By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada has highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans, writes Max Blumenthal.
1,800 Nazis, Including Ukrainians,
Settled in Canada After WWII
Deputy PM Is Granddaughter of a Top
Ukrainian Propagandist for Nazi Germany
Canada Trains Neo-Nazis in Today’s Ukraine
Zelensky raises right arm to salute as Nazi is introduced to Parliament. (Twitter/Thorston Banner/True North/CPAC/Cathy Vogan)
By Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone
In the Spring of 1943, Yaroslav Hunka was a fresh-faced soldier in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia when his division received a visit from the architect of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies, Heinrich Himmler. Having presided over the battalion’s formation, Himmler was visibly proud of the Ukrainians who had volunteered to support the Third Reich’s efforts.
Eighty years later, the Speaker of Canada’s parliament, Anthony Rota, also beamed with pride after inviting Hunka to a reception for Volodymyr Zelensky, where the Ukrainian president lobbied for more arms and financial assistance for his country’s war against Russia.
“We have in the chamber today Ukrainian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98,” Rota declared during the Sept. 22 parliamentary event in Ottawa.
“His name is Yaroslav Hunka but I am very proud to say he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming. He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Rota continued.
Gales of applause erupted through the crowd, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and leaders of all Canadian parties rose from their seats to applaud Hunka’s wartime service.
Canada’s parliament gives a standing ovation to a 98-year-old Ukrainian Nazi collaborator likely to keep a music box at home stuffed with grainy black and white execution photos
If John Demjanjuk had lived a little longer he too could have been a hero https://t.co/WXYBYCwuXr
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 23, 2023
Since the exposure of Hunka’s record as a Nazi collaborator – which should have been obvious as soon as the Speaker announced him – Canadian leaders (with the notable exception of Eyre) have rushed to issue superficial, face-saving apologies as withering condemnations poured in from Canadian Jewish organizations.
The incident is now a major national scandal, occupying space on the cover of Canadian papers like the Toronto Sun, which quipped, “Did Nazi that coming.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Education Minister has announced plans to seek Hunka’s criminal extradition.
What an epic due diligence failure for speaker of Canadian parliament to recognize a Ukrainian Waffen SS fighter during @ZelenskyyUa visit prompting standing ovations.
pic.twitter.com/Qn3uJAQK7C— Thorsten Benner (@thorstenbenner) September 25, 2023
The Canadian Liberal Party has attempted to downplay the affair as an accidental blunder, with one Liberal MP urging her colleagues to “avoid politicizing this incident.” Melanie Joly, Canada’s Foreign Minister, has forced Rota’s resignation, seeking to turn the Speaker into a scapegoat for her party’s collective actions.
Trudeau, meanwhile, pointed to the “deeply embarrassing” event as a reason to “push back against Russian propaganda,” as though the Kremlin somehow smuggled an nonagenarian Nazi collaborator into parliament, then hypnotized the Prime Minister and his colleagues, Manchurian Candidate-style, into celebrating him as a hero.
NEW – Justin Trudeau blames Russian propaganda for Canadian Parliament honoring a Nazi.
"Obviously, it's extremely upsetting that this happened… this is something that is deeply embarrassing to the Parliament of Canada…
It's going to be really important that all of us push… pic.twitter.com/Zvk5ytkxmC
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 25, 2023
To be sure, the incident was no gaffe. Before Canada’s government and military brass celebrated Hunka in parliament, they had provided diplomatic support to fascist hooligans fighting to install a nationalist government in Kiev, and oversaw the training of contemporary Ukrainian military formations openly committed to the furtherance of Nazi ideology.
Ottawa’s celebration of Hunka has also lifted the cover on the country’s post-World War Two policy of naturalizing known Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and weaponizing them as domestic anti-communist shock troops. The post-war immigration wave included the grandfather of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who functioned as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainain propagandists inside Nazi-occupied Poland.
Though Canadian officialdom has worked to suppress this sordid record, it has resurfaced in dramatic fashion through Hunka’s appearance in parliament and the unsettling contents of his online diaries.
