No doubt by now you’ve heard the global uproar - of laughter, mostly - over the Canadian Parliament honouring a dubious character.
No, I don’t mean pint-sized former comedian and Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But he was present in Parliament when House Speaker Antony Rota welcomed 98 year-old Yaroslav Hunka as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero.” The House cheered and clapped for a bonafide Ukrainian veteran who fought against Russia in World War 2, giving him a standing ovation.
Trouble was, no one in the Liberal camp seems to have vetted the guy properly. It was soon revealed that Hunka served with the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade, which was a unit formed under the personal orders of SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
Oopsy.
Cue the damage control. On the following Monday Canadian Parliament Speaker Anthony Rota, who introduced the elderly soldier with much fanfare, offered himself up on a platter with an apple in his mouth. Figuratively speaking, of course. He was solely responsible, he said, and apologized for the debacle.
Not quite roasted and toasted yet. The next day Rota returned to the Parliamentary oven to announce his immediate resignation, along with his “profound regret” for causing distress to “certain communities.”
The Libs were left to reap the whirlwind with their Fisher-Price scythes. On the same day Rota threw himself under the bus, Government House leader Karina Gould called for a unanimous motion to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Rota of the 98 year-old soldier.
Conservatives defeated the motion, but it was somewhere between amusing and horrifying to see the Libs go full Orwell, attempting to literally erase history.
More “fun” ensued. Formerly blackfaced Prime Minstrel Justin Trudeau accepted Rota’s resignation and immediately shifted focus on - you gotta love this - “Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation.”
It gets better!
“Poland wants to extradite ex-Nazi who got a standing ovation from Canada’s government,” screamed a Wednesday headline in the New York Post. The request leaves the Trudeau government in a bit of a pickle. They probably can’t completely ignore it, but if they did send Hunka packing it would open up a whole new jagged can of worms.
Cue the tap dancing around the can opener…
As noted by Max Blumenthal, “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.” So this must be a tough one for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland - particularly given this and revelations of her personal past in The Grey Zone.
There’s other worms in the can, particularly the evidence for died-in-the-wool intergenerational Nazis fighting within the Ukrainian forces, well before the Russian invasion.
“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,” wrote Andriy Biletsky, commander of an Azov Battalion in 2014, as reported by the Telegraph in August of that year. (I drew attention to the under-reported topic in the Vancouver Courier cartoon above, in 2017.)
Can it get even worse? Of course, this can o’ worms looks bottomless!
“By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans,” writes Blumenthal in The Gray Zone.
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.
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 US Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. [The wildy antisemitic Azov cited in the Telegraph report]
I got out the popcorn for this week-long production, thinking I was watching a slapstick comedy. But it now feels more like a horror movie.
I heard recently that Russia has won the war and got everything they wanted out of it. The rest is western propaganda posturing.
Nice summary on the heightened ideological farce that grips the Trudeau government. Oops! would have been all that was necessary. But that would presuppose informed politicians wise to the systemic blunders of politicians.