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News of the Canadian Parliament’s recent celebration of the career of
veteran 14th Waffen SS Division ‘Halychyna’ soldier, Yaroslav Hunka has
now circled the globe, projecting in glaring relief the stark contrast
between this nation’s public pronouncements of principles, and the base
reality of its actions.
But more than shining light into the shadowed corners of Canada’s
past, the Nazigate Affair reveals too extant fascist sympathies of the
country’s leaders in government, business, and the media – where even
now the chorus of denial and pleas of ignorance -reminiscent of those
heard in Nuremberg – serve to obliterate the memory of the murdered,
muting the voices of those massacred in Ukraine in their tens of
thousands by Hunka’s brothers in arms.
As at Babi Yar, where the bodies of the dead were disinterred the
burial pits and burned, their ashes spread across the verdant fields
around Kyiv to better conceal from the World the atrocities conducted
there, another “scattering” is being conducted for the same purpose.
This time, those throwing ashes in the eyes of History are doing so from
the Parliament. Like our government leader of the House of Commons,
Karina Gould, who responds to the indignation and disgust of her fellow
citizens, and that of those elsewhere made aware of hers and her
colleagues egregious behaviour, saying,
“Like all MPs, I had no further information than the
Speaker provided… As a descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors I would
ask all parliamentarians to stop politicizing an issue troubling to
many, myself included.”
Troubling indeed.
Glenn Michalchuk is President of both Peace Alliance Winnipeg, and
the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, or AUUC. He’s been active
in the peace movement for forty years, going back to Ronald Reagan’s
Dirty Wars in Latin America.
And; Alex Boykowich is a third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian,
president of the Edmonton Branch of the Association of United Ukrainian
Canadians, and active member of the Edmonton Peace Council and the
Communist Party of Canada.
Today, the Ukrainians in Canada: The tale of a people divided in two nations with Glenn Michalchuk and Alex Boykowich.
North Bay, Ontario, is a small Canadian city of immigrants from
Europe, their upwardly mobile children, and their children’s children.
It’s the town where Yaroslav Hunka (lead image) lives after
he left the British prisoner of war camp where he and other Ukrainian
soldiers of the SS Waffen Grenadier Galician Division were held after
the end of fighting in Europe in 1945. North Bay is where his son Martin
Hunka was chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering
company. By North Bay standards, the Hunka family is better educated
and wealthier than most, donating substantial sums of money to the local
hospital, universities, and Ukrainian national organisations, and
through the Redpath mining company to local politicians.
North Bay is also where the children of these men demonstrate Hitler salutes and Nazi Party slogans on the local high school football field.
This is the model of small-town church-going people of modest but
respectable means who share the prevailing ideology of their homeland
grandparents who were on the side of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and
Stepan Bandera in the last world war. The smiles remain the same, the
stand-up stiff-arm salutes have changed. The minds remain fixed where
they were in their grandparents’ ideology – that was the collective
fascism of a century ago.* These people continue to believe that for
their liberation, the Russian race should be destroyed – “suffocated” is
the state policy term used by Canada’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Joly.
The churches they attend organised a rally for this goal at the North
Bay City Hall featuring statements by the two Hunkas; they were St.
Andrew’s United, Trinity United, Emmanuel United Church, and Omond
Memorial United Church. “Nothing has changed,” Yaroslav Hunka said at
what the churches called a “peace vigil”. “The same enemy. First Stalin
was there and now this idiot. But Ukraine is not by itself like it was
before. The whole world knows about Ukraine and the whole world supports
Ukraine and that is very important.”
Martin Hunka added:
“I think the support in Canada, the support around the world has been
fantastic. At least now we have friends, whether that is going to
translate into anything concrete on the ground, I think it already is.”
This is the town where the first Italian to become Speaker of the
House of Commons in Ottawa ran a business and collected election
campaign donations. That’s Anthony Rota, the man who invited the two
Hunka men to be guests in the Speaker’s Gallery during the speech of
Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky on September 22. Rota and the
government’s leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould, arranged for
the two Hunka men to be seated in the front row of the gallery next to
the leaders of Canada’s military and internal security forces, General
Wayne Eyre, the chief of the Defence Staff, and Deputy Commissioner of
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Bryan Larkin, protected by two armed
bodyguards.
When Rota spoke to introduce Hunka, he had just read from his script
that in December 1941, after World War II had begun, the then-British
Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill appealed to the House in Ottawa
“to rally for continued support of his country at war. It was a defining
moment of history, and one that must never be forgotten.” Hunka and the
SS Galicians came next on the same page of Rota’s script.
