On September 22, 2023 Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky made his first trip to Ottawa to speak to the House of Commons urging Canada to stay the course and to continue to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
That was not the interesting part.
What ended up stealing the evening was Parliament erupting into cheerful recognition of a 98-year-old Ukrainian ‘war hero’ named Yaroslav Hunka – a man who just happened to be a former Waffen-SS soldier who served in the First Ukrainian Division under Nazi command.
The division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, and it fought for the Nazis against Soviet forces in what is now Ukraine.
Immediately after this nonagenarian Nazi was identified, the media, politicians, and pundits went into hysterics, and what has since happened has been an ever-flowing cascade of cringe.
As one could expect, this blunder had become a bit of a boo-boo for the Trudeau government, Parliament, and Canada in general.
Trudeau went into hiding, refusing to show up to the House of Commons for a few days, only to slink back out to offer a rather tepid and embarrassed apology. The Speaker of the House, who invited Hunka, took one for the team, and resigned days later. Federal parties trotted out their own slate of Jewish MPs to pontificate about how they, naturally, as children of Holocaust survivors, were betrayed by such a dastardly mishap. The news media, from fringe to conventional, all coalesced around condemning Hunka for being implicated in the mass murder of Jews. And Jewish groups stated how such a gaffe, in a time of rising anti-Semitism, reveals the government’sinsensitivity to the plight of Canada’s Jewish population.
Interestingly enough, the one person who has yet to speak about any of this is Zelensky, himself. Perhaps, things are more complicated than we’re being led to believe.
Meanwhile, in our simple little world, what we have here are a bunch of liberals calling one another ‘Nazis’. It is all rather craven, cynical, and opportunistic. And perhaps this is to be expected, though I cannot help but see the circling of the wagons for what it is: damage control.
By ‘damage control’ I do not mean that anyone is trying to minimise or deny Hunka’s appearance in the House of Commons nor the incompetence of the government his presence exposed. I mean that there is damage control for the narrative device that has been used to shape our moral conscience, as a society in Canada, and as a civilisation in the West, generally. That narrative is the overly-simplified moralistic framing of: Nazi = Evil. Full stop.
This event, I think, prompts a few questions – and not merely the immediate logistical questions such as ‘how did this Nazi get into the House of Commons?’
For instance: how did this Nazi get into the country? Why wasn’t he arrested and put on trial for war crimes? After all, the War Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials asserted that merely being in the Waffen-SS was tantamount to being a member of a criminal organisation guilty of war crimes. Did he actually do anything wrong or was he merely fighting on the wrong side? Can there be Nazis who didn’t do anything wrong? If one could have been a Nazi and have not done anything wrong, then are Nazis prima facie evil? If Nazis are not prima facie evil, then why is ‘Nazi’ used as such?
Stop with those questions. Nazi = Evil.
Now, the answers to these questions may likely depend upon one’s politics, with the left-leaning amongst us arguing that Hunka and his ilk managed to either lie their way into Canada or were aided and abetted by similarly vicious Nazi sympathisers. Or at best, it was government incompetence that led to a Nazi being able to slip through the cracks of our security apparatus and live out a peaceful and lengthy life among innocent, well-meaning Canadians.
To my mind, I reckon that the image we have of this particular Division is – like other such cases – grossly exaggerated, and that Hunka and others like him are probably only guilty of fighting on the losing side.
Now, before the Simon Wiesenthal Centre or the Canadian Anti-Hate Network gets in a tizzy, this isn’t an excuse for immoral behaviour, and I’m not excusing any vicious acts perpetrated by members of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division – but these aforementioned groups need to provide the evidence.
Also, let us be clear: we’ve been here before. In fact, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Hunka, and his fellow Galacia Division members, had already gone through a legal rigmarole during the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (1985-1986).
Following the sensational claims that infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele had tried to enter Canada, the Commission was set up to answer once and for all: how many Nazi war criminals had taken refuge in Canada?
Numerous Jewish sources had been throwing out all sorts of numbers into the public, stirring up controversy.
For example, Irwin Cotler, former MP and Minister of Justice, stated in 1981 that ‘at least 100’ Nazis were living in Canada – a number he inflated to ‘maybe 1,000’ two years later in 1983 alongside The Jewish Defence League. In 1984, Sol Littman, the Canadian representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center touted the figure of 3,000, and in 1986 the Simon Wiesenthal Center, itself, came down with an elbow from the friggin sky to blow everyone out of the water with a numerologically suspicious total of 6,000 war criminals.
The Commission noted that the discrepancies between these estimates are reflective of their degrees of reliability, and when compared to a list of 774 case names compiled by the Master Commissioner, one sees a 400% exaggeration by the proponents of those figures, even when charitably leaving aside Wiesenthal’s statement of 6,000. Such magnitudes leaves one with a sense of sceptical curiosity as to how these folks got their numbers.