Yaroslav Hunka, front and center, as a member of the Waffen-SS Galicia division, between 1943 and 1945. (14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
‘We Welcomed the German Soldiers With Joy’
The March 2011 edition of the journal of the Association of Ukrainian Ex-Combatants in the U.S. contains an unsettling diary entry which had gone unnoticed until recently.
Authored by Yaroslav Hunka, the journal consisted of proud reflections on volunteering for the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia. Hunka decribed the Nazi Wehrmacht as “mystical German knights” when they first arrived in his hometown of Berezhany, and recalled his own service in the Waffen-SS as the happiest time in his life.
“In my sixth grade,” he wrote, “out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.”
The Jewish Virtual Library details the extermination of Berezhany’s Jewish population at the hands of the “civilized” Germans:
“In 1941 at the end of Soviet occupation 12,000 Jews were living in Berezhany, most of them refugees fleeing the horrors of the Nazi war machine in Europe. During the Holocaust, on Oct. 1, 1941, 500–700 Jews were executed by the Germans in the nearby quarries. On Dec. 18, another 1,200, listed as poor by the Judenrat, were shot in the forest. On Yom Kippur 1942 (Sept. 21), 1,000–1,500 were deported to Belzec and hundreds murdered in the streets and in their homes. On Hanukkah (Dec. 4–5) hundreds more were sent to Belzec and on June 12, 1943, the last 1,700 Jews of the ghetto and labor camp were liquidated, with only a few individuals escaping. Less than 100 Berezhany Jews survived the war.”
When Soviet forces held control of Berezhany, Hunka said he and his neighbors longed for the arrival of Nazi Germany. “Every day,” he recalled, “we looked impatiently in the direction of the Pomoryany (Lvov) with the hope that those mystical German knights, who give bullets to the hated Lyakhs are about to appear.” (Lyakh is a derogatory Ukrainian term for Poles).
In July 1941, when the Nazi German army entered Berezhany, Hunka breathed a sigh of relief. “We welcomed the German soldiers with joy,” he wrote. “People felt a thaw, knowing that there would no longer be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and at least it would be possible to sleep peacefully now.”
Two years later, Hunka joined the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade – a unit formed under the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler inspected the Ukrainian volunteers in May 1943 (below), he was accompanied by Otto Von Wachter, the Nazi-appointed governor of Galicia who established the Jewish ghetto in Krakow.
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler inspecting Ukrainian volunteers of the SS-Galizien division, May 1943. (Wikipedia/Public Domain)
“Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews…,” Himmler reportedly told the Ukrainian troops. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”
‘Hitler’s Elite Torturers and Murderers’ Passed on by ‘RCMP Orders’
Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.
The Ukrainian Canadian newsletter lamented on April 1, 1948, “some [of the new citizens] are outright Nazis who served in the German army and police. It is reported that individuals tattoooed with the dread[ed] SS, Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] orders and after being turned down by screening agencies in Europe.”
The journal described the unreformed Nazis as anticommunist shock troops whose “‘ideological leaders’ are already busy fomenting WWIII, propagating a new world holocaust in which Canada will perish.”
In 1997, the Canadian branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged the Canadian government with having admitted over 2000 veterans of the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.
That same year, 60 Minutes released a special, “Canada’s Dark Secret,” revealing that some 1000 Nazi SS veterans from Baltic states had been granted citizenship by Canada after the war. Irving Abella, a Canadian historian, told 60 Minutes that the easiest way to get into the country “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.” [60 Minutes reported in total around 1,800 Nazis, including from Ukraine, were allowed to settle in Canada after the war.]
Abella also alleged that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) explained to him that his government kept silent about the Nazi immigrants “because they were afraid of exacerbating relationships between Jews and Eastern European ethnic communities.”
https://twitter.com/deathguard00/status/1629269806493974529
Yaroslav Hunka was among the post-war wave of Ukrainian Nazi veterans welcomed by Canada. According to the city council website of Berezhany, he arrived in Ontario in 1954 and promptly “became a member of the fraternity of soldiers of the 1st Division of the UNA, affiliated to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.”