“We have here in the Chamber today Ukrainian-Canadians,
Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought [for]
Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support
the troops today, even at his age of ninety-eight [cheering; applause]….
We thank him for all his service, thank you [cheering; applause].”
Rota was making an explicit equivalence in Canadian policy for war
against Russia between Zelensky, Churchill, and Hunka. Ideologically,
this was also the equivalence between Hunka’s service to the Reich,
“and what is at stake — Ukraine’s freedom, but also preservation of the
rules-based order which is a fundamental part of the future of the
democratic world,” Rota wound up.
Rota didn’t write this 7-minute, multi-page 2,500 word speech by
himself. In draft, Rota sent it for review and editing by Joly, the
foreign minister; by Gould, in charge of the government’s business in
the House; and by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. An Access to
Information Act (ATIA) request for the circulation list of the draft
speech and for the other preparations for the Zelensky appearance,
including the invitation list for the Speaker’s Gallery, would provide
the evidence. No Canadian reporter or publication has attempted to do
this, yet.
For Canada’s black voters, underrepresented in the House of Commons, Rota also tried to link Zelensky’s and Hunka’s war against Russia to Nelson Mandela’s speech to the Canadian parliament.
Every member of the House of Commons, General Eyre and Commissioner
Larkin, stood and applauded Hunka’s wartime killing of Russians. Twice.
Top: the front row of Canadian officials in the Speaker’s
Gallery of the House of Commons: from left to right, unidentified
Canadian official; General Wayne Eyre (red ring), chief of Canada’s
Defence Staff; Bryan Larkin, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police in charge of “specialized policing services”;
unidentified Canadian official; Martin Hunka, retired chief financial
officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering company of North Bay,
Ontario; and his father Yaroslav Hunka of North Bay (red arrow). The
two unidentified men not wearing decorations have been identified by a
local source as bodyguards for the two ranking officers between them;
the vetting by them of those seated next to them, the Hunkas, and those
seated behind them, would have gone into considerable detail of their
security files – details now denied by every senior official of the
government who were on the House floor applauding. Bottom: https://www.cbc.ca/
Source: https://pdba.georgetown.edu/ This
is the House of Commons floor plan of 2005. There have been
renovations, seating changes, and rule variations since then. Number 21
in this diagram is the Speaker’s Gallery where Eyre, Larkin, Martin and
Yaroslav Hunka and the bodyguards were seated during Zelensky’s speech
on September 22. In an attempt to explain how the Speaker’s Gallery was
filled, the government organ CBC reported
through a former chief of prootocol, Roy Norton, that in the
standard procedure Joly’s ministry would have been consulted on filling
the Speaker’s Gallery guest list. Notwithstanding, Norton claimed the
government would have had “zero role in inviting Mr Hunka, or for that
matter most of the people who sat in the gallery”. Norton had been a
Canadian foreign ministry diplomat for many years, ending up as chief of
protocol until 2019.
He was out of government before wartime security measures surrounding
the Ukrainian president and Canadian general officers took effect.
The standing, smiling, cheering, hand-clapping display of September
22 in Ottawa was, sociologically and psychologically speaking,* the same
as German communities of the North Bay-kind and German officials of the
House of Commons-type displayed throughout the 1930s and 1940s until
they were stopped by the Red Army and silenced by Germany’s capitulation
in May 1945. Not that their descendants in North Bay and across Canada
have surrendered that German ideology in the seventy-eight years which
have elapsed since then. The enthusiasm of the MPs to jump to their
feet, shouting and saluting Hunka for killing Russians is evidence
plain.
So are the subsequent attempts by the MPs, government ministers, and
General Eyre to pin responsibility on Rota and claim ignorance for
themselves. Eyre’s spokesman has announced
“[the decision to recognize Hunka] was made independently within the
Speaker’s office, without the involvement or awareness of people in
attendance, including DND/CAF [National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces]
members present.” The implication is that the chief of the Defence
Staff twice stood to applaud without knowing who or why, and without
understanding what Rota had said.
Deputy Prime Minister Freeland’s acute nervousness at concealing her
role in celebrating Hunka and the Galician division was visible when she
was questioned by a reporter six days after the event, on September 28.
Asked whether she supports the reopening of the Deschênes Commission,
the Canadian government investigation of war criminals in 1985-86,
so that “Canadians can know how many veterans who fought with the
Nazis are here in our country”, Freeland fidgeted with her hands for
several seconds before evading a direct answer.
