Remembering Winston Churchill, the greatest Briton, who was anti-Nazi, anti-Communist and pro-freedom on anniversary of his death

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." - Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948)

Sir Winston Churchill died 55 years ago on 24 January 1965 at 90 years of age. He was given a state funeral that lasted four days. 

Sir Churchill was the man who twice saved democracy from Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.  In 1940, the Battle of Britain's most decisive clash saw the Royal Air Force repel the largest Luftwaffe air strike against the United Kingdom. Months earlier on June 18, 1940 in a speech in The House of Commons titled "Their Finest Hour" Prime Minister Churchill explained the stakes of World War II and the start of the existential clash for Great Britain: 

I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

The apologists for international communism  like to extol their so-called "antifascist"credentials while remaining silent or finding bizarre revisionist explanations to downplay or ignore the connections between fascism and communism. Sir. Churchill succinctly outlined this relationship in the quote at the top of the page. 

Of even greater concern is the attempt to deny the fact that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin signed a pact in August of 1939, that secretly included the division of Central and Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, that started World War II.

Sir Winston Churchill died on this day in 1965.

The great wartime Prime Minister is remembered in the Abbey with a marble memorial stone near the Grave of the Unknown Warrior.

Discover more: https://t.co/Tno29O6nUH pic.twitter.com/xWF7lRC7F3

— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) January 24, 2021

This alliance lasted until the summer of 1941 when Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet union. 

Consider for a moment that it was Britain and France who honoring their alliance declared war on Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939 when Poland was invaded by Hitler's Third Reich.  Churchill did not equivocate and in a radio address on October 1, 1939 described the Russian's role as invaders along with the Nazis days after.

 "Poland has been again overrun by two of the great Powers which held her in bondage for 150 years, but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defense of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible, and that she will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock."

Britain and France were convinced that Russia and Germany were allies and plans were drawn up to attack Russian oil fields in order to deny them to the Nazis in what became known in the planning stages as Operation Pike.  Months later the reversals continued for Christendom. The Fall of France to the Nazi war machine took place between May 10 and June 25, 1940 over the span of 46 days ending in the evacuation of Dunkirk. This disaster is what led to Operation Pike being scrapped.

 Britain stood alone, while the United States remained neutral, and the Soviet Union actively aided the Nazi war machine.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the greatest Briton

The British Empire was alone for almost a year between June 25, 1940 through June 22, 1941 as the sole main resistance to Nazi Germany. The United States would remain neutral until Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the Soviet Union was a de facto ally of Nazi Germany until Hitler invaded communist Russia on June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. The United Kingdom was all that stood between the survival of Christian civilization and a new Dark Age that Adolf Hitler called the Thousand Year Reich. If one is truly Anti-Nazi then one must celebrate and honor the legacy of Winston Churchill, who early on identified the Nazi threat and issued calls to to resistance with one of the most important in a radio address to London and the United States on October 16, 1938.

"Dictatorship – the fetish worship of one man – is a passing phase. A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions; such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy outside world. The light of civilised progress with its tolerances and co-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. But I hold the belief that we have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realise what is afoot and make up our minds in time. We shall do it in the end. But how much harder our toil for every day’s delay! Is this a call to war? Does anyone pretend that preparation for resistance to aggression is unleashing war? I declare it to be the sole guarantee of peace. We need the swift gathering of forces to confront not only military but moral aggression; the resolute and sober acceptance of their duty by the English-speaking peoples and by all the nations, great and small, who wish to walk with them."

Four years earlier on November 16, 1934, after the Nazis had just been in power a little over two years Winston Churchill warned of their threat to peace:

There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion. In that country all pacifist speeches, all morbid war books are forbidden or suppressed, and their authors rigorously imprisoned. From their new table of commandments they have omitted “thou shall not kill.”