Also among the new generation of Ukrainian Canadians was Michael Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s second-most-powerful official, Chrystia Freeland.
Throughout her career as a journalist and Canadian diplomat, Freeland has advanced her grandfather’s legacy of anti-Russian agitation, while repeatedly exulting wartime Nazi collaborators during public events.
Canada Welcomes Hitler’s Top Ukrainian Propagandists
Throughout the Nazi German occupation of Poland, the Ukrainian journalist Michael Chomiak served as one of Hitler’s top propagandists. Based in Krakow, Chomiak edited an antisemitic publication called Krakivs’ki visti (Krakow News), which cheerled the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “The German Army is bringing us our cherished freedom,” the paper proclaimed in 1941 – and glorified Hitler while rallying Ukrainian support for the Waffen-SS Galicia volunteers.
Chomiak spent much of the war living in two spacious Krakow apartments that had been seized from their Jewish owners by the Nazi occupiers. He wrote that he moved numerous pieces of furniture belonging to a certain “Dr. Finkelstein” to another aryanized apartment placed under his control.
https://twitter.com/DonaldBestCA/status/1495903242781347843
In Canada, Chomiak participated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which incubated hardcore nationalist sentiment among diaspora members while lobbying Ottawa for hardline anti-Soviet policies.
On its website, the UCC boasted of receiving direct Canadian government assistance during World War Two: “The final and conclusive impetus for [establishing the UCC] came from the National War Services of Canada which was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”
[Read of related U.S. program working post-war with Ukrainian fascists in On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine – Consortium News.]
The UCC’s first president Volodymyr Kubijovych, had served as Chomiak’s boss back in Krakow. He also played a part in the establishment of the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia, announcing upon its formation,
“This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy.”
Freeland as Undercover Regime Change Agent in Soviet Ukraine
Following his death in 1984 in Canada, Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications. She was an early contributor to Kubijovych’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which whitewashed the record of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, referring to him as a “revolutionary.” She soon scored a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where her grandfather had served as editor.
A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News (below) featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.
“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.
Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”
In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates.
She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and The Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the U.K.-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.
Canada Trains, Protects Nazis in Post-Maidan Ukraine
Protestors occupied Kiev’s City Hall, replete with Confederate flag and portrait of Stepan Bandera. Canada’s Foreign Ministry provided shelter to the neo-Nazis (above) who occupied and vandalized the city hall in 2014. (YouTube)
When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like The New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.
In the midst of the coup attempt, a group of neo-Nazi thugs belonging to the C14 organization occupied Kiev’s city council and vandalized the building with Ukrainian nationalist insignia and white supremacist symbols, including a Confederate flag.
When riot police chased the fascist hooligans away on Feb. 18, 2014, they took shelter in the Canadian embassy with the apparent consent of the Conservative administration in Ottawa. “Canada was sympathizing with the protesters, at the time, more than the [Ukrainian] government,” a Ukrainian interior ministry official recalled to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Official Canadian support for neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine intensified after the 2015 election of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau. In November 2017, the Canadian military and U.S. Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. (Azov has since deleted the record of the session from its website).
Azov was controlled at the time by Adriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed “White Leader” who declared, “the historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
As Nazi Family History Surfaces, Freeland Lies to Public
US and Canadian military officers meet uniformed members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion during a November 2017 multinational training session in Ukraine.
Photos from a deleted page on Azov's website: https://t.co/08C1FLQ6Ee pic.twitter.com/5RAIif6OFf
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 20, 2022
Back in Canada, Freeland’s troubling family history was surfacing for the first time in the media. Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.
The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.
Zelensky center, Trudeau right, Freeland right back row as Nazi is introduced to Parliament. (Twitter/Thorston Banner/True North/CPAC)
Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, U.S.-based media organization.
For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”
When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”
By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, The Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide.
The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”
“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” The Globe and Mail noted.
After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.
LPC House Leader Karina Gould sought unanimous consent to strike Anthony Rota's comments about Yaroslav Hunka from the record and the CPC denied it
CPC MP Marty Morantz says “deleting the words from Hansard would only have one purpose, to try and forget what happened" #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/S78DkwyPra
— Mackenzie Gray (@Gray_Mackenzie) September 25, 2023
Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.
