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 Zelensky on Sept. 22, was a soldier of the Nazi’s Waffen-SS ‘Galizien’ Division. The assembly 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 Nazi Germany 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 Waffen-SS division that Britain covered up for, and sent to Canada in the years 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, and whose grandfather 80 years ago worked for the Nazis and had a key role to play in recruiting the 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 BRICS conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August, was a milestone in standing up to the sick disease of colonialism, plaguing the world over the last 600 or so years. The September 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, with a potential audience of 3.5 billion people, published today excellent coverage of that conference.
And the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will be held in Beijing next month, as Global Times put it, “to provide a new platform for international economic cooperation, as well as generate new momentum to support global economy growth.”
Preparation is here:
It’s time to say out loud the beautiful things that are in the mind.
