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trust. It is one thing to exercise freedom of choice in one's country of
residence , and another again to buy freedom at the cost of bringing
advantage to the criminal who has deprived us of that freedom, and
at the cost of those who will not be offered the opportunity of such a
transaction.
The offer of emigration is a challenge thrown to the Solidarity
movement by the government apparatus-a moral and political
challenge. Interned Solidarity activists who today choose to emi–
grate commit an act that is at once one of desertion and capitulation.
I know this is a strong formulation; but think for a moment of
those people who organized the December strikes in your defense,
posted leaflets in your defense, people who are hunted down by the
police for organizing in your defense, and of their reactions, as they
sit in their prisons and hideouts, to your decision to leave Poland.
I am not thinking here only of the political scope of the issue, of
the fate of the Solidarity movement; I am thinking merely of simple
human decency and of basic loyalty. Decency and loyalty not only
towards those who are fighting; also towards those who trusted you,
those in whom you kindled the flame of belief in disinterestedness, in
honesty and dignity of public life; those who bring you food to the
internment camp, who pray for you in churches, who think of you
with faith, hope, and love; those for whom you are-as is all of
Solidarity-a symbol of a better Poland, of tomorrow's Poland.
You must remember that here politics is inextricably linked
with moral questions, that the political choice is unavoidably a
moral choice.
r
know you do not believe in a quick victory, in a rapid rebuild–
ing of the pre-December Solidarity; you know that before you lies a
road of drudgery marked by suffering defeats and by the bitter taste
that remains after contact with human smallness. And it is not as if
you idealized that pre-December Solidarity either. You remember
too well your own anxiety at the direction the changes were taking,
too well the mechanism whereby the shrill of voice and cunning of
mind were allowed to advance and have their way, a mechanism of
dizziness from intoxication with power and of outrage at the suddeTl
advancements, the mechanism that created a court with its court
intrigues. You saw this from close up; you must have seen, then,
symptoms of a betrayed revolution and the beginnings of degenera–
tion. But you also saw, during those months that you would not
exchange for any others and that you were always ready to pay for
