“Horror and Disgust” over Donald Trump (convicted rapist) bullying Ukraine President Zelensky in White House – former Polish President Lech Wałesa speaks out – Paul LeBlanc responds
Former Polish President and Labour Leader Lech Wałesa has denounced a thuggish attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Washington DC White House on Friday February 28. The perpetrators were a convicted rapist – the US President Donald Trump – and the rapist’s sidekick, the US Vice President JD Vance. TV viewers all over the world were shocked by these scenes. One day afterwards, Vance was forced to abandon a skiing holiday by many pro-Ukraine protesters in the New England state of Vermont.
We thank Joan McKiernan for bringing us the Wałesa story, contained in a New York Times article (see below).
First, the historian Paul LeBlanc assesses the Wałesa statement.
You have asked me to comment on Walesa’s criticism of Trump.
Lech Walesa used to be someone I supported, because he was a leader of the workers’ struggle in Poland against exploitation and oppression. He was with the workers who mobilized to proclaim: “We are the masters of the factories.” The bureaucratic oligarchy defiling the name of “Communism” was finally brought down by that heroic struggle.
Of course, Walesa compromised himself — tragically, utterly — when he became the leader of a regime that turned Poland’s economy over to capitalist masters.
Yet my heart remains with the Polish workers whose inspiring struggle to be masters of their factories continues to resonate, even among those who fell away from that struggle, such as Walesa himself. He sees in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance qualities against which he and others valiantly rebelled forty years ago.
Today’s oligarchs of expansive capitalism are voracious in their hunger to be Masters of the Earth. In the Oval Office of the White House, they are on display as arrogant, detestable bullies. They seek to scorn and humiliate Zelensky because he is a symbol of the Ukranian people’s quest to be masters of their own homeland, standing against Trump’s good friend Vladimir Putin. Bullies of capitalist oligarchy, in the United States no less than in Russia, are deeply offended by those who challenge their authority.
A blindness to the viciousness inherent in capitalism is an affliction with Zelensky as it was with Walesa. But my heart remains with the laboring masses of Ukraine and Poland as they struggle to be masters of their own lives, against the pretensions of violent and avaricious oligarchs.
Walesa’s angry reaction to the Trump/Vance White House ambush of Zelensky stirs my thinking in ways that I share with you now.
Paul LeBlanc March 6 2025
Lech Walesa, Polish Labor Leader Who Fought U.S.S.R.’s Power, Joins in Horrified Letter to Trump
He and former Polish political prisoners voiced “horror and disgust” at President Trump’s scolding of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last week, saying it reminded them of encounters with bullying Communist-era officials.
Web Link :
Reporting from Warsaw
March 3, 2025
Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement, which helped end Moscow’s grip on Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, joined with former Polish political prisoners on Monday to send an impassioned letter to President Trump voicing “horror and disgust” at his scolding of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last week, saying it reminded them of their encounters with bullying Communist-era officials.
They wrote in Polish that they were “terrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and from courtrooms in Communist courts.”
“Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we had none,” the letter said, a reference to President Trump’s Oval Office rebuke to Mr. Zelensky that “you don’t have the cards.”
Communist functionaries, the letter continued, “demanded that we stop our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us.” When President Zelensky insisted in the Oval Office on Friday that security guarantees were needed to make any peace deal with Russia last, Mr. Trump slapped him down, saying, “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.”
The letter — signed by Mr. Walesa, the 1980s leader of the Solidarity trade union, and more than 30 prominent former Polish political detainees — was posted on Mr. Walesa’s Facebook page, along with a sometimes imprecise English translation and an old photograph of him meeting with a grinning, tuxedo-clad Mr. Trump.
It expressed angry disbelief that Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance had berated Mr. Zelensky for not thanking them enough for helping Ukraine.
“Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world,” Mr. Walesa, who served as Poland’s first elected president after the collapse of Communism, and other signatories said, adding, “We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this.”
While many European leaders were dismayed and deeply alarmed by Mr. Zelensky’s treatment in the Oval Office, they have avoided criticizing Mr. Trump in public, fearful of stirring his wrath and deepening his anger at Ukraine. Mr. Walesa’s letter brought Europe’s feelings into the open, particularly its alarm that the United States under Mr. Trump is veering away from standing up to dictatorial bullies to side with them.
The letter recalled the vital role that President Ronald Reagan had played in supporting Moscow’s opponents in the 1980s and bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union. “President Reagan was aware that in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, millions of enslaved people suffered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom,” it said.
Pleading for the United States not to turn its back on decades of support for opponents of tyranny, the letter warned, “The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to maintain distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up threatening itself.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.
About Paul LeBlanc :
Paul LeBlanc has for many years been a teacher and activist in Pittsburgh. His writings include “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party” and “A Short History of the US Working Class”.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 
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