Sadly the world did not listen to Churchill until it was too late to avoid a major conflict, but at least it was not too late to stop the Nazi war machine although it came at great cost and suffering. Churchill understood that to defeat Hitler the Soviet Union would have to change sides and when the Nazis invaded Russia the British Prime Minister joked, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The price of ending Hitler was cozying up to Josef Stalin, another genocidal totalitarian monster.

Sir Winston Churchill, the war time prime minister, was voted out of office within weeks of the victory in Europe in 1945. The Labour Party left the national unity government and snap elections were held on July 5, 1945 and they won by a landslide.

When King George VI offered Churchill "the country’s highest honor, The Order of the Garter, Churchill declined, saying that he couldn’t possibly accept such an honor, as the British voters had given him the 'order of the boot.'" 

But in opposition he continued to speak out on matters of great importance.

Churchill was not blind to the nature of his Russian wartime ally and understood the threat of Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union and thankfully his warnings on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri were listened to this time and may have avoided World War III, albeit with a cold peace.

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow." 

He then went on to make a remarkable statement about the circumstances that led to World War II and how it was completely avoidable:

Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.

Churchill was not only an Anti-Nazi but also an Anti-Communist and a conservative who on May 24, 1948 observed: "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy." He also understood and celebrated the importance of free speech. In the midst of the war in 1943 he observed: "Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."  Today let us remember this great statesman, democrat, and conservative and call on all people of good will to learn form this greatest of Britons.

Six years after his 1945 defeat, in 1951, Sir Winston Churchill and the Conservatives would win a snap election and return to Downing Street  as Prime Minister.  He had a close relationship with Queen Elisabeth II, and resigned from the Prime Ministership due to health issues in 1955 and retired from public life.

Attempts to cancel him posthumously need to be resisted, and this greatest of Britons remembered and honored for his service to country and the world.

Black Ribbon Day 2019: Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes

"In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years." - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945

Nazi and Soviet soldiers celebrate their military victory in Poland (1939)

Eighty years ago on August 23, 1939 Josef Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, the first communist regime, signed a treaty with Adolph Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany it was initially named after their respective foreign ministers, V.M. Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. However it also became known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. 

It was publicly described by both parties as a non-aggression treaty but it had a secret additional protocol that divided up Poland and the Baltic states. In reality it was a an aggression treaty in which the two aggressors Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia agreed before hand how to divide up the spoils as follows:

Article I.
 In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.

Article II.
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.  ...

Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland. 

On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together. In the above picture German Lieutenant-General Mauritz von Wiktorin, General Heinz Guderian and Soviet tank commander Semyon Moiseevich Krivoshein fraternize in Brest-Litovsk, Poland.

Every 23 August, we honour the memory of the millions of victims of all totalitarian regimes. The signature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on this day in 1939 opened a dark chapter in European history. pic.twitter.com/H52dlLtglc

— EU at the UN - Geneva (@EU_UNGeneva) August 23, 2019

Each year on August 23rd beginning in 2009 there is a day of remembrance for the victims of Soviet Communism and Nazi Tyranny across Europe, Canada and the United States.

We should remember the long history of Communist-Nazi collaboration that began long before August 23, 1939 and resumed after the end of World War II, and the nature of these totalitarian regimes.

This is an important moment to hold such acts of remembrance because Russia is engaged in a campaign to rewrite this history, justifying the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to whitewash Josef Stalin's crimes. This is also why the statement below is now needed.

Joint Statement by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania on the occasion of 80 years since the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

August 23 will mark 80 years since the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that sparked World War II and doomed half of Europe to decades of misery. The Pact contained the secret protocol which effectively carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. 

This is why on this day proclaimed by the European Parliament as a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes we remember all those whose deaths and broken lives were a consequence of the crimes perpetrated under the ideology of Nazism and Stalinism. 

Pain and injustice will never fall into oblivion. We will remember.

Remembering and commemorating past horrors gives us the knowledge and strength to reject those who seek to revive these ideologies or who seek to exonerate these ideologies of their crimes and culpability. The memory of the victims compels us to promote historical justice by continuing research and raising public awareness of the totalitarian legacy on the European continent.

