"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the start of World War Two. Nazi Germany
invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and on September 17th their Soviet allies invaded from
the East. This was agreed to in the secret protocols of the August 23, 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact. (Also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact).
Very early in the morning, on this day 80 years ago, Hitler’s attack against Poland started. Stalin had given Hitler green light for the attack, but UK and France declared war in response. WW2 started. pic.twitter.com/f49QwZGorM
World War One was supposed to be the “war to end all wars,” but instead it turned
out to be the protracted suicide of the West over four years and three months. Nazi Germany and Communist Russia
emerged out of the ashes of the 1914-1918 conflict and together plunged the world into another, longer and more costly total war 80 years ago today.
Images from Poland in September 1939 at the start of World War Two
This six year conflict began on September 1, 1939 and ended six years and one day later on September 2, 1945. An estimated 15 million soldiers died on the battlefield, and 45 million civilians were killed in the conflict.
Whereas WWI empowered the toxic ideologies of Communism and Nazism, the Second World War gave rise to nuclear weapons, the unique evil of the Holocaust, and the possibility of human engineered planetary extinction.
1939: On 1 Sept, Germany attacked Poland. The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelling a 🇵🇱 base on the Westerplatte peninsula fired the opening shots of WWII.
On 17 Sept, Red Army invaded 🇵🇱, as set out in the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.#80WW2pic.twitter.com/UshLm1iQ0F
Poland observes the 78th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
Soviet soldier and Nazi soldiers fraternize after conquering Poland in 1939
On September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later on September 17, 1939 the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East
and met their German allies in the middle of the occupied country. Despite being attacked from all sides the Polish army continued to fight for 37 days.
Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).
On September
22, 1939 the Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a
military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated and marched together. Today the Embassy of Poland in the United States in a series of tweets remembered the start of World War II and their struggle against the combined military forces of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The defense of #Poland was a heroic 37 day struggle by the Polish Armed Forces against the combined might of Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union pic.twitter.com/iTcynOnBJI
By war's end, Poland lost 6 million citizens, experienced incredible destruction & suffering, territorial changes, #Yalta. Today we remember pic.twitter.com/YUhCJxlI0R
22,000 Polish military officers who had resisted the Nazi invasion of their homeland were rounded up by the Soviets and on Josef Stalin's orders executed in April-May of 1940 in a forest outside of the small town of Katyn.
Nazi Germany and Soviet Union invaded and occupied Poland in 1939.
Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were allied together from August 23, 1939 until June 22, 1941 when "under the codename Operation 'Barbarossa,' Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union." Western countries downplayed Soviet collusion with the Nazis and war crimes preferring to focus on the task of defeating the Germans with Russian help.
Nevertheless the Polish people remembered and despite enduring decades of Soviet domination they continued to resist, remember and on August 31, 1980 the Polish Solidarity movement came into existence following an important victory when Polish workers had a number of their demands met after a prolonged strike.
However now that World War II is long over the task of setting the historic record straight is of great importance and for the world to know what the Polish people have known for so long about how the Second World War started.
Over the past few months there has been a vigorous debate around continuing economic sanctions on the dictatorship in Cuba and a series of manufactured controversies surrounding democracy promotion programs directed at the island. However, a couple that have gone unaddressed are the conceits that American tourists, business, and high technology would somehow be game changers in Cuba and that "evolutionary change" would take place within Cuba.
Solidarity with dissidents in Eastern Europe from the West and a policy that took human rights into consideration did achieve great things there 25 years ago: the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later in 1991 with predominantly nonviolent movements.
The end result of ignoring the crimes of totalitarianism
and engaging these regimes was one world war, and at least four
genocides. Winston Churchill called the Second World War the "Unnecessary War" explaining in the preface to his book, The Gathering Storm: "How the English-speaking
peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed
the wicked to rearm." Would sanctions have prevented the death of over 60 million people between 1939 and 1945? When one does not support the nonviolent option for real and
profound change that challenges the fundamental injustices of a
dictatorship only two options remain: war or collaboration with tyrants. Both are unacceptable.