Thanks to decades of officially supported Holocaust education, the mantra that demands citizens “never forget” has become a guiding light of liberal democracy. In present day Ottawa, however, this simple piece of moral guidance is now treated as a menace which threatens to unravel careers and undermine the war effort in Ukraine.
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
This article is from The Grayzone.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Max writes:
“The Ukrainian Canadian newsletter lamented on April 1, 1948, ‘some [of the new citizens] are outright Nazis who served in the German army and police. It is reported that individuals tattoooed with the dread[ed] SS, Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] orders and after being turned down by screening agencies in Europe.’”
To amply — why would a Ukr-Cdn newsletter critically report on the Nazi ties of their former fellow nationals? — this was the newsletter of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, a progressive group based in pre-war immigration waves of Ukrainians to Canada. To read about the Canadian government’s suppression of the AUUC and promotion of the right-wing, Nazi-tained Ukrainian Canadian Congress, see hxxp://coat.ncf.ca/P4C/70/70_46-47.htm (scroll down).
For more about Chrystia Freeland’s Ukrainian roots and anti-Communist career, see
hxxps://coat.ncf.ca/P4C/70/70_54-55.htm and hxxps://coat.ncf.ca/P4C/70/70_56-58.htm (scroll down)
The current uproar in Canada, is the latest in, actually, a very lengthy story as to how Ukraine has become a caldron of massive eruptions. The US involvement with Ukraine is the latest element for all this.
We read on Russia Times, a brief look at what became of Ukranian Neo-sympathizers. It stated that right after WWII, the British accepted thousands of these people into their country. It seems they were such a mass cauldron of discontents that Great Britain reached out to its colony: Canada, and had them removed there. As a result, about 80 thousand, went to Canada.
But Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungarian history reveals hundreds of years of massive invasions by the Mongolians, Turkish Empire, the Austrian Empire etc.. Much bloodshed took place, Meaning, that all those countries had great difficulties in building solid foundations.
Right after WWII, Russia, under Stalin, Churchill and others conducted massive involuntary migration of millions into or out of Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Germany.
Combining those factors, it isn’t any wonder why Ukraine, now under US tutelage, have only instigated a full-throttled fury.
Blame should be put at the very feet of more powerful countries as to what happened in the past, and the present.
Excellent work as always, Max. I have come to expect nothing less from yourself and the expert journalistic team at the Grayzone.
Stay safe, my friend.
I am very interested in learning more about the OUN’s involvement with the CIA, including members of Freeland’s family and possibly Freeland herself. Good article, Max.
Thank you, Max, for continuing to be a source of truth and reason in this world of abject corporate evil bullshit. You are a true hero of these times.
Don’t mess with Max Blumenthal, he will dig up whatever they try to bury when it comes to fascist scum. Good job.
No ordinary Brit, relying on the BBC, The Times or the Sun (or any other source) for information could have any inkling of this history. I certainly did not.
Max Blumenthal never fails to amaze.
And I always thought that Canada was one of the good guys, along with us Brits and you Amis, of course. Though I do have a distant memory of being taught that the Reds had to be more dangerous than the Nazis. Nothing changes – for which the French (once Frogs to us) have a more notable expression.
I believe the old and the new Nazi criminals should be tried, punished and expelled from wherever are living…. also the Jewish government members in Israel also should be tried and being forced to follow the International Laws in regards with innocent Palestinians …. Justice should be for everybody or nobody….
Blumenthal strikes again. What can we learn from this hilarious episode? One thing is that total ignorance of history does not cease as you go north from the lower 48.
Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”
If Canada were really a democracy, Freeland would be prosecuted via the Canada Criminal Code section 319: Criminal Code (justice.gc.ca)
If Jewish Organizations hadn’t protested this. Anthony Rota would still be speaker of the House. Sometime ago Canuckistan went from being a UK colony to a vassal state of the United States of Atrocities (USA).
Sad, but true.
