What was intended as a tribute to a veteran Ukrainian fighter who was exiled during President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Canada ended in a scandal that engulfed Justin Trudeau’s government and sparked angry protests from Russia and Poland. It is worth remembering how the events were presented and then proceeded to the root of the incident: last Friday the Ukrainian president traveled to Ottawa to ask for funds for the war against Russia and the House of Commons received him with dignity and status. . At the event, the plenary session of the parliament applauded a recognition of Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old man who was presented as a hero of the Second World War.
It did not take long for the background of the “heroic fighter for the freedom of Ukraine” to emerge against the Soviet troops. Hunka was a member of the dreaded 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he was responsible for crimes against the Jewish population of Lublin, in 1944. The protests of the B’nai Brith Canada organization immediately. That regiment, also called the Galitizia Division (after the Carpathian area around the city of Halicz, pronounced Galuch, unrelated to the autonomous region of Spain) was made up of volunteers. Huka was also accused of participating in the massacre of Poles, for which the government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said it would request his extradition. Moscow says the same.
The case led to an apology from Trudeau, who admitted not knowing Hunka’s background although he blamed the Russians for wanting to exploit the case for their interests in the context of the war. The first head to be lost was that of House Leader Anthony Rota, who also swore that he was not informed about the case. Others who withdrew were the directors of the University of Alberta, who returned a donation of 30 thousand Canadian dollars from the family of Yaroslav Hunka in the past. Zelensky, who shared the applause that Friday, said nothing, and it was understandable. He already had enough problems in Warsaw when at the beginning of this year they honored Stepan Bandera, another protagonist of crimes against the population of Poland, in the Verkhovna Rada of kyiv.
At the time, the vice chancellor, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, said that “it is unacceptable for Poland to honor the ideologue of Ukrainian nationalists who killed tens of thousands of Poles in Volhynia.” In the region that is now part of the territory of Ukraine, in the fall of 1943, troops from the short-lived People’s Republic of Ukraine carried out “ethnic cleansing” that killed up to 130,000 Poles, a genocide that will never be forgotten by Warsaw. .
The bottom line is that the Canadian authorities can’t/shouldn’t ignore who they’re dedicated to. And if they never got the paper dimension it was because they pretended to be crazy since Canada, as a member of the Commonwealth, sent troops against Hitler’s Germany and after the surrender, many Nazis hid those coast and from there they banked, in CIA-sponsored operations, to anti-communist groups around the world.
In fact, Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, Chrysta Freeland, is the granddaughter on her mother’s side of one of those refugees, Mykhailo Khomiak, a lawyer and director of a media outlet close to Nazism in the occupied Warsaw in 1940. He changed his name to Michael Chomiak when he arrived in Canada. After graduating from Harvard, Chrysta went into journalism at Financial Times, The Economist, The Washington Post and editor of The Globe and Mail. Later, he was the Minister of Finance and Chancellor. His name was heard as the head of NATO, according to New York Times, replaced Jens Stoltemberg, whose term ends these days, although in July it was extended until October 2024. Perhaps these ties made the agreement of the Atlantic organization difficult two months ago. From where they were saved.
The Poles, on the other hand, after announcing that they will not send more weapons to Ukraine or allow the transfer of grain from the uneasy neighbor through their territory, scored another mark in their dispute with ancestor. And those who cling most to a glorious past hope that the war will destroy Ukraine so much that those regions will return to Warsaw’s control with little effort. And they also hope that this competition will end by putting Poland in the role of the real brake on Russia.
The European locomotive
If those looking for the root of the undisguised rebirth of Nazism try to get to the core, they will find, just on the surface, that “the worst drama ever experienced by Mankind has re-emerged in the folds of German democracy, with knowledge. , concealment and complexity of State institutions and authorities.” At the end of World War II, the attempt, if there was one, to denazify the country had failed. Nazism continued to control key forces, especially the Judiciary and, although it was difficult to understand, the armed forces. There, precisely, lived the launch platform of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and where the arsenals that feed the civilians who kill the immigrants are located.
The reasons are not lacking Red fish when he denounced the complicity of the state in the rise of the Nazis. In a country that rose from the ashes of Adolf Hitler’s regime, militarism was the essence, the very identity of Germany. Well, there, a year ago, and when the signs of rebirth were overwhelming, the need to satisfy the Atlantic alliance, NATO, and the interests of the United States in Ukraine led to the approval of a fund of US$112 billion to be allocated to the armed forces. force and development of the arms industry. All, and on the same day, Congress also authorized a 2% increase in GDP for external defense and the internal security apparatus. Until June 2022, 1.4% of all wealth generated was used for these needs.
When with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact the threat that surrounded the West ended and Europe launched itself into development tasks, and it progressed – Germany became european locomotive-, until the United States and NATO said it was time to go back to war. There are sectors of Germany that take this to heart and seek to return to the worst of the Cold War. In that framework everything is requested. To give the signals of war again and destroy the lives of young people and the peace of the world by renewing the times of compulsory military service. Since its elimination in 2011, the idea of restoring the loon has returned from time to time.
With Nazism at the top and a complicit state, Wolfgang Hellmich, one of the leaders of the SPD, returned to the subject. The CDU Christian Democratic party applauded the event. The AfD has wiped its hands.
