Word: walesa
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...original invitee was Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity Movement—the first anti-communist trade union in the Soviet bloc...
...Unfortunately, Walesa, an electrician from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland who would later serve as the country’s president, could not set foot on U.S. soil for fear of being unable to return to his country, thus becoming the first to have his speech read in absentia at a Harvard Commencement...
...Raised in Gdansk as a member of the tiny Kashubian ethnic minority, he joined the anticommunist Solidarity movement in the 1970s while studying history at university. He was later forced by the authorities to work as a house-painter because of his dissident activities. Tusk shared with Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders an antipathy to the government that he says was self-evident: "Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around...
...your trade union colleagues in Solidarity view your free market ideas? It was not possible to convince everyone. The key person was [Solidarity leader] Lech Walesa. A not-highly educated, some would say simple, man, but deeply clever, wise, with huge intuition. Walesa - this is his greatness - put Solidarity and his own authority in play to protect Poland's free market and pro-Western orientation...
What lessons do you take from Walesa and other leaders? Our heroes of the imagination were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They symbolized a tough attitude to the Soviet Union and they revitalized the idea of leading with freedom and traditional values, which seemed then to be dying...