Canada — remora of empires …
Well, I realized quite a while ago that the U.S. was being ruled by Third Reich supporters who were disappointed that we were not part of the Axis powers during WWII (see, e.g., Bush family). Now I know that Canada was in the same boat, longing for fascism.
“Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.”
You simply couldn’t make this stuff up is the most apt response to the Canadians abject gormless humiliation.
If it wasnt for Canberras generationally collossal $368b subsidy of the US Navy Canada would be a serious rival to Australia for the title of Washington’s most greasy dupe.
No country engaging in the re-sale of armaments – sold to them specifically for their own singular self-defense – to another country, at war with a third party, can be considered neutral.
This is the insanity under-girding the manufacture and sales of all weaponry for private profit, seen as progress for humanity
Sadly, and very tragically, humanity has regressed to a state of mind in which neutrality in international relations does not reign.
Being selective in what one reports may, by others, be considered “wokeism”, disingenuousness in full display!
This lay commenter is not calling into question the accuracy of any of the statistical details reported by Max Blumenthal in his Gray Zone reporting expose’ of the most recent Canadian parliamentary imbroglio swirling around the individual, Yaroslav Hunka.
In no way was this Ukrainian-Canadian, fighting against the Soviet Union, a Ukrainian hero! In Nazi uniform he was nothing more than a traitor to his country, at the time the USSR who was ‘our’ most integral and staunch ally in the defeat of the barbaric Nazi regime.
Were all the adolescent German boys not mere cannon fodder to fulfill the demented Nazi dictators delusions of victory still at-hand; forcibly conscripted into the Nazi German army in the closing stages of WW II which was already by then being accepted as lost by the remaining commanding Generals?
Does this not smack of the disaster befalling Ukraine today, where youth, as well as the elderly are being rounded up on the streets, and forced into combat in the delusional hope of its purported maximum leader?
Can the today 98 year old, Yaroslav Hunka, not be considered to have been but a 16 year old, misguided youth attempting to find his way in a world of utter chaos, and being laid waste; following the dictates of the then traitorous narrative in the Ukraine?
Yes, by association, Yaroslav Hunka committed heinous crimes. Yes, he was an accessory to cold-blooded murder.
Compassion is NOT necessarily condoning, whereas atoning IS the art of compassion, not only for one’s perceived enemy, but for oneself. Was Yaroslav Hunka the first? At the rate humanity is descending into evil, he definitely is not the last!
Seeing through lifelong rose colored lenses is the issue at hand for self-opinionated Americans.
If, as in Christianity, we all, under religiously imposed one-god rule, are seen as being born sinners, by the self-selected priesthood, who of us fallible beings is righteous enough to condemn others, before we have atoned for our own sins?
If a mere human being can be elevated by his cohort of peers, to a post where he is seen as infallible, so too can any individual be demonized as evil, by those who unilaterally sit in negative judgment of humanity!
The facts, most regrettably, are that the nature in the ‘human nature’ of humankind, or so it appears by inhumanity’s displays of genocidal tendencies are that it has not evolved to a higher plane than from the moment when we first recognized ourselves as a species separate from all the other animals; capable of acting consciously, with critical forethought, rather than instinctively reacting, as commanded by the forces of the dark side – unconscious side, in our nature.
America today is the back-up light; the reverse gear of humane progress!
Premeditated ignorance, or “plausible deniability” is the servant of Neo-corporate, plutocratic capitalism.
This is an incredible piece of reporting by Max Blumenthal. This incident opens up a huge opportunity to investigate Canada’s invitation to Nazis after the war. It definitely was done in order to fight the new Cold War against the Soviet Union. And, at the same time Canadian authorities wanted nothing to do with the Canadian volunteers who fought with the Spanish Republic against Franco.
Shame on Canada. Shame, shame.
Actually, today, I took a quick peek at the corporate, mainstream news, and I was surprised at just how little of a ‘scandal’ this really is.
