When someone tells you that the 80's protests in communist Poland were inspired by the US, pro-capitalist or any other similar bullshit, just have a look at this 1980 list of 21 Interfactory Strike Committee postulates.
@kravietz To be completely fair, anything that was anti-Soviet, regardless of how otherwise socialist it might have been, would have had Western support.
The fallacy here is that there was any such thing as "the West". Each country had different policy towards Eastern Bloc, and within each of these countries there were countless movements that either supported or condemned the anti-Soviet movements. For example in France you had organisations that both supported Solidarity (Polish independent trade union), and also die-hard communists (L'Humanite) that would approve of any Soviet decision, regardless of how stupid it was.
@kravietz All models are wrong, some are useful.
"The West" ~= NATO block nations + Japan and a few others, but really, the US hegemony, and specific to the period, the Reagan White House and GOP, with some input from Thatcherite UK.
I understand that but in "the West" you had political pluralism which meant you could have *at the same time* both people condemning human rights abuse in communist Poland and useful idiots marching against NATO and for unilateral disarmament.
In case of Eastern Bloc it was all simple - if there was decision from Moscow we now support Palestine Liberation Organisation, we all marched in support of PLO. When Moscow decided we no longer like PLO, we marched against.
As someone who was at that time living on the other side of the Iron Curtain I didn't really care about the motivation of the people in the West who sent me the humanitarian parcels, or more generally who supported Solidarność. We didn't really care about their *internal* politics and whatnot. The support itself did matter.
> it caused pain to the USSR
I'm not quite sure how sending a humanitarian parcel to someone stripped of basic food and medicines (due to "temporary difficulties in real socialism") could have "caused pain to the USSR" 🤔
> But they Were Not In Charge
And thank God, because if say instead of Reagan it was Bernie Sanders who was in charge - after his enthusiastic trips to USSR - I would now probably still living in communist Poland earning $20 per month.
@kravietz And yet you also had unitary executives, meaning that even in pluralistic societies striven by discord and dissent, actual power was manifested by a single party or individual. At worst, by a coalition government.
Neither the US nor UK operated under coalitions at the time.
Trust me, I get nuance. It really has little place here.
The Western ideologues-in-power loved Solidarność and did so regardless of how opposed its campaign and policies were to their own domestic platforms, so long as it caused pain to the USSR. THAT WAS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERED.
(Rather frighteningly akin to how the GOP has fallen completely for Trump despite his refutation of much of what the party had nominally supported.)