The basis for sustainable conciliation and building a common future is justice and objective truth. Victims of totalitarian crimes have a right to justice. Unfortunately, the practice of investigating and prosecuting the crimes of totalitarian regimes has been insufficient and inconsistent across countries.

We call upon the governments of all European countries to provide both moral and material support to the ongoing historical investigation of the totalitarian regimes. By acting in a concerted manner, we can counter more effectively disinformation campaigns and attempts to manipulate historical facts.

We must stand together against totalitarianism. A clear and firm position of the international community will pave the way to further reconciliation.

We are confident that today's Europe is a safe place for all peoples, and ready to resolutely resist any kind of injustice. We believe that Europeans will never tolerate totalitarianism or genocide against any people.

Our countries have been reborn as free and democratic nations after decades of totalitarian rule. Thirty years ago, our nations started the democratic transformations that eventually made us equal and vigorous members of the European Union. Our countries are determined to continue working with our partners in Europe and around the world so that the horrors of the past never re-emerge.

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Estonia Urmas Reinsalu
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia Edgars Rinkēvičs
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania Linas Linkevičius
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland Jacek Czaputowicz
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania Ramona-Nicole Mănescu

On 23 August 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its Secret Protocols paved the way for #WW2 and for the division of C. Europe.
Part 1 - wait for tomorrow to see part 2.
Special thanks to @Roger_Moorhouse! #BalticWay30 #BlackRibbonDay pic.twitter.com/CO8OELBImE

— LT MFA StratCom (@LT_MFA_Stratcom) August 22, 2019

Remembering Paul Hollander, a great scholar who saw through the propaganda techniques of totalitarians

You need ideology to commit large scale evil. - Paul Hollander

Paul Hollander, October 3, 1932 - April 9, 2019

The scholar Paul Hollander passed away on April 9, 2019 at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had the honor of meeting him on November 8, 2017 after he gave a presentation on a panel titled, "The Bolshevik Revolution and the Establishment of the Soviet Union" which was part of a series of panels under the title: "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" an event organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He was a good and kind man who took the time to answer some of my questions.


Totalitarians whether Nazi or Communist have a track record of effectively using tourism, athletic events, and academic exchanges to present their regimes in a way that historically legitimized them and covered up their hostile objectives often with disastrous results not only for their own countries but the international community as a whole. 

 An excellent accounting of these practices and their impacts on national and international politics is found in Paul Hollander's book Political Pilgrims that should be required reading for anyone traveling to Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela, or Vietnam. His book has had a great influence on me, and I look forward to reading his other works.

Requiescat in pace

Black Ribbon Day 2017: Remembering the victims of Soviet Communism and Nazi Tyranny

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

Seventy eight years ago on August 23, 1939 Josef Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, the first communist regime, signed a treaty with Adolph Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany it was initially named after their respective foreign ministers, V.M. Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. However it also became known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. It was publicly described by both parties as a non-aggression treaty but it had a secret additional protocol that divided up Poland and the Baltic states. In reality it was a an aggression treaty in which the two aggressors Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia agreed before hand how to divide up the spoils as follows:

Article I.
 In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.

Article II.
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.  ...

Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland and on September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together.

Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).

Each year on August 23rd beginning in 2009 there is a day of remembrance for the victims of Soviet Communism and Nazi Tyranny across Europe, Canada and the United States. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation will hold a Black Ribbon Day on Wednesday from 5:00pm to 6:00pm at the Victims of Communism Memorial located at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue NW and Massachusetts Avenue NW, in Washington, DC. If you plan to attend please RSVP.

