Poles honor Reagan, John Paul II with new statue

Yahoo! News / The Associated Press ^ | July 14, 2012 | Vanessa Gera

[2ndDivisionVet]

GDANSK, Poland (AP) — Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.

The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime...

[oldsicilian]

God bless the Poles.

[TomasUSMC]

They need to add Waleska

[Argus]

Lech is still alive. When he’s gone, expect statues.

[EyeGuy]

Coincidentally (maybe not), gorgeous Gdansk, Poland is the featured iamge today, in Bing’s spectacular daily picture series.

Check it out:

http://www.bing.com/

[EyeGuy]

Coincidentally (maybe not), gorgeous Gdansk, Poland is the featured image today, in Bing’s spectacular daily picture series.

Check it out:

http://www.bing.com/

[AlanGreenSpam]

And President Narcissus says,

“Waaaaa, why don’t I get a statue of myself in Poland? Don’t they love me in Europe?”

[RPTMS]

It's certainly on my short list.

[SuziQ]

That’s terrific!

[dfwgator]

Reagan,Thatcher,Pope John Paul II and Helmut Kohl are all owed an enormous debt of gratitude for having played such a huge roll in the collapse of Soviet Communism.

I would even put Boris Yeltsin there, the Soviet Union might still very well be with us today, had he not stood on that tank during the attempted coup attempt.

[Revolting cat!]

The bodies are fine, but the heads and faces not so much, I wonder what the artist had in mind.

[Revolting cat!]

The Poles get it, baby!

[MacMattico]

From the article: “Reagan should have a statue in every city”, Walesa said.

[Cronos]

the jokes about Polish lack of intelligence date from the 1800s. Poland had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria in the period around 1793.

The poles had defined literature, art, etc. in the prior years -- and the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was the largest country in Europe for a long time until the rise of Muscowy.

the entire "dumb Poles" was planned propaganda by the Prussians to explain their destruction of their former overlords (Prussia had been a subordinate state to the Polish-Lithuanian union from the battle of Grunwald in 1410 and arguably started off as one in the 13th century) -- and the Prussians succeeded -- in trying to stereotype Poles as stupid oafs.

This was false -- we need no further proof than that the Polish language and culture survived when Poland was obliterated for 130 years. A strong culture, an educated one, survives even under strong Germanization/Russification (in the PRussian and Russian partitioned parts of Poland the Germans and Russians made it compulsory that learning etc. was to be in german/russian and aimed to destroy Poland as a concept... Hitler continued on the same track and the Soviets would have liked to do it as well)...

incidently, the English did the same to the Irish from the 1700s onwards -- prior to that Ireland was known as the land of the poets and where Roman culture was kept alive after the march of the Germanic barbarian hordes

[clearcarbon]

I read that there's a clinton erection in Kosovo.

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[TomasUSMC]

LECH IS STILL ALIVE!

I will write that on the board one hundred times. lol

Well I bet your right on target....in fact I’d say its gonna be one hell of a statue, and he will have deserved every meter of it.

Thanks.