A war criminal, who’s extradition is now being requested by the government of some of the alleged victims, is honored in a ‘western’ parliament. And yet, this morning, I took a quick tour of some of the MSM websites I don’t normally visit, including the Canadian State Media known as the CBC, and this story was well down the page. There were stories about climate change, and then a story about how Toronto is losing its last affordable neighborhood (a true shock to anyone who tries to live in a North American city I’m sure), and then this story was only on the news ticker feed as the piece where the Speaker had fallen on his ceremonial sword as a rather silly and transparent act of damage control. And the obvious tone across the North American corporate mainstream media was that this puts an end to what has been an unfortunate mistake.
Considering that the world just saw the entire political leadership standing and applauding a lying SS officer, the above is not nearly the huge scandal that one would have expected.
It is just what one would expect from propaganda controlled by a small number of corporations that are profiting from their partnership of corporate power and state power first envisioned by Benito Mussolini and his fascist party.
There is zero coverage of this in the U.S. from what I’ve seen of the corporate news. However, online is a totally different story. There have been a number of articles and podcasts, and plenty of people are going to remember.
My father volunteered to give four years of his life to serving his country in Belgium, Holland and France, contributing to the effort to defeat Adolf Hitler’s forces in Europe in the hopes that one day the Prime Minister of Canada would promote a Nazi to the position of deputy Prime Minister.
The comments I have read online from Canadian WWII veterans are very, very good. And it seems even high school students know better than to honor someone who “fought Russia during WWII.” We the people are not as stupid as the dimwit “leaders” assume (my god! Trudeau’s expression in that photo!).
Justin Trudeau is just a figurehead. It is Chrystia who is a creature of the deep state, with a generational hatred of Russia, Canada’s answer to Victoria Nuland. Interestingly Chrystia is also on the Board of Governors of the WEF.
In wake of the 2014 coup, the Ukraine nationalist lobby group UCC was encouraged to submit to the Canadian parliament an incredibly one-sided and tendentious “history” of Ukraine, which served as the essential background informing official Canadian policy. (“Briefing Note to Parliament: The Situation in Ukraine and Canada’s Response” Feb 9, 2015). It is possible that most of the MPs who stood and applauded knew little of Ukraine beyond this document – a serious dereliction considering the large allocations of public money directed to that country and the harsh righteous posture of Canada’s foreign policy in that region.
Canada, along with the UK and USA, had hastily recognized the 2014 coup as representing a new “legitimate” government, effectively halting ongoing international mediation efforts and, due to the belligerence of the newly recognized ultra-nationalist interests, soon plunged the country into a destabilizing civil dispute. The anglo NATO bloc was hugely responsible for this.
“Meanwhile, Poland’s Education Minister has announced plans to seek Hunka’s criminal extradition.” You have to give the Poles credit for being even more tone-deaf than the Canadians. They’re going after a Canadian Nazi even as they send weapons and money to Ukrainian Nazis. Didn’t know there were “good” Nazis and “bad” Nazis. We can also ask, where’s Antifa — those intrepid anti-fascists — during this war between Russia and NATO-led Ukrainian fascists? Clearly Antifa also subscribes to the “good Nazi – bad Nazi” charade.
‘DoubleThink’ is evidence of the use of powerful Mind Control.
From the beginning of the Ukraine ‘crisis’, some obvious bits of doublethink have been quite visible. If I change a few names for purposes of emphasizing a point.
The Portland branch of Antifa does not support the Donetz Antifa branch which has been openly resisting fascists.
The Mar de Lago branch of the Proud Boys does support the Donetz Antifa.
The Mar de Lago branch of the Proud Boys does not support the Lviv branch of the Proud Boys and their torchlight marches.
The Portland branch of Antifa does support the Lviv branch of the Proud Boys.
Logically, it makes no sense. But that is why this obvious ‘doublethink’ is evidence of the employment of powerful mind control. People do not logically reach such positions, but they obviously hold them. Thus the evidence of powerful mind control. Don’t forget that a small handful of corporations control a vast majority of what almost all people see, hear and read. The only use of this is not the selling of overpriced cell phones and cryptocoin scams.
“Antifa” is anyone who is anti-fascist. It’s not an official organization with a headquarters or anything.