“As a government,” she said, “we are going to be very thoughtful about any further steps that need to be taken.”
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland at her press conference on September 28. Source: https://twitter.com/
A new investigation, if it were held and if the Deschênes Commission
files on immigrant Ukrainian participants in German war crimes were
reopened, would identify the German Army, SS and Nazi career of
Freeland’s maternal grandfather, Mikhail Chomiak, who was still wanted
for his war crimes in Poland in the 1980s.
The first report of Chomiak’s active involvement in the liquidation
of the Jewish communities of the Galician region around Lvov, appeared
here in January 2017. At the time Freeland dismissed the evidence as Russian propaganda.
Hunka has identified the British Army and its intelligence units as
likely to be holding files on him and other members of the Galician
division during their time in British prisoner-of-war camps between 1945
and 1951. According
to Hunka, “on the last day of the war, the Galicia Division broke
contact with the CHA in Styria, Austria, and surrendered to the British
Army. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, I met many guys from
different villages of the Berezhany region. I remember that Yaroslav
Babuniak, Stepan Kukuruza, Yaroslav Lototskyi, Lev Bahlay, Volodymyr
Bilyk, Ostap Sokolskyi, Lev Babiy, Yaroslav Ivakhiv were there from the
Berezhany gymnasium. I think it was God’s will that we should go around
the world like the tribe of Israel, tell the world about Ukraine, and
forty-five years later come to it with help.”
A Canadian government press release claims
the British government asked Canada to take Ukrainian POWs like Hunka
as immigrants. Hunka himself has not revealed where he met Margaret
Edgerton, the English woman he married in 1951, before the two moved to
Canada in 1954.
Edgerton’s obituary reveals she was born in Warwickshire, but this does not reveal
how she met Hunka “after the Second World War.” Altogether, nine
years of British Army, MI6, and MI5 records on Hunka are so far
unmentioned in the Canadian and international reporting of his case.
Published in 2011 in Combatant News,
a US-based platform for Ukrainian soldiers who had served the Ukrainian
National Army (UNA), Hunka titled this statement “My Generation
Memoirs”.
During two years of interrogations of Hunka and the other Galician veterans in Italy, the British government prepared
some for covert operations against the Soviets in the Ukraine, and
resettled others in the UK. “When the 8,500 Ukrainian former soldiers
of the Galicia Division were transferred to the UK from Italy in
May-June 1947 they were accommodated in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in
various parts of the UK, mainly in the agricultural areas of eastern
England and southern Scotland. Occasionally the men were moved between
camps. In July 1948 the numbers of men in camps at or near various
locations were as follows: Hempton (Norfolk) – 1,682 men, Mildenhall
(Suffolk) – 1,401, Allington (Lincolnshire) – 1,319, Moorby
(Lincolnshire) – 1,264, Botesdale (Suffolk) – 1,010, Dalkeith (Scotland)
– 958, Lockerbie (Scotland) – 463, other locations (including
hospitals, where invalids were held) – 300. After the men were released
from POW status (August-October 1948) and admitted into the European
Voluntary Workers (EVW) scheme, the POW camps in which they were being
held were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as
hostels.”
Another Ukrainian account of British efforts to prevent Hunka and the
other Galician veterans from being repatriated to Soviet Ukraine to
face war crimes trials is described here.
Because Hunka came from Berezhany, in the Ternopil region, the British
classified him as a Polish national rather than a Soviet, and this
protected him from deportation to his homeland.
That he and his associates may have participated
in the killing of between 4,000 and 8,000 Jews in the area between 1941
and 1943 is suggested in this brief timeline. Hunka claims that in
1940 when he was a 15-year old high school student in Berezhany, he was
one of six Ukrainians in a class of forty; two were Poles; and “the rest
[32] were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they
ran away in front of such a civilised Western people as the Germans.”
In 1941, when the killing of the Jews of Berezhany was under way,
Hunka has written that “I was just 16 years old, and the next two years
[1942-43] were the happiest years of my life. I did not imagine that
what I experienced in those two years would give me love for my hometown
so much that it would be enough for me for the rest of my life. Little
did I know then that dreams of those two years, of the company of
charming girls, of cheerfully cheerful friends, of fragrant evenings in
the luxurious castle park and passages through the city would help me
overcome the troubled times of the following years.”
In 1943, Hunka, then 18 years old, reports
that “in two weeks, eighty thousand volunteers volunteered for the
division, including many students of the Berezhany gymnasium. None of us
asked what our reward would be, what our provision would be, or even
what our tomorrow would be. We felt our duty to our native land – and
left!” The massacres of several thousand Polish villagers started in
the Ternopil region after this mobilisation in 1943, and after the Jews
had been wiped out, including all of Hunka’s schoolmates. The most
notorious of the Galician division’s attacks was the destruction of the
Polish village and inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka in February 1944.
