The Polish “Second Circulation” and Protecting Free Speech in America

AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis

The biting chill of winter swept through the Polish city of Gdansk in December 1981 as two figures, a man and a small boy dressed in long, dark coats, moved quickly through the streets, avoiding any light. They stole away to the basement of a nondescript apartment building and entered a small room. The boy moved a printing press from the wall and the man filled it with fresh paint.

“Good Lord, help us to reach those who need it,” they prayed. Then both moved the copying drum with a knob.

On the drum was a small magazine with an essay, “Live Not By Lies,” by Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was a criticism of conformism, a temptation common in communist systems.

“Let us each make a choice,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “whether to remain consciously a servant of falsehood (of course, it is not out of inclination but to feed one’s family that one raises one’s children in the spirit of lies), or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect from one’s children and contemporaries.”

It took a few days for the boy to drop the illegal leaflet on the window ledge at the medical center, the movie theater, the gas station, and wherever people would stop longer than five minutes. No one knew about his mission except his father.

In a few years, their country would regain its freedom after nearly four decades of occupation. Throughout these long years of struggle, the Polish people and many others behind the Iron Curtain fought back against the Soviet propaganda machine through small acts of rebellion like this.

Their combined efforts were known as the “Second Circulation,” a parallel to the regime’s “approved” narratives and censorship activities. All culture-creating and educational content independent of the regime, including information conferences, secret scientific courses, secret meetings of discussion clubs, theater performances, music concerts, and amateur radio stations constituted the Second Circulation.

Hundreds of amateur news distributors like the one operated by the Polish father and his son in December 1981 printed leaflets and even small magazines. They played a pivotal role in keeping hope alive behind the Iron Curtain and combatting the Soviet regime’s ideological warfare.

But censorship and government propaganda did not die with the fall of the USSR. Indeed, it merely went underground, resurfacing in less extreme but perhaps more insidious versions around the world.

In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic showed how powerful censorship can be even in a free and independent country. Under the pretenses of a “global emergency,” elites censored all dissenting views and forced their narrative on the people. Only now are we learning many ugly truths about the virus and the failures of the government’s response to it.

COVID-19 censorship in the United States also came toward the end of a four-year stretch in which the media and the Democrat Party colluded to push a number of false narratives in order to hamper the presidency of Donald Trump, from the “Russiagate” scandal to the first impeachment hoax. In both these cases, anyone who dissented from the established mainstream narrative was branded as a “conspiracy theorist” and “extremist.”

Like the Poles under communism, Americans today are facing a threat to their ability to exchange opinions on crucial matters of importance to their daily lives. Many mainstream media “journalists” in the United States today are the direct successors of Soviet journalists who served particular groups and regularly broadcast lies as the truth.

Defenders of free speech in the United States and the rest of the world today can still look to the principles that motivated the Poles to resist the Soviet censorship regime: self-realization, determination, patience, and a firm conviction in victory.

The power of the internet and social media, while often weaponized by Big Tech monopolies to silence free speech, is still a powerful tool to promulgate honest debate and the exchange of ideas. Newsletters shared between friends can take the place of home printing presses. If ten people share a story with ten more people, who each then pass it on to ten more, one small act of rebellion against the establishment can snowball into a movement that counters the power of the corporate media.

Thankfully, Americans today don’t have to worry (yet) about being thrown in prison for publishing a story claiming that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in China or that Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings are worth investigating.

But the best way to prevent the creeping authoritarianism of the state and mainstream media is to continue to call out their hypocrisy and lies, much as the Poles did so many years ago. As Solzhenitsyn wrote on the cover of that brochure the Polish boy illegally distributed in December 1981, “when truth is replaced by silence, that silence is a lie.”

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.