A Hunka Burnin' Love for Fascism
The events last week in the Canadian Parliament are not just an isolated gaffe.
The actions of the Speaker of the Canadian Parliament last week were shameful, but the response of his fellow MPs was a real wake up call, alerting us to the barbarism which formerly upright and respectable western legislatures have fallen into. Quite apart from the Speaker’s disgrace in thanking Yarolsav Hunka, a member of the Waffen SS for ‘his service’ on the eve of Yom Kippur, Canadian MPs should take a long hard look in the mirror for applauding such service. It was the service of a man who fought for Adolf Hitler, in a branch of the Nazi war machine which perpetrated atrocities against Canadian POWs in Normandy. The SS saw themselves as a racial elite, not just a meritocratic elite, a racial elite. They took oaths of personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler, they were fanatically committed to the ideology of Nazism. So what was the service he was being thanked for? Surely not fighting against the allies. No, the service was, quite simply, killing Russians. That was what got the applause from the Canadian Parliament. He may have been fighting the Soviet Union, but as far as the Speaker was concerned that meant killing Russians, and like the trained Pavlov dogs they are, the MPs around him lapped this up unthinkingly.Â
The whole idea of representative democracy is that we elect those who are better educated, informed, more deliberative, a moderating hand restraining the passions of the hot headed demos. And here we had an atavistic crowd, a mob indeed, cheering for the death of those semi asiatic orcs, the Russians, even if it was done by those that Canadians gave their lives to defeat in the one war which we up till now had regarded as the very exemplar of a just war. The war to defeat the evil creed of Nazism. Nazism despised Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. We turn a blind eye to the treatment of Gypsies in Ukraine but we have been bombarded by such a wave of propaganda in recent years regarding Russians that many supposedly liberal types seem to think that blanket hatred of Russians is now all good, almost obligatory in polite society. At the same time that Russians have been demonised, the shadow of Nazism that lurks over the Ukraine war has been minimised. The Azov battalion have been lauded for their heroism. No doubt they have shown bravery, as did the SS in WW2. But they are in effect if no longer in name commanded by Andriy Biletsky, who even the BBC acknowledged as a white supremacist in 2014 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29755967
Since that article, the outsize influence of Neo Nazi groups and their links to western power brokers have been downplayed by the western media, in much the same way that the islamofascist tendencies of anti Assad groups our intelligence agencies worked with on their failed regime change ops in Syria have also been downplayed. Likewise, the barely veiled racist rhetoric of European leaders gives the lie to their posturing as the bearers of enlightenment values.
Despite what Justin Trudeau may think, simply writing off observations that there is something very concerning about the path the west has been taking of late is not Russian propaganda. The ovation for Hunka was not set up by Putin. Simply because Russinas make hay with the propaganda value of Ukrainian troops revelling in Nazi imagery doesn’t mean that absent of Russians picking up on it there would be no problem. We could try to make all this worrying Nazi stuff just go away, as one Canadian MP attempted the day after the ovation.
But Orwellian rewriting of history won’t make everything OK any more than pulling a sheet over your head will protect you from an axe man. Our society is in real moral danger as a result of our despicable foreign policy. I could go on about the Nazi situation in Ukraine but the problem is closer to home. Most Ukrainains are not Nazis. They wanted peace. They voted for Zelensky because he said he would bring them peace. Ukrainians wanted to make the Minsk accords work. If they had, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would still be alive.Â
But that’s not what NATO wanted. Western leaders bragged about pulling the wool over Putin’s eyes at Minsk, using his good faith upholding of the accords as a chance to rebuild Ukraines military for the war they looked forward to.https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html
Likewise, US pundits now brag about the amazing investment the Ukraine war is proving to be as they corner the European energy market and their arms industry fills its boots as the orders come rushing in. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/02/ukraine-aid-great-investment/
It was certainly a good investment for military industrial lobbyists. Forgotten in all this are the people of Ukraine. They are just fodder, a price worth paying as Madeleine Albright might have said. Admittedly, their suffering counts for a bit more than that of arabs…
But if stopping the war and stopping the steady annihilation of Ukrainian manhood that this unwinnable struggle is causing gets in the way of the US empire and the profits of the corporations who call the shots there, then they will have to learn to be less ‘casualty averse’. https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/347835#Big-brave-Western-proxy-warriors-keep-whining-that-Ukrainian-troops-are-cowards
Where do these commentators get brass balls big enough to make these sorts of comments?
The US suffered from the body bag syndrome in Vietnam with around 50 thousand dead. That’s around a quarter of what we are probably looking at as a conservative estimate of Ukrainian casualties in the current conflict. Ukraine’s population is about a tenth of that of the US. They are fighting a war they didn’t want, from which the only beneficiaries are US energy arms and financial industries (Ukrainian debt will leave the nation on the hook to the likes of Blackrock for decades to come.) They will have no sovereignty, being owned by their (mostly US) creditors. They will have lost a chunk of their best land unnecessarily. The flower of their youth is being annihilated on the muddy fields of the Donbass and there will be a real burden on the working age population to support the remainder in the war ravaged ruins of the post war Ukrainian economy. Meanwhile, US politicians brag about their investment. Have they any conception of how sick their behaviour is? Is there any morality in Washington? I look at the role of the UK and US in Ukraine and my feelings are heart-rending despair for the people of Ukraine and disgust at the likes of Boris Johnson who scuppered promising moves towards peace at a time before too much damage had been done.
When I used to stand on the terraces at Millwall there was an ironic chant which poked fun at the media representation of us fans;
‘We are evil! We are evil!
When I reflect on the behaviour of The US and UK governments since the turn of the century, I am increasingly inclined to think of that chant, stripped of its irony.Â
This madness has to stop.
Well said. Has any actual journalist tried to find out what "ordinary" Ukrainians feel about this wretched war and their trusted "allies" ?
An excellent summing up of a war that was planned from at least the beginning of this century.