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Walesa coming to meditate stand-off Nov 24, 19:49kyivpost.comWARSAW (AP) - Lech Walesa, the founder of Poland's Solidarity movement, will travel to Ukraine to act as a mediator in the standoff over the disputed presidential elections there, his son said Nov. 24.
Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had said Nov. 23 that he received a letter from Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko seeking his help in negotiating a resolution to the crisis.
Jaroslaw Walesa told The Associated Press that Walesa would leave for Kyiv early Nov. 25 for a one-day visit.
Lech Walesa told Polish news agency PAP that he wanted to meet outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and election rivals Yushchenko and Kremlin-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
"I would like to meet each of them" and tell them "I don't want to interfere with your affairs, but as a neighbor I would like to help as much as I can," Walesa told PAP.
He said he wanted to avoid a situation similar to Poland's 1981 martial law crackdown against the Solidarity labor movement, which he called a "crime on the Polish nation" that "divided the nation, killed determination and drove many people from the country."
Walesa launched the Solidarity movement in 1980, rallying workers as part of eastern Europe's first free labor union. He presided over round-table talks in 1989 that led to the peaceful end of communism in Poland, and was elected president the following year.
Anti Semitism has reared its ugly head across a broad swath of Eurasia. When we hung the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, the message was mostly felt in the US and in Western Europe. The further east (and south) one goes, the less the message is part of people's psyche. That is why there is a resurgence of both the fradulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Middle East and Mein Kampf through out the non Western World. Of note, some of the worst anti Semitism I have observed is in pan Sinic groups. But Islamists and Arab Pan Nationalists are in stiff competition with them in this regard. Finally, another very dangerous group is the National Bolsheviks, a resurgence of an older concept developed by people who had been Communists around 1900 but later gravitated toward the Nazi way of thinking. Whereas, the early 1900s version of it was mostly found in France, Germany and the Benelux countries, the current version appears to be focused in the former Soviet Union and Germany. The National Bolsheviks, notably, have ties with Spartacus in Canada and nearly every neo Nazi and major anarchist group in the US and UK. And some folks thought I was kidding when I wrote, a few months ago, that I am a Nazi hunter. :=)