Oh, Canada!

South Park's Mothers Against Canada were right to Blame it

Canada—ruled over by Justin “Blackface” Trudeau—is a funny place right now.

It wasn’t always: in 2019 Britain took top funniness billing with its parliamentary shenanigans over Brexit. That said, even Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, and Liz Truss at their worst didn’t manage to do anything as bad as invite a Waffen-SS veteran to the House of Commons and hail him as a war hero.

Canada did.

Stated baldly like that, it seems impossible, bonkers, BS. When people first told me about it on Elon’s personal playground aka Twatter, I didn’t believe them. No government is daft enough to do that, I thought, especially not Woke Canada’s.

How did we get here?

Whoopsie

War is rarely pure and never simple. WWII was no exception. Thing is, if you’re British or Australian or American—or Canadian, for that matter—WWII can look like what my dad used to call (with heavy irony) “the good war”. My dad was a Royal Navy WWII veteran. Protecting merchant shipping destined for the UK as it made its way across the Atlantic—as he did—was an unalloyed good.

But the complexities and exigencies of warfare meant the Western Allies had to make common cause with the USSR, a great empire in its own right with a government as genocidal and deranged as the one seated in Berlin.

Russia and various “captive nations” (including Ukraine) were ruled over by a savage tyranny which killed more of its own citizens during the 1930s than Nazi Germany managed under cover of war. Stalin had also carved up Poland with Hitler in 1939—an arrangement historian Roger Moorhouse called The Devils’ Alliance in his book about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

If you were Polish and fighting against the Russians in 1939-40, you probably were a war hero.

Later—in 1944-45—Stalin’s armies raped and murdered their way across Eastern Europe, Soviet troops shadowed everywhere by battalions of secret policemen ready to shoot local dissidents, not to mention terrified peasant boys who fled the front line.

If the war was a crusade against barbarism—a “good war”—it’s hard to account for the UK’s forging of a jewel-covered ceremonial longsword as a wartime present to Joseph Stalin. That sort of behaviour suggests the Soviet alliance is only intelligible and defensible in the context of a war for national survival and in the national interest. It’s less acceptable if we conceive of the conflict as a grand battle of good versus evil.

Unfortunately, the retconning of our collective WWII memories—that is, repurposing the war’s events to tell a simple tale of victory over fascism in the name of idealism and human rights—is now so pervasive that anyone who fought tyranny for whatever reason can be recast as a hero.

And that, I think, is behind the standing ovation SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka got in Ottawa last Friday.

A bit of history

Hunka is a Ukrainian veteran of the 14th Waffen-SS Division “Galicia”, variously 14. SS-Freiwilligen Division “Galizien” or “Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS [Galizische Nr. 1”]. This division was comprised almost entirely of volunteer Ukrainians and typically officered by an ethnic minority known as Volksdeutsche—men of mixed Ukrainian and German ancestry who spoke both languages.

Here’s a 1943 recruitment poster for them:

We’ve all become familiar with the idea that Ukraine isn’t just “part of Russia” since February 24th last year. However, that state of affairs has obtained for at least decades and probably centuries.

In the (roughly) half of the country west of the river Dnipro, Ukrainian nationalism has historically been pretty fervid. By contrast, the (roughly) half of the country east of the Dnipro has always been closer to Russia culturally and linguistically. When (in the 1990s) I researched and wrote my first novel—with its “West Ukraine during the Holodomor/WWII” setting—I admit to seeing partition in the country’s future.

Putin’s maladministration and incompetence in the bits of Ukraine Russia conquered in 2014 coupled with more recent atrocities has driven the eastern half of the country closer to the western half, such that I think it’s possible to say Ukraine’s ethnogenesis is now complete. This means it enjoys a right to self-determination as conceived of by nineteenth century classical liberals and legal positivists.

That said, how do you explain Yaroslav Hunka and others like him?

I get that everyone’s frantically googling the 14th Galizien, but only a modicum of digging will reveal all sorts of Ukrainian collaboration in some of the worst bits of Hitler’s genocidal scheming. Google “Trawniki Men” or “Operation Reinhard” if you dare—and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

That said, the primary reason for Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany—as Hunka has admitted himself in various pieces written for his veterans’ association [in Ukrainian]—was to kill Russians. And, consistent with the country’s (then) linguistic and cultural divisions, most collaborators came from religiously-and-lingustically-distinct West Ukraine.

East of the Dnipro (and, of course, all Ukrainian Jews including President Zelenskyy’s family), Ukrainians fought for the USSR. Various Nazi leaders had a moan about this, too. They thought the whole country would be like the Western half, and complained of “passivity” in eastern cities like Donetsk and Kharkiv.