Soviet soldier and Nazi soldiers fraternize after conquering Poland in 1939

This is an important moment to hold such a ceremony here in the United States when far too many Americans have openly marched in 2017 with Nazi Swastika flags and Soviet hammer and sickle flags there is a heightened need for acts of remembrance at the horrors unleashed by these twin symbols of hate and how the bloodiest and most brutal war in human history was unleashed on the world when these two evil systems conspired together under a banner of peace and non-aggression that was a lie. Between 1939 and 1945 an estimated 50 to 85 million people were killed in this conflict.  Furthermore the anti-racist credentials of the Workers World Party should be called into question when they support North Korea despite its racist screed against President Obama.

Marching with Communist and Nazi flags in Charlottesville, Virginia

In times of great moral confusion it is important to recall past errors to avoid committing them again in the future. The ongoing debate in the United States of how to confront the menace of violent Neo-Nazism finds far too many Americans looking to AntiFa, a violent fringe group, linked to the Communist Party, to violently counter the white supremacists. The belief is that countering a violent and hateful ideologically motivated movement with another violent and hateful ideologically motivated movement will lead to at least the destruction of one or of both.

Hitler and Stalin salute each other over the corpse of Poland in this 1939 caricature

 In the 1920s and 1930s in Germany groups with the same names and carrying the same flags fought in the streets, with each creating their own heroic narratives, in their decade long violent skirmishes. Fires were set, businesses trashed, and brawls carried out with each side portraying the other as dangerous terrorists, but in reality their radical movements fed off one another while weakening German democratic institutions as mob rule co-opted Weimar Germany, eventually it was taken over by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party, consolidating power by blaming the communists for burning down of the German Parliament building on February 27, 1933 with the Enabling Laws.

Source: Library of Congress

There were other factors that fueled the rise of Nazism: the Great Depression, the punishing Treaty of Versailles, and the later appeasement of the West but the violent dynamic between the Communist Party and AntiFa against the Nazis in the 1930s helped the rise of Hitler more than impede it.

Nazism and Communism are two ideologies that together have claimed more than 160 million lives and remain a threat to civilization. They should not be underestimated, their histories remembered and condemned. This is why it is so important to observe Black Ribbon Day on August 23rd.

Berlin 1936 and Beijing 2022: Legitimizing Totalitarian Regimes Through Sports

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."- George Santayana

Berlin Olympics 1936 and Beijing Olympics 2008: Legitimizing Totalitarians

The 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing were a human rights disaster for China with scenes of Tibetan demonstrators gunned down by Chinese soldiers. Despite this the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has chosen China to once again to host the Olympics in 2022 in the midst of an ongoing crackdown on human rights lawyers and defenders in the country.  As was the case in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics friends of a free China need to increase scrutiny on the Chinese regime with an Olympic Watch. The consequences of  the IOC legitimizing such a regime cannot be overstated. The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin and hosted by the Nazi Third Reich with the ceremonies formally opened by Adolph Hitler should serve as a cautionary example. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum described the impact of the games as follows:

On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the XIth Olympiad. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece.
[...] Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of "Olympia," the controversial documentary directed by German film maker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games. Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made them "more human again." Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure. 

  The 1936 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Nazi regime in Germany and led to acceptance of Hitler's criminal regime. The 2008 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Communist regime in China further legitimizing that criminal regime. In 2022 it will add insult to injury by returning to China and making this decision amidst a human rights crackdown where more than 200 lawyers and human rights activists have been detained with some facing 15 year prison sentences.

Cardinal Józef Glemp: Poland's Cardinal Ortega in 1983?

Cardinal Józef Glemp

Pope Bendict XVI will be visiting Cuba arriving first in Santiago, Cuba on March 26, 2012 to hold a Holy Mass in Antonio Maceo Square to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre and will be departing from Havana two days later. A healthy debate has erupted around the trip and state of relations between the Cuban Catholic Church and the Castro regime. The debate over the role played by the Catholic Church in Cuba and its Cardinal Jaime Ortega could do with a little added context.