Even if the numbers are more-or-less in the ballpark, the language used by the sources to accrue the numbers is based on a conflation of two terms: ‘war criminal’ and ‘war time collaborator’.
According to the Commission:
[The source ie: Littman et al.] does not refer simply – and clearly – to war criminals: he speaks of ‘war criminals and war-time collaborators’. Now, there is more than a slight difference between the two categories: war criminals were collaborators, but surely not all collaborators qualify as war criminals. So, a figure which pretends to mix both classes of unsavory characters into a single total may be quite misleading when one rather thinks of war criminals as such.
As part of the inquiry, the Galicia Division and its members were investigated and during this process the Commission concluded that Canadian authorities were fully aware of the history of the Division, and that the members were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada.
Additionally, the Commission stated charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division had never been substantiated, and the Division should not be indicted as a group. As such, in the absence of evidence of participation in or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division was insufficient to justify prosecution.
In short, Simon Wiesenthal and his fellow travelers had grossly exaggerated their numbers, and unless and until there was evidence brought against members of the Galicia Division, there would be no prosecution.
What we have here is a historical assessment of the facts surrounding Hunka and his Division, which found that there were a bunch of Nazis who were, in fact, not evil. Or at least not evil enough to be prosecuted.
Now, we’re being told that ‘Canadians’ (read: White people) are ignorant of their history, and that the Hunka gaffe is a result of that ignorance.
We’re also told that our government should have been able to do the geo-political arithmetic to ascertain that those who fought for Ukraine against the Soviets in World War II were Nazis – oh, and Nazi = Evil.
Why then aren’t we to take similar advice and recall that in 1930-1933 tens of millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by the Soviets in what has since been called the Holodomor? Given that the Ukrainians had suffered so horribly under the Soviet Union’s communist barbarism and that the Nazis showed up fighting Soviets, its unsurprising that Ukrainians enlisted to fight alongside the enemy of their enemy.
How about the Commission and its findings? Are we ignorant of these facts, too? Sure, but of course we’re not supposed to consider those things. Instead, we’re supposed to genuflect to a certain telling of history. Looking into such things and asking pesky questions is too unruly for the average Canadian. It is easier to just look at history and our present situation and lapse back into: Nazi = Evil.
So now we have Hunka, and men like him, being treated like criminals of the worst sort. He is being painted as a hunter of innocent people, and yet the only evidence we have for his conduct in World War II was that he fought for his country against the Soviets in his capacity as a Nazi soldier.
We’ve explicitly turned this one elderly man into a site for public judgement and moral condemnation – we’ve turned him into a scapegoat with no evidence and for no reason other than petty politicking.
I’ve stated that there is damage control going on: there is an evident winding up of the Nazi = Evil treadmill. The ruling regime did show its incompetence but not its lack of commitment to the post-war rules-based liberal order. We see this in how each side – from Trudeau to Poilievre – are calling each other out for not being sufficiently contrite in the face of the Holocaust that Hunka is supposed to represent. The very presence of Hunka in the House of Commons is taken to be a deep moral scar on Canada – and in fact is supposed to show how Canada still has ‘much more to do’ in ‘coming to terms’ with its past.
Now, I’m sure that much of the condemnation of Trudeau is coming from rather Machiavellian motives. This is certainly an opportunity to get some shots in on Trudeau and his government. But while the normie conservatives are ‘owning’ Trudeau for inviting a Nazi into the House – and Nazi = Evil – they’re also just re-enforcing a shallow moralistic framing device that World War II and the Holocaust tend to serve.
In February 2022, I wrote an article on the Trucker Convoy. In that piece I discussed the controversial uses of Nazi imagery by some protestors and stated that ‘the Holocaust is universal in that it universally imposes guilt, andyet it can only ever be used exclusively in the service of some favoured group or other. We’re supposed to see it as a window into the darkness of our hearts, but we cannot use it as a lens to view our own victimisation.’
And more victimisation will likely come.
Hunka could get extradited and die in a prison cell in Poland. Trudeau, in his narcissism, could very well lash out with more anti-White/progressive policies in his last gasps as Prime Minister. New investigations into imagined war criminals or perhaps even pro-White advocates may pick up pace. Calls for Canada to ‘examine’ its history (ie: destroy more European culture and heritage) could be incited. All of these things and more are aided and abetted by stupid, petty chatter about: Nazi = Evil.
Instead of getting angry at Trudeau for unwittingly inviting an elderly former Nazi soldier into the House of Commons, people should be getting furious at the state of the nation and our people wrought by his policies – and the would-be policies of the Conservatives.
Perhaps more people are… And that is a reason for the damage control.
