A Prescient Fascist?

Canada and Zelensky celebrate an anti-Russian "patriot" who fought with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS while Canada and the US were allies with Stalin.

The picture of tolerance: Jewish Ukrainian patriot saluting a Nazi Ukrainian patriot

The Soviet Union allied with the US and Canada during World War II. Moreover, any non-biased analysis would show that it was primarily the USSR who defeated Nazi Germany during four terrible years of fighting—not some band of brothers storming the beaches in Normandy less than a year before the war ended.

Yaroslav Hunka, the man to whom the entire Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation, was a volunteer with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, which was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials. He fought for Nazi Germany and against the Allied war effort. It is very open minded of Canada to celebrate an enemy combattant so warmly. Such displays of tolerance are rare indeed these days.

But one wonders if it’s really possible that historic ignorance, so rampant in the West these days, led to Canadians not realizing Herr Hunka was fighting on the side of Nazi Germany in World War 2? After all in his introduction, it was clearly stated that he was fighting for Ukraine and against “Russia.” Perhaps today people believe that Canada and the West have always been at war with Russia?

Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?

But during WW2, technically “Russia” did not exist as a nation-state. The Soviet Union ruled Russia and Ukraine, along with 13 other Soviet Republics. Here is a photo taken in the Crimea no less, towards the end of World War 2, of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin deciding how to divide up Europe after an Allied victory. By the way, Stalin was not Russian, he was Georgian.

Wintertime in the Crimea

Were the Allies on the wrong side of history by siding with Stalin and the USSR? After Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, they liberated Ukraine and Crimea from the Soviet jackboot. Many Ukrainians, fuelled by nationalism and ethnic animus towards Russia, volunteered to fight with the Nazis. Ideological decedents of these Nazi freedom fighters are still active in Ukraine today—where swastika tattoos, Hitler salutes, and Nazi paraphernalia are rampant in groupings such as the Azov Brigade.

Perhaps Herr Hunka was a hero and the Allies were wrong? Just look how much Hitler hated the Russians. From Mein Kampf but these comments could come from any mid-level Western bureaucrat nowadays:

“Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity which, favoured by circumstances, overran a great state in a tragic hour, slaughtered out thousands of her leading intelligentsia in wild bloodlust, and now for almost ten years have been carrying on the most cruel and tyrannical regime of all time.

Furthermore, do not forget that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying, and which today more than ever is conscious of a mission to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world.

Considering the Collective West’s convergence with Hitler’s view of Russia, could it be that Herr Hunka was a prescient fascist? That does seem to be the message the Canadian Parlement was trying to send: normalizing fascism as an anti-Russian tool. While common citizens may forget the geopolitical alignments in World War 2, it is hard to believe senior Canadian politicians did as well. For example, Chrystia Freeland, who is both Deputy Foreign Minister and Minister of Finance, has a grandfather who served as a pro-Nazi journalist in Poland during WW2:

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia 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.

Ms. Freeland's family history has become a target for Russian forces seeking to discredit one of Canada's highly placed defenders of Ukraine.

Ms. Freeland, who has paid tribute to her maternal grandparents in articles and books, helped edit a scholarly article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies in 1996 that revealed her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was a Nazi propagandist for Krakivski Visti (Krakow News).

Krakivski Visti was set up in 1940 by the German army and supervised by German intelligence officer Emil Gassert. Its printing presses and offices were confiscated by the Germans from a Jewish publisher, who was later murdered at the Belzec concentration camp.

The article titled "Kravivski Visti and the Jews, 1943: A contribution of Ukrainian Jewish Relations during the Second World War" was written by Ms. Freeland's uncle, John-Paul Himka, now professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.

In the foreword to the article, Prof. Himka credits Ms. Freeland for "pointing out problems and clarifications." Ms. Freeland has never acknowledged that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator and suggested on Monday that the allegation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

These revelations occurred in 2017, when Ms. Freeland served as Foreign Minister in Justin Trudeau’s government. Is it really possible that the Canadian leadership forgot that Ukrainians fighting against Russian’s in WW2 were fighting for the Nazi’s?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is trying to compartmentalize the blunder by blaming Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons. But there are reports that the aging Herr Hunka personally met with Trudeau and Zelensky before his standing ovation in Parliament. But just as Chrystia Freeland did in 2017, Justin Trudeau, after apologizing, claims the uproar surrounding the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation is Russian propaganda and disinformation.

Premature Anti-fascism

Canada has a history of temporally incongruent narratives surrounding the rise of fascism and World War II. In 1937, hundreds of young Canadians volunteered to fight the rise of fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Yes, these young men and women were often Communist Party members:

As the number of foreign volunteers grew in support of the Republican Government, the International Brigades were established and reorganized according to language groups to incorporate existing and new volunteers. The International Brigades were intended to act as instructors and examples to the Spanish recruits while a new Spanish Army was formed and trained to defend the Republican Government. The recruitment campaign in Canada was organized and administered by the Communist Party of Canada. Individuals with military training were encouraged to volunteer. The large majority of the volunteers were CPC members and the CPC screened the volunteers to ensure that only their supporters and sympathizers would receive assistance to travel to Spain. A few individual Canadian volunteers made their own way to Spain.

<…>

The federal government became concerned with the large number of volunteers leaving for Spain and in April 1937 passed a new Foreign Enlistment Act outlawing participation by Canadians in foreign wars. On July 31, 1937 the Act was applied to the enlistment by Canadians on any side in Spain. The recruitment campaign which was discreet went underground. However, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police continued to investigate the recruitment activities of the Communist Party of Canada.

Fascism emerged victorious in Spain and the surviving Canadian volunteers straggled back to North America. These soldiers had officially broken the law in fighting fascism. Very soon afterwards, WW2 broke out and now Canada itself was at war with fascism. Canadian intelligence agencies continued to track many of the returning anti-fascist veterans of the struggle in Spain. In order to justify their continued surveillance and harassment, Canada (and the US) had to get creative since both countries were now officially anti-fascist. And so the veterans of the Spanish Civil War in Canada and the US were officially labelled with the Orwellian term: “premature anti-fascists.”

And so why not a new category for those Ukrainian Nazis, past and present, who had the foresight to already fight for Ukraine’s independence from the USSR/Russia years before the Western intelligentsia got woke to anti-Russian hate? For what could be more important than Michael Chomiak, the Azov Brigade, and Yaroslav Hunka’s prescient use of fascism to fight the evil Russians?

Not one Canadian parliamentarian refused to rise and salute the aging Yaroslav Hunka’s service to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Canadians can hold their heads high as not one of their leaders fell victim to Russian propaganda like the guy did in the photo below:

Russian stooge who loves Stalin / Putin?

Personally, I do have tolerance for the stories told by soldiers who fought for the Nazis. One of the most powerful books I have ever read was, The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. He was an Alsatian who volunteered to fight for the elite Panzergrenadier Division Großdeutschland unit. This book is a much more powerful antidepressant than any drug ever could be. If ever things were not going well in my life, I would sit down and read a chapter from Sajer’s adventures on the Eastern Front, and suddenly all of my puny problems were put into their proper place.