What did engagement through tourism, business and the exchange of high technology achieve in the early twentieth century? This first entry will focus on the role of engaging totalitarians with business and high technology. In the Cuba debate there is a lot of talk about computers and the internet as the magic bullets that will end the Castro dictatorship but often times attention is not paid to who is empowered in the transfer of technology. History demonstrates that this can be a disaster.
American businessman Armand Hammer played crucial rule in Soviet Union
Saving the Soviet Union
Armand Hammer, and Henry Ford, both sold tractors to the Soviet Union. Such endeavors facilitated commercial ties between the Soviet Union and the United States, establishing the basis for further cooperation, dialogue, and diplomatic relations between the two countries. Pravda described Armand Hammer as a confidant of Vladimir Lenin and a "red millionaire" in the article titled "The Soviet Union that Hammer Built." Hammer was a key player in Lenin's New Economic Policy that consolidated Soviet rule in the 1920s. The Black Book of Communism estimates that 20 million were killed by the communists in the Soviet Union. The United States established the Export-Import Bank to encourage more trade with the USSR and having US taxpayers assume the risk during the Roosevelt Administration.
Thomas
J. Watson, (middle) head of IBM and president of the International
Chamber of Commerce, and members of the ICC's board meet with Adolph
Hitler in 1937.
Beginning with the National Socialists arrival in power the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) provided the equipment with ground breaking technologies, precursors to computers, to identify and categorize holocaust victims. According to a October 8, 2002 article in The Village Voice "the infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. IBM engineered a strategic business alliance with Nazi Germany and provided the punch card technology that would be used in managing the vast apparatus of the Nazi death camps. More troubling is that the NAZIS were able to arrive in a town with lists of names of people identified as being Jewish. Where did they get the data? From IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting
and registration technologies. IBM enabled the Holocaust.
Yahoo identified Chinese dissidents for regime who were jailed, tortured and killed
Principled diplomacy, international human rights standards combined
with nonviolent interventions by civil society have been shown to
produce positive change without wholesale bloodshed. Democracy, or
human rights, promotion using principled nonviolent means can always be
improved, but should not be discarded.
Unfortunately, the history of the twentieth and twenty first centuries have shown that corporations engaging with totalitarian dictatorships be it the Nazi Third Reich under Adolph Hitler, the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, the Peoples Republic of China under Mao Ze Dong and Deng Xio Peng, or Communist Cuba under the Castro brothers businessmen peddling high tech equipment have not only provided legitimacy to these dictatorships but assisted in systematizing gross human rights violations and prolonging their rule.
You have heard that it was said, 'Love (agape) your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love (agape) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? —Matthew 5:42-44
Opus solidaritatis pax - Ioannes Paulus PP. II
The power of non-violence is often underestimated while violence is often overestimated. I recently attended a fundraiser for a documentary that is still being produced called Oscar’s Cuba, and at the fundraiser I sat with a Cuban dissident who practiced non-violence while on the island, but now more than a decade later in exile had come to have second thoughts on the matter. We had a lengthy and passionate, although mutually respectful, discussion.
What I realized was that he believed that violence could accomplish more than non-violence against a totalitarian regime. He cited the Nazis in Germany and the necessity of WWII. I pointed out those German housewives who as late as 1943 had successfully stopped their Jewish husbands from being deported to concentration (death) camps by organizing a non-violent demonstration and work stoppage at Rosenstrasse. Civic non-violence had been shown in at least one instance to have worked even against the Nazis and it was shown to have worked in the East bloc against the Communists which have a body count of 100 million dead then there is a good argument that it is powerful and requires much less effort than that of the Allied powers in WWII without the horrendous war crimes: Dresden and Hiroshima just to name two of the many cities where civilian populations were devastated.
