In a recent Substack, my friend and often co-worker, Adam Bucko, tells a powerful story based on his years growing up under Soviet rule in Poland. I share it here and in my next DM with his permission.
His article is called “They Killed Him in Public and Called It Order: On Practicing Contemplation When the State Kills.”* It could hardly be more pertinent to this moment in American history.
Adam talks about how he barely slept the night he learned that Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse in a veterans hospital, was murdered by ICE when he dared to assist a woman who was being pepper-sprayed by masked government thugs. And Adam tells us why he was so affected.
This is not abstract for me. I feel it in my body.
All of a sudden, I am a child again, frightened by tanks occupying our streets.
I am a child again, learning that Fr Stanislaw Suchowolec, a parish priest I attended Mass with just days before, had been killed by the government.
I am a child again, seeing images of the tortured body of another priest, Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko, kidnapped, beaten, and thrown into a river, broadcast on national television.
Both priests and many others were portrayed as terrorists intent on doing maximum damage to the country. But we knew better.
We knew who was doing the damage.
They were killed because they saw what was happening and refused to be quiet—because they were not afraid to preach fearlessly, standing with the victims of injustice while calling those who serve lies back to conscience, back to truth, back to freedom, back to that still point deep inside where we are always held by God, who is loving into courage and giving us strength to say no to everything that violates the dignity God has breathed into every life.
They were killed because they saw clearly and did something about it.
They saw mass arrests and the imprisonment of workers, students, and organizers, often without real charges. They saw internment camps and overcrowded prisons set up to crush dissent. They saw the secret police cooperating with total impunity, surveilling, threatening, beating, and killing without accountability. They saw deaths in custody explained away as accidents or suicides.
They saw paramilitary police unleashed on civilians in the name of ‘order.’ They saw informants everywhere, turning neighbor against one another. They saw fear used deliberately as a governing tool. They saw truth replaced by propaganda, repeated until lies sounded normal. And they saw how life inside institutions adjusted to this reality, as many people learned to live with life adapting just enough to survive or to benefit, careful not to disturb the arrangements that allowed their lives to continue without much interruption.
They saw all that, and from the pulpit, they said no.
They said violence does not become just because it is legal.
They said fear enforced by law is not peace.
They said silence in the face of injustice serves power, not God.
And they knew what that would cost.
We are seeing similar things today….
We are seeing fear used deliberately as a governing tool. We are seeing cruelty justified as enforcement. Just like then, we are told this is necessary.
Just like then, we are told to look away.
Just like then, silence is called neutrality.
It isn’t.
To be continued.
*Father Adam Bucko, “They Killed Him in Public and Called It Order: On Practicing Contemplation When the State Kills.” Contemplative Witness with Adam Bucko.
Banner Image: ZOMO paramilitary police advance behind a shield wall in a Polish city during the 1981-1983 period of martial law. From an archive of illegally circulated witness photos. Wikimedia Commons
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree that there is a kind of déjà vu not only for Adam Bucko but for all of us as we read his account of life in Poland under Soviet occupation in the context of the current scene in Minnesota? And lessons to be learned?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
5 thoughts on “Lessons from Soviet Occupation Pertinent to the News from Minnesota”
“They saw paramilitary police unleashed on civilians in the name of ‘order.’ They saw informants everywhere, turning neighbor against one another.” To me the most puzzling part of that darkness, be it in Poland, in Cambodia, in Russia, in the former Czechoslovakia, in Israel, in the USA, or anywhere in the world, remains this apparently unsolvable question: “how do they do it?” “they” being the thugs, the informants, the killers, the liars, and all those who, when the nightmare is over, vanish in the landscape and become inconspicuous bakers, grocers, civil servants, businessmen, churchgoers, etc. Do they brush their teeth in front of a special mirror that somehow does not reflect their image?
Thank you Matthew and Adam Bucko. This is deeply moving for me personally. All four of my grandparents were Catholic Polish emigres who escaped from Poland during the Nazi occupation. They came to Canada. We lived in Kitchener, whose name was changed from Berlin because of the war. When my Irish husband and I visited Poland in the 1990s we were joined by Canadian Jewish friends who were active clandestine supporters of Jews detained in Russia. When the four of us visited Auschwitz a movie was being filmed onsite. We saw actors dressed as inmates milling around. It was startling. Our full tour of Auschwitz was totally devastating – piles of shoes of murdered Jewish children were on display ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
YES! Like Minnesota, All Americans and democratic institutions need to demonstrate and resist Trump’s authoritarian regime, his gestapo ICE militarization of our cities and residents, the greedy billionaire oligarchs, and the cowardly enabling Republican congress. The recent histories of what happened to Polish and German societies under authoritarian rule, propaganda and lies should be stark reminders that it can also happen (already happening?) to the US. The integrity of the upcoming elections in November need to be especially protected if we are to save our democracy!!! God’s Spirit of Love-Wisdom-Truth-Peace-Justice-
Healing-Freedom-Transformation-Creativity-Compassion-Loving Diverse Oneness… PRESENT within and among gives Us the discernment and strength to guide Our actions with one another to do God’s Divine Will….
I am forwarding the present essay to the editor of my regional newspapers, in a largely red part of rural Ohio. “Lest we forget” is the motto of people who understand the value of knowing history without partisan exclusions. We must see that the tactics of ICE bullies reflect the wishes of a president who admires not just Hitler, whose *Mein Kampf* was his bedside reading, but also the major dictators of our day in Russia, North Korea, China and Turkey.
The president is behaving like a tyrant. He is using domestic intelligence agents to attempt to glean information on voters in the 2020 election from records in states where he lost. Who could be investigated or arrested next?
Adam Bucko’s commentary hits the nail on the head! ICE and DHS Jihadi’s are no different than the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. America is better than this! Our country is founded on the essential equality of all human beings. This is not to say that our history matches that value set. Clearly the period of slavery and Jim Crow was diametrically opposed to the value set as posed by the founding fathers. But, now is not the time to abandon our ideals. ‘NOW’ is always the time to live up to our ideals!