By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Before he started bringing young Eastern Europeans to Arizona to study America’s economy-liberating free-market practices, Jacek Spendel was making money off Arizona — that is, selling the “Arizona” pizza popular at his Xpress Pizza store in Katowice, Poland.
The pie had mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, and the Southwest’s jalapeno peppers, Spendel told The Wanderer after six young Europeans under his wing had made another stop on their three-month visit here to look into the customs and practices they’re hungry to take back to their countries previously sickened by indigestible Communism.
They spent a couple of evening hours at the offices of the Arizona Project Tea Party in north Phoenix on February 5, speaking to and answering questions from about 30 Tea Partiers. The name of the Europeans’ own group is mirror-image: Project Arizona.
Spendel said their ages range from 19 to 29, they came from Poland, Ukraine, and Croatia, and they “were born after Communism collapsed.”
As the chatter proceeded at the Tea Party office, facts emerged that this was the second year of Project Arizona after word of the idea spread on Facebook, and donors to finance it — many of them from Arizona — were lined up. Project Arizona doesn’t accept government money.
Anastasia Mykolenko told the Tea Party audience that those who applied to participate in the program also saw about it on Facebook.
When a woman in the audience lamented that U.S. college students want socialism, Natalia Drozd replied, “People who want socialism, always the ones who don’t know what socialism is.”
Drozd gave the thumbs-up when a man in the audience said, “Freedom has to be held up. It won’t stay up by itself.”
Spendel said he first came to Arizona in 2009 and considered the state an especially attractive U.S. location for free-market energy and initiative.
He interned at the free-market Goldwater Institute here in 2011, an article at Project Arizona’s Facebook page says, adding in what sounds like English composed as a second language:
“He understood that effectiveness in freedom movement is possible, that people of freedom disposition don’t need to be always just defenders — they might deliver victories and change their own communities into better places. Inspiration he gained led him to found Polish-American Leadership Academy, which is educating freedom leaders of tomorrow in Poland.
“The academy sent several best students for internships to Goldwater Institute and other institutions,” the article added. “For number of years he observed that the seed that has sown begins to germinate.”
Spendel told the Arizona Project that participants spread ideas of U.S. freedom, the Constitution, and private property to other countries.
Also, “I like it so much (here), your people, how friendly you are, the climate,” as well as the “extraordinary beauty of the Southwest,” including one of the seven natural wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon, as well as Sedona, Ariz., California, and Las Vegas, Spendel said.
“People come here, learn how it works,” then take that knowledge back home, he said. “…We are your guests, and we’re very honored to be.”
He said 60 to 70 applications were received to participate in the current program, from which the six people were chosen.
When The Wanderer later asked Spendel’s wife, Magdalena, who was accompanying him, how Communists are regarded back home, she replied, “In Poland, if people say they are Communist, people would not be happy about it,” so those with such political sympathies call themselves social democrats instead.
Drozd, from Ukraine, said that back home the education system teaches that Communism was “a dark place in our history.”
Arizona Project chairman Ron Ludders sent an email invitation to his members to attend this event, saying, “Please join in this wonderful effort of Jacek and his wife to unite the citizens of the world with liberty, economic freedom, understanding, and brotherhood.”
During the meeting, Ludders said, “I’m not a preacher, but I think it’s the North Star of my life” to look to God.
Other activities during their stay have included taking classes at Arizona State University’s Center for Political Thought and Leadership, meeting with Arizona Supreme Court Associate Justice Clint Bolick, training with Americans for Prosperity Arizona, having a networking meeting about the U.S. health-care system, and touring the Arizona Senate and meeting with a pro-liberty and pro-life state senator.
In addition, they went mountain climbing in Phoenix and ate barbecue and “quality American burgers.”
Back home, Magdalena Spendel told The Wanderer, the youth “want to have more opportunities, want to go abroad, want to do something.” Less-adventurous older people are looking for a “third way” that has both the security of socialism and positive features of capitalism, she said, but younger people are “more into free markets.”
The other Project Arizona participants this year are Karolina Kowacka, Michael Maljak, Agnieszka Slowikowska, and Artur Rychter. They were accompanied by the Spendels’ friend Bartosz Zasielzny.
Slowikowska said the U.S. “is much younger, but in freedom” is older, than thousand-year-old Poland.
When Jacek Spendel opened up his phone to enter the name of The Wanderer as his interview concluded, he already had a message on the little screen: “Taxation is theft.”
Maybe these Eastern Europeans, having thrown off Communism, have some useful messages to bring to America’s own encrusted liberal politicians.
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