Wojciech Jaruzelski

I watched Gorbachev put together the democratic transformation of Poland, by the way.

You might be surprised to know Gorbachev intervened actively to say to General Jaruzelski, take those nice young people from Solidarity into the government.

That's how revolutionarily peaceful we were in 1989.

And I met Chancellor Kohl, and I met Foreign Minister Genscher, because I was working on the economic issues of the transition then.

The next morning, regular programming resumes.

A Polish army general called Jaruzelski announces that martial law has been declared, that Poland is on a path towards corruption, and he's been forced to launch a military junta which is taking over the country.

Thousands of miles away in Washington, DC, a young man watches the news come in.

His name is Miroslav Hoyetski, Mirek to his friends.

So he thinks this is the end of communism.

But Mirek's underestimated his enemy.

Within a few days, perhaps forty-eight hours, as he hears, I think, the scale of what's been going on and just quite how well-planned it's been, and this is a kind of textbook operation that Jaruzelski leads, he realizes that no, it's not the end of communism.

It's a return to the pre-Solidarity era or even before that.

The, the government always have their hands clean to some point because they make so many mistakes with the letters as well.

And y- you recognize this because this is what used to happen under what? Jaruzelski and people like that.

James, I, I am not kidding.

This is identical.

And 12 o'clock in the midnight, sorry, midday, we heard sirens on the street, and nobody ever realized we have speakers on the streets.

Nobody ever seen those speakers.

But we had sirens, and then we have the announcement from the, from the Jaruzelski that we have a martial law.

But the ...

Okay.

So, but, but where do you end up in the end, and maybe Jaruzelski is a good example, with people who are head of a state, uh, apparatus?

You, you cannot prosecute someone for being head of a state.

What you can prosecute Jaruzelski for, I think, is, for example, in 1970 when he was defense minister, there were protests in the Polish city of Gdansk, and police open fired and killed a lot of people.

And Jaruzelski, as defense minister, gave the order to those soldiers to fire.

That is something you can prosecute him for.

Then after Deng Xiaoping dies, are you suggesting that people perhaps can, uh, prosecute, can prosecute people who gave the order to fire on people at Tiananmen Square?

I think Bush viewed him as a rabble-rouser.

What Bush did was he met with General, uh, Jaruzelski.

And again, if I'm butchering these names, I apologize.

Everybody bear with me.

I don't...

Like, any, any Slavic guys or girls, uh, listening, like, don't hesitate to correct me in the comments or whatever, but I'm not good with these pronunciations.

But Jaruzelski was an interesting guy.

Uh, he was the only military man who was a chief of state of a Warsaw Pact state, which is interesting to me at least, because tone deaf as the Soviets were, like, as bad as their optics were, uh, they realized in some basic way that they couldn't just install, you know, these, like, military, uh, strongmen in, in the several satellite states.

Initially, it was very sad, adding moment.

Because we were listening at the dorms on the radio, the speech of Wojciech Jaruzelski, that he's making the right decision, this is the best way forward, we have to bring back the normality to our life, etc.

All this propaganda stuff.

And initially it was scary.