw's communications with Moscow became a flood. The details came not only from priests but also from spies within the Polish government.

The campaign by Washington and the Vatican to keep Solidarity alive began immediately after General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law on Dec. 13, 1981. In those dark hours, Poland's communications with the noncommunist world were cut; 6,000 leaders of Solidarity were detained...Authorities took Walesa into custody and interned him in a remote hunting lodge.

Shortly after Polish security forces moved into the streets, Reagan called the Pope for his advice. At a series of meetings over the next few days, Reagan discussed his options. "We had a massive row in the Cabinet and the National Security Council about putting together a menu of counteractions," former Secretary of State Haig recalls...

Haig dispatched Ambassador at Large Vernon Walters, a devout Roman Catholic, to meet with John Paul II....

According to U.S. intelligence sources, the Pope had already advised Walesa through church channels to keep his movement operating underground, and to pass the word to Solidarity's 10 million members not to go into the streets and risk provoking Warsaw Pact intervention or civil war with Polish security forces... John Paul II communicated with Jozef Cardinal Glemp in Warsaw via radio. He also dispatched his envoys to Poland to report on the situation. "The Vatican's information was absolutely better and quicker than ours in every respect," says Haig...

In the first hours of the crisis, Reagan ordered that the Pope receive as quickly as possible relevant American intelligence, including information from * a Polish Deputy Minister of Defense who was secretly reporting to the CIA. Washington also handed over to the Vatican reports and analysis from Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, a senior member of the Polish general staff, who was a CIA informant until November 1981, when he had to be smuggled out of Poland...

The key Administration players were all devout Roman Catholics -- CIA chief William Casey, Allen, Clark, Haig, Walters and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican. They regarded the U.S.-Vatican relationship as a holy alliance...

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_holy_alliance.php


Walesa's presidency initiated neoliberalism in poland.

as a result:

Once a place of work for over 20,000 people, the Gdansk shipyards provide only 2,200 jobs today.[6] The European Union has backed a restructuring plan for the shipyard.[7][8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gda%C5%84sk_Shipyard

Several former Soviet block countries are still struggling with high unemployment and high corruption. Drugs, prostitution, cybertheft you name it, they have people doing it.

Poland is one of the better ones at 41 on the CPI list.
Estonia is 32
Slovenia is 37

http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results

under the tutelage of the west.

over 20 years of 10%+ unemployment, so much so that poland is losing population.

http://www.wbj.pl/article-61982-poland-losing-people.html

eastern europe = cheap labor to drive down the price of labor in western europe.

unemployment is by design.

I'm not familiar much with Europe, but have heard more about South America.

First sentence. Someone should fix that, pronto.