FOR SHAME, CANADA…for shame!!! Millions gave their lives fighting Hitler and the Nazis and now…Nazi-sm becoming ‘sanlonfaehig’ ???
The shame rests with the minority government of the day, not Canada , Our shame is that 32% of us elected a clearly incompetent Liberal government who couldn’t be bothered to properly vet a House guest in the gallery while feting his “ Excellency “ Volodomyr Zelensky. The real shame is that western backers of this Kiev regime turn a blind eye to actual neo-Nazis officially incorporated into Ukraine’s government and military ,Azov,Aidar and Right Sector to new a few.
Especially when those of us who do not shove everything down a ‘memory hole’ can remember that Rupert Murdoch’s media got fooled by the same routine last year. An old man was in Rupert’s UK tabloids, and IIRC, briefly on FoxNews, as a ‘hero who had fought Stalin’ during World War II.
To fall for this scam requires such zero historical knowledge as to be unable to name either the country or the leader who fought against Stalin in World War II. Maybe its not the schoolkids who need more testing, but the politicians and ‘the news’?
Of course, today the same ‘news’ is asking everyone to believe that an important state visit, including a speech by a foreign leader before the legislature, is not entirely organized and scripted down to the final detail of diplomatic protocol by the government of the nation.
Yeah Right. If you believe that, I can get you a deal on some Florida swampland for a condo development for seniors that will collapse 40 years from now? We’ll throw in a free hard hat for ‘safety’, but you’ll be so happy to be on ‘the ground floor.’ You’ll never live to regret it. This won’t be like the last one, this one will be built with the same concrete the UK uses for schools and hospitals, so of course its safe. Or maybe you want some Crypto? I’ve got some great connections there. You can give me your money and make a political donation to the CREEP all with one swipe of your card. Don’t forget to vote for Change and Hope. Its always offered, even if its never delivered.
Fantastic comment! And you don’t need the Florida swampland; retirees are still busy buying condos along Florida’s coast which essentially will have no value very shortly.
It’s awful quoting Sarah Palin, but I’ve been doing so ever since she said, “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ for ya?”
All though Canada is immensely wealthy in natural resources, it remains a “minor government” in the eyes of the US, Western Europe, Russia, and many others. Sadly, most Canadians are easily hoodwinked by people like C. Freeland. Canadians, in general, are quite “laid back” citizens who have rarely, if ever revealed much aggressive patriotism. A perfect environment for Ukranian-Nazis to fester their animosity.
I wish the term, “independent media” would be replaced with “free media” when referring to fearless reporting that can’t find favor with anyone in the plutocracy. Consortium News and the Grayzone are two of a very few that would deserve the designation. Everything else could just be called “b.s. news”.
I tend to use the phrase “corporate news”. While this is a synonym of your suggestion, it has an advantage that it points out the source of the problem.
Once you remember that corporations act in a sociopathic or psychopathic manner to constantly lie, cheat and steal for maximum profit, and that their ‘officers’ are required to do so under western ‘law’ as their legal responsibility to the shareowners, it is at least no longer a surprise that the ‘news’ is ‘b.s.’
Still, there appear to be a huge number of people on the internet who are surprised by such. This is true long, long after the same ‘news’ told you that Kennedy was killed by a ‘magic bullet’ which could change directions in mid-air, fired by a social reject who could operate an old, mail-order rifle with the efficiency of a skilled and practiced sniper. In a world where such nonsense is believed and seriously repeated, I do find it useful to refer to this stuff as ‘corporate news’ as a reminder.
But as an old white guy once pointed out, when you let this stuff get stuck to your shoes, the odor is the same no matter what name you give it.
@ Blanca Rose
Your point is very well taken! “Corporate” is indeed the antithesis of “Independent”, these are descriptions of the quality of the content provided by the source; neither of these sources are “Free” in any meaningful way. The term “Independent” properly describes a source of commentary predicated on an informed public interest; unlike all “Corporate” media, which are private for-profit business audio-visual tabloids functioning largely as teleprompter readers and stenographers for government and other private sector propagandists.
As Usual,
EA