Hunka’s whereabouts as the Galician units moved through his home
region killing Poles was almost certainly recorded by British military
interrogators when Hunka was in their POW camp in Italy from 1945 to
1947. The British evidence on Hunka would have been passed to the
Canadian immigration authorities if they had requested it at the time
Hunka applied to leave the UK for Toronto.
The same evidence, and more, was gathered by the Polish authorities
in Warsaw, where the Galician division and individual name files are
being opened now at the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). Soviet
military and security files on Hunka are also available in Moscow.
In January 2017 Galicians vandalized the memorials to the villagers of Huta Pieniacka with Ukrainian national and SS graffiti.
British government propaganda is reporting the Hunka affair as a
debate between elderly Jews and nonagenarian Ukrainians arguing over
past and disputed history which Rota, government ministers, General
Eyre, and every member of the Canadian parliament knew nothing of until
now. This is also the line taken by Gould whose first tweet to protect
Hunka and herself claimed: “Like all MPs, I had no further information
than the Speaker provided. Exiting the Chamber I walked by the
individual and took a photo. As a descendent of Jewish Holocaust
survivors I would ask all parliamentarians to stop politicizing an issue
troubling to many, myself included.” What Gould meant was that she and
the Jewish community do not want Hunka’s past record to upset the
current alliance between the Jews and Ukrainians of Canada to prosecute
the war against Russia.
The German Foreign Ministry, headed by Annalena Baerbock, the leading
promoter in Berlin of race war against Russia, defended the standing
salute for Hunka given by Sabine Sparwasser, German ambassador to
Canada, who was in the Speaker’s Gallery near Hunka. According to the
ministry spokesman, Sebastian Fischer (right), reading from a prepared statement, Sparwasser had no idea
what she was standing to applaud. “The true identity of Mr. Hunka,
namely that he was a volunteer member of the Waffen-SS, was not known to
those present, since his participation had not been announced.”
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) version of what happened
in the past claims “the Galicia Division has been accused of committing
war crimes, but its members have never been found guilty in a court of
law.” This BBC report
makes no reference to Poland or to the Polish massacres at all. It
depicts public criticism of Hunka as a Jewish community protest, boosted
by Moscow. “While far-right extremism still exists in Ukraine, it is
much smaller than what Russian propaganda tries to make people believe…”
The Polish government investigation of Hunka has begun since the Hunka affair was publicised.
The mainstream Canadian media are also trying to restrict the public
controversy to a debate between Jews and Ukrainians, and direct the
ensuing public apologies to the Jewish community. Here, for example,
Irwin Сotler, former Canadian justice minister and Liberal Party
attorney-general, speaking from Jerusalem, makes the point that in 1948
“it was easier to get into Canada if you were a Nazi than if you were a
Jew.” Сotler explained
the reason for this was “indifference and inaction by successive
Canadian governments. As a result we became a sanctuary for Nazi war
criminals and no accountability.”
Сotler was misrepresenting the record. He knows that before the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Anglo-American alliance
took the same view as the German Reich that the “Judaeo-Bolshevik
conspiracy” put Jews and Russians into the same category for targeting
as enemies. After 1945 it took time before the same alliance, including
Canada, removed Jews from the war targeting. Russians have remained,
however. Сotler is as committed to waging the present war against them
as Hunka and everyone else in the Canadian parliament.
[*] Fascism has been repeatedly defined on this website, and
in the author’s books, to mean the state when rule is by force (and the
fear of it); when state budgets, parliamentary votes, and oligarch
fortunes are frauds upon the taxpayers; and when government propaganda
has become so pervasive, no alternative public beliefs are permitted,
and subversion is the rule. That’s when the majority of people believe
what it is demonstrably not in their interest; and when they encourage
the use of state force to suppress everyone who dares to calculate and
say otherwise, so that no one can any longer apprehend what is in their
interest, or not. There have been countless experiments by US
psychologists to identify the fascist citizen or totalitarian
personality, ever since this became a wartime priority in the 1940s. The
most telling of these is Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments
at Yale in the 1960s. They demonstrated that normal individuals will
administer fatal electrocution to others if they are convinced the
authority to order them to press the button is legitimate. With a wave
to Hunka, Rota got Canada’s parliament to demonstrate how easy it is to
press the button.
