Canada’s Fascist Friends: Ukraine/ German Allies WW2

There is some family history for my husband’s side of the house in this dispute. Let’s put it this way.. it’s good those family members (Polish/Catholic) left, when they did.

A disclaimer: I do not endorse WSWS for many reasons. However, there research in this series is very good. Canada has very dirty hands in this situation. Those hands have become filthier as of late!

Minimal excerpts:

The first part introduced Canadian imperialism’s long-standing alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalism. Part two investigated the origins of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi record of Krakivski Visti, which was edited by Mikhailo Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Part four will examine how the Canadian state provided a safe haven to the Nazis’ fascist OUN (M) and OUN (B) collaborators, assisted them in whitewashing their crimes, and used them and far-right Ukrainian nationalism as instruments of its imperialist foreign and domestic policy.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR was conceived of, from the start, as a “war of extermination” aimed at establishing German imperialist domination over colonies stretching to the Urals. It was characterized by unprecedented brutality and savagery. Under the “Generalplan Ost,” developed by state institutions and the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, the peoples living in Eastern Europe or Russia were to be exterminated or transformed into colonial slaves.

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), other contemporary right and far-right Ukrainian nationalists who promote, defend and whitewash the OUN, and their imperialist sponsors in Ottawa, Washington, London and Berlin make a series of self-serving, utterly fantastic claims about the OUN’s record in World War II. All of them are a pack of lies.

They claim that the OUN and the Banderite Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were a “national liberation movement.” In reality, they were fascists, subservient to Nazi Germany and later to British and US imperialism. They claim the OUN and UPA fought “both the Nazis and the Soviets.” This despite the Ukrainian fascists having eagerly served in the June 1941 invasion of the USSR and their having continued to fight the Soviets, either directly under Nazi command or in coordination with them, until they were forced to flee in 1945 to the final Nazi redoubts in Vienna, Munich and elsewhere.

In particular the UCC and Ukrainian far-right venerate the genocidal record of the UPA—a force whose leadership and fighters were largely comprised of fascists who, under Bandera’s orders, had previously served the Third Reich’s war machine and the SS.

Canadian historian John Paul Himka, himself once a promoter of the myth of Bandera as “national liberation fighter” and a life-long liberal promoter of one form or another of Ukrainian national identity politics, has been forced to admit, through a confrontation with these facts, that the OUN was a criminal organization which participated in the genocide of European Jewry and in the ethnic cleansing of Poles.

A short text that does not even use the word independence, the proclamation pledges that the “Ukrainian state power” will “cooperate closely with National Socialist Great Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, to create a new order in Europe and the world … and to strongly cooperate with the German army against the Muscovite occupation. …”

The surrender of the 14th (Galicia) Division of the Waffen SS to the British forces is illustrative of the campaign of lies told by the Ukrainian fascists to cover their tracks and clean up their political reputation to make themselves more palatable to their new American—and Canadian—masters. Around April 25, 1945, just before its surrender, the members of the Galizien Division of the Waffen SS shed their uniforms and SS insignia and declared themselves to be “the First Unit of the Ukrainian National Army.” The British officers who first encountered them only later discovered who they were really dealing with. They were interned for several years before eventually being admitted as immigrants to the US, Canada, UK and Australia.

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On April 27, every Liberal, Conservative, Bloc Québécois, Green and New Democratic Party MP present unanimously approved an NDP parliamentary motion labelling Russia’s military operation in Ukraine an “act of Genocide.”

Clearly, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the Canadian ruling class and its political representatives is boundless.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reactionary. But the claim that Moscow is carrying out genocide in Ukraine is a provocation aimed at diabolizing Russia and making any de-escalation of the conflict impossible, so Canadian imperialism and its allies can pursue their plans to subjugate Russia irrespective of the cost in Russian and Ukrainian lives.

In plain terms- The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Trudeau and Freeland- Who are the fascists? Judging by the company they keep? The way they act? Can it be any more obvious? Not to those of us with eyes to see.