How Canada’s Leaders Came To Publicly Cheer a Ukrainian Nazi

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Mélanie Joly and Chrystia Freeland join a standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka

EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Sept. 28, 2023 (EIRNS)—To smell a rat, one did not need to know that the 98-year-old man, trotted out for a “feel good” moment when the Canadian Parliament welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sept. 22, was a soldier of the Nazis’ Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galizien Division. The assembly, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, went berserk, just to honor a warrior in World War II against the evil Russians. But there’s something wrong with that picture: Didn’t over a million Canadians fight on the side of the Russians and against the Nazis in that war? Didn’t those Nazis kill some 44,000 Canadians?

However, it gets worse. Yaroslav Hunka was indeed a Nazi warrior, very likely a participant in the war crime of burning to death over 500 Polish civilians in February 1944. There are some 1,200 to 2,000 members of that Ukrainian Waffen-SS division that Britain covered up for, and sent to Canada after the war. What happened last week has the quality of screaming out loud what was too evil to be said, and rather was only supposed to be kept in one’s dirty private thoughts: “We really are deploying Nazis.” It wasn’t “Communist disinformation” back then, nor is it “Russian disinformation” today.

For that matter, Canada has a Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who helped to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, whose Ukrainian grandfather 80 years ago worked for the Nazis and had a key role to play in recruiting then 18-year-old Yaroslav Hunka to join the Galizien Division. Small world. But, up to now, mentioning the role of her grandfather Michael Chomiak in whipping up mass, racial hatred against Jews in Ukraine from 1939 to 1945, would be deflected by the magic words, “Russian disinformation.”

But this is not about Ukraine or Canada. How have we come to the deployment of Nazis? When financial manipulations, cheating one’s neighbor, predominate in the world, the proper job of science, industry and agriculture in creating the necessary physical wealth for populations is disrupted; and one can guarantee that, in a Malthusian, dog-eat-dog world, some form of fascistic race hatred will be promoted—such as Hitler’s Nazis. But the model had been established by rapacious, militaristic empires such as Babylon and Rome—or the more modern-day Dutch and British Empires, whose policies and actions murdered millions of darker-complexioned populations.

The Aug. 22-24 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa was a milestone in standing up to the sick disease of colonialism, plaguing the world over the last 600 or so years. The Sept. 9 Schiller Institute conference entitled “Let Us Join Hands with the Global Majority To Create a New Chapter in World History!” offered the radical and appropriate idea that the Western world could accept the gracious offer to join in the eminently feasible project of wiping out hunger, disease and poverty—instead of imitating the ‘wicked witch of the west’ and melting in a puddle of rage. TV BRICS, an international media network with a potential audience of 3.5 billion people, ran excellent coverage of that conference.

And China announced on Aug. 31 that it will hold its Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing next month, as the Foreign Ministry put it, “to provide a new platform for international economic cooperation, as well as generate new momentum to support global economy growth.” The Schiller Institute’s new pamphlet “Colonialism Is Over!” details such “An Appeal to the U.S.A. and Europe To Support a New, Just World Economic Order, Not War!”

It’s time to say out loud the beautiful things that are in the mind.