Last week I reported that the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk, warned on his visit to Canada that peace in Ukraine cannot be built on a foundation of lies. There was pain in his warning, as the days of his visit coincided with U.S. President Donald Trump making his own the lies of President Vladimir Putin regarding Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Patriarch Sviatoslav, like St. John Paul II generations ago, is a voice from the “bloodlands” — those territories between Germany and Russia that, from 1930 to 1945, witnessed the killing of some 14 million people. John Paul lived under both Hitler and Stalin’s occupation, while Shevchuk did not, but the latter is a worthy heir to the former, giving voice to the blood of the innocent which cries out to heaven.
The week ended with Trump and his vice-president attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The disgrace to the Oval Office came from the astonishing behaviour of the hosts, not the guest, who understandably objected to another of Trump’s big lies, namely that Putin can be trusted to observe a ceasefire, let alone a peace agreement.
While the entire world outside of the MAGA environs reacted with disgust, the shameful treatment of Zelenskyy brought forth another lion’s voice from the bloodlands, one who roared from retirement.
Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity trade union leader who shook the foundations of the evil empire and was elected president of Poland (1990-1995), posted an open letter to Trump, signed by 41 fellow Polish political prisoners of the Soviet era.
He signed the letter as a “political prisoner, Solidarity leader, president of the Republic of Poland,” emphasizing that the first title gave him more credibility than the last. He did not even mention his Nobel Peace Prize. All the other signatories also included “political prisoner” as their first biographical identification.
Expressing “horror and distaste” for Trump’s treatment of Zelenskyy, Wałęsa insisted that “gratitude is owed the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who spilled their blood in the cause of a free world. For more than 11 years, they fell on the front in the name of freedom’s values and for the freedom of their fatherland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia.”
In a stinging comparison, Wałęsa and his fellow political prisoners said the “atmosphere in the Oval Office reminded us of the kind of discussions that the Polish political police convened in Soviet-era interrogation rooms and Communist courts.”
“Prosecutors and judges, on the orders of the Communist political police also explained to us, that they held all the cards and we held none,” Wałęsa wrote. “We are shocked that you treated President Zelenskyy the same way.”
Those communist show trials insisted that the lies of the regime be treated as the truth. For a moment — never to be repeated, one hopes — that toxic air blew through the Oval Office. For refusing to accept lies presented as truth, Wałęsa and tens of thousands of others were imprisoned. Zelenskyy’s similar refusal has earned him the ire of Trump and the pausing of military aid to Ukraine.
Canadians, on much less grave matters, have come to breathe a bit of that foul air emanating from the White House. Trump lies about the size of the trade deficit. He lies about our oil exports, which offer Americans discounted energy. He lies about drugs and crime; far more American cocaine, heroin and illegal guns come north than the tiny amounts of fentanyl that head south. He lies about our history, our sovereignty and our long harmonious relationship — until recently the envy of the world.
Wałęsa gives witness that the first step in confronting lies — big and small — is simply to tell the truth. Many don’t, given that there is a cost attached. That is the lesson from totalitarian regimes that is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to our moment.
My Post colleague Terry Glavin quoted Hannah Arendt in light of Trump’s confrontation with Zelenskyy: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
The late Vaclav Havel, like Wałęsa the post-Soviet president of his country, made the same point in his work, that the only power held by the powerless is to refuse to go along with the lie. Even imprisoned, as Wałęsa was, Havel — the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first Czech president — knew that his power came from challenging the reign of the lie.
It is to be hoped that Zelenskyy’s unpleasant encounter with the presidential prevaricator might mark a shift. Part of Trump’s modus operandi is to make obviously false claims and then observe who will submit to the subsequent rituals of abasement. Punishments and rewards are then delivered accordingly. The lie is not an ancillary embarrassment to the Trump style; it is essential to the effectiveness of his political power.
Zelenskyy’s visit came in the same week as French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were received in the Oval Office. They came offering ostentatious obsequiousness — Sir Keir even prevailing upon King Charles to invite Trump for an “unprecedented” second state visit, apparently trying to catch up with Macron, who permitted Trump to headline the re-dedication of Notre Dame last December. But they could not abide the lies, with both publicly correcting Trump’s falsehoods about European support for Ukraine. After Zelenskyy was thrown out of the White House, Sir Keir hosted an emergency summit in which European leaders — and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — were able to register their own dissent from Trump’s lies about Russia’s war.
Europe’s leaders are the heirs to the legacy of Wałęsa and Havel. Wałęsa was right to remind them of that.
National Post