In February of 2010, Walesa attended a campaign event in Chicago for GOP gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski, where he is quoted:
WALESA (via translator): The United States is only one superpower.
Today they lead the world.
Nobody has doubts about it. Militarily.
They also lead economically but they're getting weak.
But they don't lead morally and politically anymore.
The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. There was the hope, whenever something was going wrong, one could count on the United States.
Today, we lost that hope.
When the news hit that 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Lech Walesa from Poland, was going to be joining and standing with the Wall Street Occupiers, something didn't sound right. Although I have been writing about the movement as it digresses from a protest that had potential to out of control howlers that defecate in doorways, I backed away from reporting on it here until more news came out or until he actually stood up with the Occupiers.
Something that appears won't be happening after all, once Walesa was informed of a few facts.
Initially he stated in an AP interview that he supported the movement, via WSJ:
Poland's former President Lech Walesa says he supports the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York that protests corporate greed.
The Nobel Peace laureate told The Associated Press that he is planning either a visit or a letter to the protesters.
"I am weighing now how and when to best support them, without doing any harm," Walesa said Thursday.
The liberal left was thrilled, breathless as shown by examples provided by Legal Insurrection from The Hill, Huffington Post and Esquire, but then interested parties decided to make sure Mr. Walesa was informed of who and what the Occupier movement truly was.
Adam Andrzejewski explains in a piece titled "Lech Walesa Not Attending #OccupyWallStreet in New York After Discovering Hard-Left Organizers."
We suspected that the European news media had filtered out accurate information about the genesis of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).
When Walesa’s comments hit the AP wire last week, my team immediately reached out to our Polish contacts. We made the point that the political themes of Occupy Wall Street may have started out with some of the principles that we share, but OWS themes were rapidly being morphed into anti-freedom and anti-liberty messages. At the core is the want for a big, powerful central government to dominate the lives of individual citizens.
Using biggovernment.com plus other news sources, rapidly we painted an accurate picture of the groups training, leading, and organizing the “movement.” The movement is organized by anarchists, Code Pink, the American Communist movement, jihadists, anti-Israel, socialist, and anti- free enterprise interests. OWS folks are politically to the left of President Barack Obama.
At the Lech Walesa Institute Foundation in Warsaw, they were thankful to receive this information.
Based on our discussion and intervention, President Walesa is not going to get involved with the OWS. He is not comfortable with the “organizations” behind the movement. It was not a difficult discussion.
As his intent to join, stand up with and support the Occupiers was expressed in an interview, so should his backing away from doing so now that he knows more about them.
One would hope he would give some type of official confirmation of his change of mind.
[Update] I have sent an email out asking for confirmation and will update this if a response is sent.
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