The view I formed at the time I wrote my first novel was that there were good reasons for Ukrainians to fight against Russian and Communist imperialism (and more generally against Marxism, which is toxic, genocidal nonsense). The problem, of course, was how those reasons led Ukrainian nationalists into widespread and destructive Nazi collaboration. And Nazism was also toxic, genocidal nonsense.

The Nazis also strung Ukrainians along, initially promising the country’s leadership Germany would support Ukrainian independence. Hitler, of course, did no such thing: he viewed Ukrainians as racially inferior Slavs so fit only for servitude. Germany didn’t even bring Stalin’s monstrous forced collectivisation—a significant contributor to Ukraine’s Holodomor in 1931-3—to an end.

It was only when Himmler’s underlings persuaded him that West Ukrainians were Aryans (because their ancestors were Swedish Vikings) that Nazi policy towards Ukraine started to shift, and then only in ways that made it easier for Germany to use Ukrainian recruits as cannon fodder and Ukrainian civilians as slave labour.

The 14th’s name is indicative of this complexity. Its Ukrainian recruits and Volksdeutsche officers wanted it to be called a Ukrainian division, but Himmler—remember, opposed to Ukrainian independence—wasn’t having any. Hence the use of “Galicia”, an Austro-Hungarian name for West Ukraine (Галичина in Ukrainian, pronounced Halychyna).

Towards the end of the war—when Nazi Germany’s chain of command had pretty much collapsed—troops in the 14th did rename their formation “The First Division of the Ukrainian National Army”. By that point, there was no-one left to tell them “no”.

Some of them didn’t flee west, either, staying in Ukraine and waging a guerrilla war against the Soviet Union that persisted well into the 1950s.

The 14th’s insignia had distinct Austro-Hungarian vibes.

Blame Canada!

Where does this leave Justin Trudeau and Canada’s international reputation (apart from “in tatters”)? Trudeau fils has always been a lightweight. He’s a walking, talking argument against electing pretty drama teachers with negative IQ points to be PM. In this extraordinary roo-in-the-headlights video—made in response to revelations about Hunka’s background—he’s still trying to blame Russian propaganda and disinformation for an inexcusable lapse entirely of his own government’s making.

Why do I say “inexcusable lapse”?

Canada is full of postwar Ukrainian immigrants in the same way Australia is full of postwar Greek and Italian immigrants. Just as Australians finished up knowing a lot more about those two countries thanks to the influx, so did Canada with Ukrainians and Ukraine. Relatedly—and like Australia, the US, and the UK—it also had major war crimes trials (mostly leading to acquittals, to be fair) of Ukrainian collaborators in the 80s and 90s. People with an interest or background in law or politics should know this.

When I was researching The Hand that Signed the Paper, for example, it was impossible to ignore Polykhovich v Commonwealth (the “War Crimes Act Case”). Not only did it concern Ukrainian collaborators, but a constitutional aspect went all the way to Australia’s High Court, producing one of Justice Brennan’s famous dissents. This was headline news for months. Trials that finish up in a country’s apex court—particularly when there are interesting or terrifying facts involved—are not small affairs.

And Australia didn’t admit anything like as many postwar Ukrainian immigrants as Canada.

Meanwhile, Canadian House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota appears to be swearing undying love and gratitude to the bus under which he’s been thrown, taking all the blame. Mind you, his speech in the House featuring Hunka (full text here) was risible to the point of cringeworthy.

[UPDATE Wed 27th Sept 10 am BST: Anthony Rota has stayed under the bus long enough for it to kill him off. He’s just resigned.]

Watching Woke Canuckistan led by the Blackfaced One try to back itself out of this weapons-grade parliamentary cockup has been nothing if not amusing. I’ve been introducing all sorts of people to Mothers Against Canada and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

Thank-you to the anonymous black-belt in Photoshop who produced this

However, there is a serious point underneath all the pointing and laughing, and it’s this: historical events of WWII’s magnitude are not univocal. They don’t just say one thing.

Canada’s embarrassment is borne of the trend towards an ahistorical and politicised folk memory of that great conflict, coupled with the belief that Ukraine’s cause in its current war of necessity against Russia is always and everywhere “a good war”. The wokery with which Canada is particularly afflicted is also fond of reducing the past to simplistic morality plays, but the past often refuses to cooperate. Last Friday’s events in Ottawa were a signal act of historical non-cooperation.

I’ve written in detail elsewhere (commentary collated here) on why I think Ukraine is on the side of right in this conflict. However, right and good are not the same thing. It’s possible to resist tyranny for bad reasons and in a bad cause. It’s possible to do bad things in a good cause. It’s possible to do good things in a bad cause.

And there are no “good wars”, only bad and less bad ones.

Housekeeping: Now I’m back from consulting, Lorenzo Warby’s next essay will be out later this week, and I’m in the process of organising a second unrecorded, Chatham House rules Zoom chat for paid subscribers.