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Lessons from Soviet Occupation Pertinent to the News from Minnesota By Matthew Fox 1/31/2026 |
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 |
Tanks on the streets of Zbąszyń during martial law in Poland, 1981. Photo by Jacek Żołnierkiewicz, from Solidarity files. Wikimedia Commons |
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. |
The funeral of Father Jerzy Popieluszko at Saint Stanislaus Kostka Church in Warsaw, 1984. Photo by Jarek Tuszyński on Wikimedia Commons | 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. |
ZOMO squads (paramilitary police) with batons preparing to disperse and beat protesters during the Polish martial law of 1981-1983. From an archive of illegally circulated witness photos. Wikimedia Commons |
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. |
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? |
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