Cuba is not Poland. Poland is a profoundly Catholic country. Nevertheless there are parallels between the Catholic Church in Cuba and Poland when confronted with a communist regime.
Reading over the role of the Polish Cardinal Józef Glemp in the penultimate chapter of the 1999 book, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, which covers the role played by the Vatican, the Church in Poland, the KGB and the Polish intelligence agency, the STB. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, the Catholic Church was heavily infiltrated by state security agents because they viewed it as a profound threat. At the same time when martial law was enacted and many of the more radical elements in the Solidarity movement counseled a general strike, Cardinal Glemp counseled restraint. The Polish communists felt that the Cardinal's message served their agenda and they rebroadcast it several times.

The U.S. Library of Congress* in their Country Studies on Poland has a section that analyses the relationship between the Polish Catholic Church and the state. The following excerpt covers the last two years of Cardinal Wyszynski and the arrival of Glemp in 1981:

In 1979 the triumphal visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland boosted the Polish cultural self-image and turned international attention to Poland's political and spiritual struggles. The next year, the church lent vital moral support to the Solidarity labor movement while counseling restraint from violence and extreme positions. In 1981 the government requested that the church help it to establish a dialog with worker factions. Needing church approval to gain support among the people, the government revived the Joint Episcopal and Government Commission, through which the church gradually regained legal status in the early 1980s. In 1981 the Catholic University of Lublin reopened its Department of Social Sciences, and in 1983 clubs of the Catholic intelligentsia reopened in sixty cities. Twenty-three new church-oriented periodicals appeared in the 1980s, reaching a total printing of more than 1.2 million copies in 1989. Nevertheless, state censorship, paper rationing, and restriction of building permits provoked serious conflicts with the Polish government in the last decade of communist rule.

Wyszynski died in 1981. He was replaced as primate by the less dynamic Cardinal Józef Glemp, who attempted to continue the dual policy of conciliation and advancement of religious rights. By 1983 several activist bishops and priests had broken with an official church policy they saw as too conciliatory toward the regime. In a 1984 meeting with Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski, Glemp again attempted to obtain official recognition of the church's legal status as well as freedom for imprisoned dissidents. Later that year, the murder of dissident priest Jerzy Popieluszko by Polish security agents fueled a new confrontation between church and state. The Jaruzelski government, which had met with Glemp seeking the legitimacy that would come from renewed diplomatic relations with the Vatican, abandoned its conciliatory tone and returned to the pre-1970 demand that the church limit itself to purely spiritual matters and censure politically active priests.

The Archdiocese of Havana released an editorial today in advance of the Pope's visit which states in part:

It will be difficult to reach the proper social harmony and the necessary economic development, without a new political consensus of all our diversity. To achieve it, as we have repeated on other occasions, the patriotic path of encounter, of dialogue and reconciliation among all Cubans should be taken. At the moment this method may appear unreachable. The actors best positioned in the political mechanisms - equally in officialdom as in the internal opposition and in the groups in our diaspora that stand out - many times give the impression of not accepting this methodology.

[...]

Cuba is a plural country, where the majority of its citizens, at the margin of political, economic, social and religious differences advocate for a independent, democratic, developed homeland with social justice and without external interferences in our sovereign affairs.

This editorial, combined with the prayer sessions by Cardinal Ortega for the health of Fidel Castro when he fell ill in 2006 and just recently for Hugo Chavez who underwent surgery in Cuba appears to be part of an effort to strengthen the position of the Cuban Catholic Church. Its not the first time that a Cardinal has publicly prayed for the life of a tyrant. For example, the German Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber ( who criticized Nazism and called for an amnesty of all prisoners in the concentration camps) in 1936 also prayed for the life of Adolf Hitler. In the case of Poland the Church's policy of accommodation angered activists and some within the Church for being too soft and in the end the Polish regime eventually rejected the Church's role in political affairs and sought to limit their sphere of influence. On the other hand the Church managed not to alienate itself with the democratic opposition and when the final crisis of the regime arrived was able to play a constructive role. Time will tell if the same pattern repeats itself in Cuba.

*Glenn E. Curtis, ed. Poland: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1992.