Harper Dictatorship's Involvement in Promoting Neo-Nazi Revival
Dougal MacDonald
The resolution voices great concern over the rise of racist crimes around the world and the promotion of parties with extremist agendas, for example, the French National Front. It warns against glorification of the Nazi movement and former members of the collaborationist Waffen SS organization and erecting monuments and memorials to them, for example, in the Baltic Republics. It also decries attempts to whitewash Nazi collaborators by depicting them as fighters of nationalist resistance movements and honouring them as such, as is being done in Ukraine. The anti-Nazi resolution will be formally adopted by the UN General Assembly as a body in December.
 The U.S. actively recruited Nazi war criminals through Operation Paperclip after World War II as part of its own striving for world domination -- click to enlarge. |
The Canadian and world's people know that the Nazis are war criminals, that they were responsible for over 60 million deaths, and that the revival of their ideology and politics has nothing to do with fighting for freedom and democracy. The fact that current members of Canada's ruling circles have a long history of Nazi collaboration, and that this collaboration is being perpetuated and ramped up by the Government of Canada today is a matter of grave concern to Canadians since its aim is to criminalize all those who take up the resistance to war and injustice today.
Here are just four recent examples of Harper's continuing love affair with Nazism.
- On November 22, 2014, the Harperites once again celebrated the "anniversary" of the mythical Holodomor, a 1932-33 shortage of food in Ukraine which the reactionaries claim was "man-made" by the Soviet Union. But, while there were difficult times in Ukraine mainly due to the ongoing imperialist interventionist campaign against the Soviet Union, there never was a "man-made famine." The Hitlerite Nazis created the famine myth in 1933 to discredit the Soviet Union, the enemy they most feared. Nazi stories in German newspapers were picked up by the reactionary British press and the yellow press of U.S. millionaire, William Randolph Hearst, an open supporter of Nazism. In September 1934, Hearst met with Hitler and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin and signed a cash deal to promote a positive image of the Nazis in the U.S., including paid-for columns by both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Hearst also attended the infamous 1934 Nazi Party Nuremberg rally.
- On August 23, 2014, the Harper dictatorship again celebrated the anniversary of Black Ribbon Day, a memorial day concocted by the ruling circles of Europe in 2009 to promote anti-communism through slanders and lies and to glorify Nazism. Harper and certain of his ministers make official statements and speeches to mark the day on behalf of the most reactionary dregs of society who link human rights to the rehabilitation of Hitlerite crimes against humanity, all in the name of high ideals. They promote the view that the Hitlerite Nazis who slaughtered the peoples of Europe, Britain and the Soviet Union were heroes, while the anti-fascist forces who fought them to the death, especially the communists, should be reviled.
 Prime Minister Harper with Ludwik Klimkowski, head of Tribute to Liberty at Toronto fundraiser, May 30, 2014. |
- In March 2014, Harper visited Ukraine to show support for the fascist-led coup which ousted the elected Ukrainian president, and to promote the new Ukrainian government which includes declared neo-Nazis and which has banned the communist party. No wonder Ukraine was one of the only three countries, along with Canada and the U.S., to vote against the 2014 UN anti-Nazi resolution. Harper also brought new Ukrainian prime minister, billionaire Petro Poroshenko, to Canada on September 17 to address Canada's Parliament. Previously in 2010, Harper visited Ukraine and laid a wreath to promote the mythical Holodomor. In an attempt to make people falsely equate the Nazis and the Soviet Union, Harper also laid a wreath at Babi Yar, site of horrific Nazi massacres. No mention was made that the massacres were carried out by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators who served in the Auxiliary Police and the Waffen SS Nachtigall and Roland battalions. Many such collaborators were later allowed to enter Canada.
While Harper's love affair with Nazism continues to develop, it still may seem out of sync with what Canadians expect of their governments and state officials. But Harper is actually following in the footsteps of his predecessors. Again, just to give four examples:
- In a 2001 book Le Livre noir du Canada anglais, investigative journalist Normand Lester features letters between Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett's (1930-35) Conservative Party and avowed Hitler supporter and fascist leader in Canada, Adrien Arcand. The letters detail that the Conservative Party donated $25,000 to Arcand's fascist newspapers in return for the assistance of his newspapers and organization in helping the Conservatives win 12 seats in the 1930 election. The uncovered letters also detail correspondence between Arcand and Conservative members between 1930 and 1935. Topics included the party helping Arcand get out of legal trouble and setting up potential meetings between Prime Minister Bennett and Kurt Ludecke, Hitler's Washington representative and fund raiser in the U.S.
- Canadian Prime Minster Mackenzie King (1935-48) openly admired Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In his personal diary, he recorded his impressions of his 1937 meeting with Hitler: "My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow man and his country." King also supported the policy of "appeasement" of Germany, including the illegal annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in 1938, which gave the green light to the Nazis to invade Poland in 1939.
- Thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators were admitted to Canada after the Second World War. Only a handful have ever been prosecuted or deported. To give one example, former Nazi prison guard Michael Siefert, known as the "Butcher of Bolzano," spent 50 years living and working in Vancouver until he was finally deported in 2008. To give another example, Nazi collaborator Radislav Grujicic, helped operate a prison camp just outside Belgrade. He took a job with U.S. intelligence after the war, even though he was convicted of war crimes by the post-war Yugoslavian government. The U.S. helped him immigrate to Canada in 1948 where he worked for the RCMP until 1951 when he was exposed as a war criminal. Yet, he was given citizenship in the mid-1950s and was never convicted or deported.
- Wolfgang Droege was a German-born Neo-Nazi leader who moved to Canada in the 1970s. He joined the neo-Nazi Western Guard in the early 1970s, then left to join the Nationalist Party of Canada in 1975 and the Ku Klux Klan in 1976, both of which disseminated racist propaganda. In 1981, Droege was arrested and imprisoned for three years for plotting to overthrow the government of the Caribbean island of Dominica. In 1985, Droege was sentenced to a thirteen-year jail sentence in Alabama for possession of cocaine and weapons, however he only served four years, returning to Canada in April 1989. Later in 1989, he and Grant Bristow, who was outed as a CSIS agent in 1994, established the neo-Nazi, white supremacist Heritage Front which worked within the Reform Party until 1992, even providing security at party meetings, during the time that Stephen Harper was Reform Party policy chief. Despite decades of open neo-Nazi activity, Droege was never prosecuted by Canadian authorities.
(Photos/Graphics: TML, W. Ray/Canadian Veterans Advocacy, Ottawa Streamer, J. Thompson/PMO)
(TML Daily No. 98, November 24, 2014)