Here’s a story destined for urgent dispatch down the Memory Hole. In fact, if you listen closely, you can already hear it being sucked down through the ducts of the GloboCap Ministry of Truth toward the enormous mnemonic incinerator where all official “unstories” go to die. Yesterday, it was an embarrassment. Tomorrow, it will no longer be of interest. By next week, it will have never happened.
So, let’s review it before that happens … and perhaps try to understand why it happened.
What happened was, on the eve of Yom Kippur, members of the Canadian House of Commons and assorted invited dignitaries and diplomats stood up in the Canadian parliament and paid extensive homage to a Nazi. Not a figurative Nazi. A literal Nazi. A member of the Waffen SS.
They did this shamelessly, exuberantly, on camera, in front of the entire world.
The Nazi in question is Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Nazi who emigrated to Canada in the 1950s following his military career as a Nazi in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary forces, whose members swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
Here’s Yaroslav (front row center) in what he describes as “the happiest days of his life” …
The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (also known as SS Galizien) was created by the Nazis in 1943. It was comprised of soldiers from the Galicia region who were trained and armed by German SS officers, and is believed to be responsible for war crimes like the Huta Pieniacka massacre in 1944, among other war crimes, mass murders, and so on.
Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, and the members of the Canadian parliament and other dignitaries in the House of Commons thanked Yaroslav “for all his service.” They rose to their feet, beaming up at Yaroslav with gratitude and adoration, and clapped like a bunch of trained Nazi seals.
For those who know their post-WWII history, this repulsive Nazi-celebrating spectacle was not as completely shocking as it might sound. As Max Blumenthal reported in the Grayzone, “by celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a hero, Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans.” Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, just happens to be the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist. And there are monuments to the Nazis all over Canada. And so on.
Anyway, someone drew attention to Yaroslav Hunka’s Nazi history, and the shit hit the fan on social media. The stink soon spread to the corporate and state media, which had no choice but to get on the bandwagon. They couldn’t get away with ignoring the story, so they were forced to report it, and spin it as a “blunder.”
Yes, it appears, once again, that “mistakes were made.”
The speaker of the House fell on his sword and resigned. Trudeau called the episode “deeply embarrassing,” and implied that the Russians had somehow tricked him and his cronies into cheering for a literal Nazi with their devious “Russian disinformation” operations.
Then, in a particularly Orwellian move, members of the House of Commons tried to erase the whole affair from the official record, so that, once the video had been visibility-filtered into Internet oblivion, there would be no proof that it had ever really happened. But they were too late. The Nazi cat was out of the bag.
Apologies, “fact checks,” and rationalizations ensued.
Dignitary after dignitary explained to the press how they had no idea who was fighting who in the Second World War, and had just assumed that the Nazis were the Russians … or something.
German historians goose-stepped onto Twitter to explain how the question of who exactly was and wasn’t technically a “Nazi” was … well, you know, complicated.
Oh, yeah, and speaking of the Germans, as it turns out, the German ambassador to Canada was among the crowd of dignitaries enthusiastically honoring a Nazi. Of course, the German public won’t be aware of that, as the German media will not report it, and RT, which did, is banned in Germany.
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