Communist Junta Becomes Postcommunist Junta

It is finally time to realize that the communist system was not broken at all. The invisible ties that bound together the armies of the communist party, the secret police, the military and everyone else in the power system of a communist country have not gone away. They stick together in perfect solidarity. They populate different political parties (quite an interesting story in itself, almost unimaginable in the old democracies of the West), they associate themselves with the church, they control the media, they occupy the vast majority of all the positions of power, they control the legal system.

So the communism was not really broken. The communist junta changed the external decorations, changed their dresses and the rhetoric, and started a new chapter where they and their offspring pretend to be capitalists. The new guys are the old guys. They continue to run the show. Once you readjust your perception and stop fooling yourself you can see it very clearly. You learn to recognize the obvious lies in the media. You recognize how many supposedly heated political debates are merely prearranged games supposed to impress the unsuspecting public and foreign observers that there is a genuine political debate and a genuine difference of opinion.

The communists understood very long time ago that in order to run a successful tyranny they needed to manufacture an artificial opposition made of their own ranks. So today the key figure in the Polish media is Adam Michnik, son of a communist who was convicted for being a Soviet spy in the 1930s. It boggles the mind how on earth this guy was praised for being a leader of the so called "democratic opposition" to communism. Similarly for Lech Walesa, a Solidarity leader who was in fact an informer of the communist secret police. Anyone who knows the realities of life under communism would have to conclude that it was impossible to really have any sort of underground political activities. The communist secret police knew details of anyone who did not identify him/herself with the communist state.