I was trying for something disorienting like "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." but not having anything close to Orwell's skill it's a faint shadow of what he did and what I was trying for.
Now, if wary but possibly curious reader wishes to continue, here's something really confusing. A hard leftist talks about the Ukrainian influence in Canadian politics, Canadian influence in Ukrainian politics, Justin Trudeau and other neo-Nazis.
And despite the title of this piece he does not even get close to mentioning Chrystia Freeland's Nazi-collaborating grandfather.
note: the writer says the death toll in the Holodomor was ten million souls and there are a couple ways to get to that figure but it appears the number of deaths was closer to 3.5 million, still one of the greatest genocides in history.
From The Canada Files, July 18, 2020
A Liberal Hand in Hand with Nazis: Chrystia Freeland in UkraineWritten by: Adam Riggio
For progressives, foreign policy is one of the most difficult tasks of government to put ideals into action. Some decisions are relatively easy, like expanding intake of refugees from climate disasters, wars, or oppressive governments, or pressuring our allies to adopt better labour practices and workers’ rights.
But no one can leave the Great Games of geopolitics unsoiled from the filth of compromise with some form of brutality. Worse, geopolitics is not a field from which a country and its leadership can opt out. As long as some play aggressive geopolitics, everyone else must stay on the chessboard, to prevent our people from being hurt by hostile actors, or states by aggressively nationalist and imperialist political movements.
One such brutal battlefield of today’s Great Games is Ukraine. There, Canada, and particularly one of Canada’s central leaders Chrystia Freeland, has embraced the mud and blood of geopolitical empire-building and war. As Foreign Minister, our current Deputy Prime Minister has sullied herself and Canada with her support for violent, radical, racist nationalist movements in Ukraine.
When the Geopolitical Can Be Personal
These are the foreign policy shenanigans into which Canada and our state’s foreign policy had to step. The Canadian government’s alliance with the European Union and other democratic states and parties in Europe, as well as previous support for ending autocracy in the former USSR, meant that we were obligated to take some stand on the war in Ukraine.
The Liberal government extended the same military training, funding, and weapons sales program that Harper began, and as Foreign Minister, Freeland was in charge of maintaining that relationship. But there is also a personal element in Freeland’s own upbringing that makes Ukraine important to her: She is the child of a Ukrainian immigrant....
....What betrays Freeland’s apparent lack of self-discipline is how her use of geopolitical tools to fight the Russian military and Russian-allied militias in Ukraine, boosted ultra-nationalist militias whose goals include the cleansing and erasure of ethnic minorities from Ukraine.
The Inevitable Awkwardness of Ukrainian AlliancesUkraine has not been a very fortunate country over the last hundred or so years. Ukrainians organized armed resistance to Russian rule in the early years of Stalin’s government, support for which grew as Soviet policy emptied Ukraine of food, an intentional famine that killed more than 10-million people now known as the Holodomor. This was Stalin’s most brutal attempt to subjugate Ukraine to rule from Moscow, using the tools of genocide.The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists formed in response to Stalin’s state terror, but shared with the Soviets many of the same totalitarian political principles. The OUN’s extreme ethnic nationalist ideology held that Russian-speaking people and Jews had no place in Ukrainian society. The OUN was also openly fascist: their leader’s official position was Vozhd, warlord, or absolute military ruler.
With their goal of liberation from Russia and an ideology of ethnic purity and violent anti-Semitism, the OUN under Stepan Bandera in the 1940s were enthusiastic partners of the Nazi invasion. Bandera declared independence after helping the Nazi army push the Soviet army out of Ukraine, establishing the new state’s capitol in the OUN heartland, Lviv. Bandera’s stand for an independent Ukraine, rather than integration into Germany’s European empire, landed him in a Nazi prison cell for years.
As the USSR took full control over Ukraine from the end of the Second World War, the OUN was forced into exile, and because of their anti-communism found a home in the Ukrainian diaspora of Western Europe and North America. The Canadian government throughout the 1950s and 1960s encouraged OUN members and affiliates to immigrate. The policy’s purpose was to dilute the tendency to left-wing political organizing in the Ukrainian-Canadian community.
Chrystia Freeland’s mother, Halyna Chomiak, was one of those socialist activists, a union organizer and NDP candidate for a federal seat in Edmonton in 1988 (Chomiak came in second). Many other Ukrainians who arrived in the same era as Chomiak were far from progressive, including young men who were employed as violent enforcers against labour unions in the natural resources sectors.
Those same nationalist Ukrainians who fled the post-Stalin USSR include those who erected a monument to the Ukrainian branch of the Waffen SS who fought Stalin. These soldiers carried out multiple massacres of Jews, Russian-speakers, Roma, and other ethnic minorities throughout the German invasion. The memorial stands proudly, if controversially, in Oakville, Ontario, at the city’s St. Volodomyr Ukrainian Cemetery....
....It was Freeland who coordinated millions of dollars in arms sales from Canadian weapons plants not only to Ukraine’s government, but also Ukrainian nationalist militias. Those militias include the Azov Battalion, Dniepro Battalion, Donbas Battalion, and Aidar Battalion, each of whom has been credibly documented as carrying out massacres of Russian-speaking and Jewish Ukrainian civilians. Under Freeland’s watch, Canadian military officers also trained the Azov Battalion in guerrilla combat. One officer in charge of training the ethnic nationalist militia was Major Oksana Kuzyshyn, who is also an influential member of the lobby group the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress....****....Turning From the Dark Side of Heritage
Stepan Bandera’s ethnic nationalist party, the OUN, still exists today under another name: Svoboda, formerly the Social-National Party of Ukraine, whose ideology openly is and always was that kind of national socialism. A fairly minor party, their activists played a noticeable role in the Maidan uprising of 2014, as the only protestors openly committing violence against police forces and Party of Regions offices. Svoboda officials and leaders have deep connections with violent guerrilla groups like Azov Battalion, who have massacred ethnic minorities throughout the Russian invasion.That Chrystia Freeland, as the Foreign Minister of one of the world’s more resilient liberal democracies, sold arms and sent Canadian soldiers to train neo-Nazi groups in the name of holding back Russian military aggression, is a serious fault. Her own identity as the child of a Catholic Ukrainian immigrant includes a weakness that made her enthusiastic support for the nationalist battalions more likely than not. Freeland’s heritage is the same as Bandera’s and his successors in Ukrainian fascism: the city of Lviv, cultural centre of the most European, least Russian-influenced, region of Ukraine....
....MUCH MORE
It wasn't just Canada. The Obama administration, in addition to backing the thugs of the Maidan coup were waist-deep in neo-Nazis. If interested see:
Why Was The American Government Training Neo-Nazis In Ukraine?