I found the whole discussion ironic considering that we were both attending a fundraiser for a man who has committed his life to principled nonviolence and knew what sacrifice it would entail. This past summer in a letter smuggled out of prison he described his early days of activism and the foreknowledge of the suffering it would entail:
"I remember when I started preaching of Gandhi and Thoreau some said Dr. Biscet testimonials from cell 123 would walk through the streets of Havana with a loin cloth like Gandhi, when I became aware of these words spoken in a derogatory fashion about me I just smiled knowing I would be in these conditions but not in the streets of Havana but in endless captivity that I would have to suffer." (1)
When Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet in 1999 said "I recognize that I only have adversaries and I have acquired the capacity to love them because in this way we do away with violence, wrath, vengeance, hatred and substitute them with justice and forgiveness," he was not speaking from weakness but strength. He was not talking about an affectionate or sentimental love but of the Christian variety known as agape. (2)
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while visiting St. Augustine in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights struggle spoke of this kind of love and the impracticality of violence:
"Its difficult advice and in some quarters it isn't too popular to say it...Let us recognize that violence is not the answer. I must say to you tonight that violence is impractical...We have another method that is much more powerful and much more effective than the weapon of violence...Hate isn't our weapon either...I am not talking now about a weak love it would be nonsense for an oppressed people to love their oppressor in an affectionate sense I'm not talking about that too many people confuse the meaning of love when they go to criticizing the love ethic. ...I am talking about a love that is so strong that it becomes a demanding love. A love that is so strong that it organizes itself into a mass movement and says somehow I am my brothers keeper and he is so wrong that I am willing to suffer and die to get him right and to see that he is on the wrong road."
When Oswaldo Paya in 2002 said that “we can rebuild our society with love for all, as brothers, and as children of God” he was speaking of the kind of love described in the gospels and highlighted by Dr. King above.(3) The movement that brought about the end of the Soviet Union emerged in Gdansk at the ship docks and was called Solidarnosc – Solidarity. It was a movement that took its name from a word which encompasses Paya’s conception rebuilding society. Pope John Paul II in his 1987 encyclical letter Sollicitudo rei socialis describes it in greater detail:
"Solidarity is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. In what has been said so far it has been possible to identify many points of contact between solidarity and charity (agape), which is the distinguishing mark of Christ's disciples (cf. Jn 13:35). In the light of faith, solidarity seeks to go beyond itself, to take on the specifically Christian dimension of total gratuity, forgiveness and reconciliation. One's neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One's neighbor must therefore be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her; and for that person's sake one must be ready for sacrifice, even the ultimate one: to lay down one's life for the brethren (cf. 1 Jn 3:16)." (4)
World War I which Woodrow Wilson described as the war to make the world safe for democracy led to 16 million deaths and gave rise to a communist state in Russia and the formation of the Soviet Union and the Nazis in Germany. Within twenty one years the war to end all wars would be dwarfed by WWII with estimates of between 50 to 70 million deaths with the number of civilians killed ranging between 40 to 52 million. One byproduct of this war was nuclear weapons that for the first time in human history have the firepower to wipeout the entire human race. It is still an open question whether or not the West will survive the consequences of WWI. Now contrast that with the nonviolent struggle waged by the Polish Solidarity movement. Dozens of workers were killed and thousands wounded, in 1970 prior to the founding of solidarity, and a Roman Catholic priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko, aged 37, was kidnapped on 19 October 1984 by the secret police and murdered.(5)
Within the Cuban context armed peasant guerillas fought Castro’s troops in the hills of the Escambray in Cuba between 1959 and the mid 1960s and thousands died while entire populations where “resettled” and placed under surveillance. Yet the greatest shock to the system that forced the dictatorship in Cuba to change its constitution in 2002 was the Varela Project a citizen initiative within the legal framework of the 1992 communist Constitution that demonstrated that over 25,000 Cubans wanted democratic reforms and their human rights respected and where willing to sign their name, give their identity number, and home address. This led to a crackdown on the opposition, show trials, lengthy prison sentences, and having the constitution changed. Meanwhile the world became aware of the desire of tens of thousands of Cubans for change and of the men and women standing up courageously for this change.
If Cuba is to survive as a nation then it needs solidarity which offers both freedom and justice and out of this will emerge peace the fruit of solidarity.
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