Ten days after Canada’s political establishment exposed the dirty, Western frame of mind in supporting anything – Nazi or not – against the evil Russians, Chatham House’s Keir Giles has stepped forward to try to pick up the pieces. Giles’s day job, as an expert on Russian military policy, includes his “How Russia uses nuclear threats to shape Western responses to aggression (Chatham House, 2023),” a contribution to the utopian fantasy that nuclear war is just one big game of chicken, and that there is always a way to cross the next ‘red line’ and Russia will fold.
Yesterday, Politico published his contribution, entitled “Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi.” There, Giles is pushed to his sophistical limits in stepping forward for this mission. While fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, volunteering to join the special “Galizien” unit of the Waffen-SS, approved personally by Adolf Hitler, lauded in person by Heinrich Himmler, commanded by German officers, and devoted to defending Ukraine from the “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy is a pretty good start.
Giles’s defense is that the “nuanced truth” is that there were two “terror regimes” at the time, Nazi Germany and the USSR, and it is a tough choice which one to join, so one should ‘cut some slack’ for those Ukrainians who joined the Nazi’s Waffen-SS. After all, not all of them personally committed war crimes.
One might ask, what of Poland’s case presented to the UN in 1947 of the “Galizien” Division of the Waffen-SS, the unit that Yaroslav Hunka was in, committing a war crime, in rounding up and burning alive more than 500 Polish civilians in February 1944? Such specific charges do not exist for Giles. Rather, he dispenses with them, explaining that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.”
Not only does Giles omit any mention of this simple and specific war crime, but he acts as if the British government never deliberately moved any of the accused away from any possible trial. (London sent between 1,200 and 2,000 of the “Galizien” Division to Canada to avoid such trials, and Canada submitted.) Instead, Giles states that, if the current Russian ambassador to Canada cites “multiple war crimes,” it should “set off alarms. And sure enough, here too the facts were invented out of thin air.” Translation: If Russia agrees with Poland’s 1947 documentation, then Poland was wrong. What of the fact that Heinrich Himmler traveled to the “Galizien” unit himself, to congratulate them on slaughtering the Polish civilians three months earlier? What Giles counts as a “fact” is that, since Canada never prosecuted the Waffen-SS men, the ones sent to them in order that they would never be prosecuted, the war crime was never committed. It was “invented out of thin air.” The whole affair is better treated in last year’s one-minute comedy sketch:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1591504778512990208
Finally, the Hunka affair, for Giles, comes down to the danger of disinformation doing such damage, that countering disinformation, or “debunking,” by such careful examination of the “nuanced truth,” doesn’t really work for the masses. The clear implication is that the masses need someone to “pre-debunk,” which in English means, Big Brother needs to censor things that the masses can’t be counted upon to come to the correct conclusions.
After all this blowing of smoke, and putting the Nazi issue aside for a moment, does anyone notice that Canada’s political elite stood cheering for anyone, any time, that fought against Russia – including when 44,000 Canadians died as allies of Russia? One must assume that at least some of this elite didn’t know, or never cared to think, of Canada’s submissive roll to London in harboring, en masse, the Waffen-SS members, thereby sabotaging (or, in newspeak, ‘pre-debunking’) any potential war crimes investigation. Their ignorance is a strategic danger. However, it is unlikely that either Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland or Chatham House’s Keir Giles are unaware of today’s neo-Nazi games that are being played.
One should think twice before buying a nuclear confrontation being sold by Chatham House’s Keir Giles.
