Filename: 20312A10
Word count: 1894


 Harper Government's Extremism in Contempt of Canadian Values
 Canadian Troops to Be Sent to Ukraine
Louis Lang
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 On April 14, the Harper Conservatives announced their decision to send 200 Canadian troops to Ukraine as part of a so-called training operation along with 800 U.S. troops and 75 troops from Britain. The Harper government did not explain why no debate took place in Parliament concerning the deployment of Canadian troops. Prime Minister Harper stated, "Canada continues to stand with the people of Ukraine in the face of the Putin regime's ongoing aggression. The Canadian military mission being announced today will help Ukrainian forces personnel to better defend their country's sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau supported the deployment of Canadian troops, while NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair criticized the decision because it was not authorized by Parliament or NATO. Elizabeth May of the Green Party of Canada demanded that the issue be debated in the House of Commons: "If Stephen Harper believes there is an argument to be made to send our troops to Ukraine, he should make it in Parliament. With the information Parliament currently has received, there seems to be no compelling reason to engage militarily in this region."

While Harper is justifying these actions by high sounding ideals like defending Ukraine's "sovereignty and territorial integrity," the real role of the Canadian government has been to assist U.S. imperialism along with the European Union in military intervention and installing and supporting the puppet regime in Ukraine, and it has been working hand in hand with the other foreign powers in the takeover of Ukrainian agriculture. In fact the Harper Conservatives have been active participants in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, before and after the coup against elected President Viktor Yanukovich, to open the rich Ukrainian agricultural sector for foreign private investment.[1]

The Harper Conservatives continue to justify the criminal activities of the Kiev government against the people of Ukraine. It is well-known that the Kiev regime turned on Ukrainians in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias, they bombed and used artillery to destroy cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. None of this is reported in the western mainstream media and what is reported are distortions and unfounded accusations that describe the Ukrainians in the eastern part of the country, who are fighting for the right to autonomous regions where their rights are recognized, as "terrorists" or "pro-Russian separatists."

In an April 16 interview on Salon.com, American historian Stephen F. Cohen spoke about the crimes of the Kiev government: "The horror of this has been Kiev's use of its artillery, mortars and even its airplanes, until recently, to bombard large residential cities, not only Donetsk and Luhansk, but other cities. These are cities of 500,000, I imagine, or 2 million to 3 million. This is against the law. These are war crimes, unless we assume the rebels were bombing their mothers and grandmothers and fathers and sisters. This was Kiev, backed by the United States. So the United States has been deeply complicit in the destruction of these eastern cities and peoples. When[Victoria]Nuland[Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs]tells Congress there are 5,000 to 6,000 dead, that's the U.N. number. That's just a count of bodies they found in the morgues. Lots of bodies are never found. German intelligence says 50,000."

The Harperites make a point of repeating the big lie each time they speak, about "Russian aggression," although not a shred of evidence exists to justify their wild accusations. Along with its most unprincipled demonization of Russian President Putin, the Canadian government is trying to justify assisting the rabid, warmongering regime installed by the U.S. in Kiev, which far from being a democratic institution, is a collection of infighting oligarchs, each with their own private armies and neo-Nazi militias.

The Kiev government, which the Harper Conservatives are intent on propping up, revealed their true fascist nature with legislation they passed recently that imposed a police state in Ukraine.

On April 9, the Ukrainian Rada passed four pieces of legislation submitted by the government, which ban all "Communist symbols and propaganda." After the law comes into effect, any monuments for Communist figures which have not already been destroyed by fascist thugs in the last few months must be demolished. Also any cities and streets named after communists are to be renamed. The preamble states: "The draft law is aimed at condemning Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) criminal totalitarian regimes at the legislative level, implementation of the ban on public denial of the criminal nature of totalitarian regimes, banning public use of symbols and propaganda, the introduction of the State's obligation to carry out an investigation and disclose the crimes committed by members of these totalitarian regimes to prevent the recurrence of such crimes in the future, eliminate threats to the sovereignty, territorial integrity and national security of Ukraine, as well as for historical justice."

The anti-propaganda legislation says it concerns Communist symbols from 1917 to 1991 and the list of banned items includes the Soviet flag and anthem as well as monuments and historical plaques commemorating Communist leaders. Penalties for violating the law range from five to 10 years in prison.

Among the monuments already demolished by fascist thugs is one dedicated to the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Nikolai Kuznetsov in the village of Povcha in the Rivne region of Ukraine. Kuznetsov, subsequently recognized as the top Soviet scout during the Great Patriotic War, personally eliminated 11 generals and high-ranking officials of the occupation administration of Nazi Germany. It was Kuznetsov who managed to obtain information about the preparation of the German offensive at Kursk. According to TASS, he died on March 9, 1944, during a shootout with soldiers of the Organization of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the paramilitary faction of the Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) -- the same notorious Nazi-collaborating organization whose members have been proclaimed national heroes of Ukraine by this new law.

In Velikiy Lyuben (Lviv region), the followers of UPA also demolished a monument to the 5-year-old Roma Taravsky, a Polish boy who was killed by the Bandera gang.

The condemnation of "Nazi totalitarian regimes" is cover for the true anti-communist intent of the legislation. Another law passed by the Rada is called, " On Legal Status and to commemorate fighters for Ukraine's independence in the twentieth century ." This law lists dozens of organizations which are recognized as Ukrainian freedom fighters, including those which collaborated with the Nazis and carried out massacres of Jews, Poles and others, like the OUN and the UPA. Their symbols are widely used by far-right organizations and paramilitary fascist organizations which are now part of the state apparatus. In fact, just a few days ago, the leader of the Right Sector Dmytro Yarosh, who sees himself as the inheritor of the tradition of Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera and his OUN-UPA organizations, was appointed as Advisor to the Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces.

Under this new law, the symbols of these Nazi-collaborationist and genocidal organizations are protected: "Public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for the independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century,[a]recognized insult to the memory of fighters for independence of Ukraine in the 20th century, constitutes disparagement of the Ukrainian people and is illegal."

Another organization specifically mentioned by the law is the Hetmanate, a short-lived anti-socialist German-backed dictatorship which existed in 1918. With this the re-writing of history by present day "Ukrainian patriots" reaches the absurd. The Hetmanate only existed because of German and Austro-Hungarian support. The commanding staff of its armed forces were all officers of the Russian Imperial Army defeated by the Bolsheviks and the Hetmanate was opposed by the vast majority of Ukrainians and overthrown by the people within ten months. That such an organization can be considered part of "the struggle for the independence of Ukraine" clearly demonstrates that in fact what is being legitimized and protected is anti-communism and anti-socialism.

The new Ukrainian laws also downgrade the May 9 Victory Day celebration by creating an additional Remembrance and Reconciliation Day in Ukraine on May 8 "to commemorate all the victims of World War II." Presumably that means the celebration of those who died fighting on the Nazis' side. The term Great Patriotic War will no longer be officially used. Victory Day will remain a holiday but the remembrance ceremonies cannot include any Soviet symbols under the new law. Since it was the Soviet Union which played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazism, by banning all Soviet symbols these laws render the victory over Nazism meaningless.

These new laws have been roundly condemned by people all over the world.

In an April 12 statement, the Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced the laws passed by the Ukrainian Parliament to equate Nazism and Communism and to recognize local Nazi collaborators as "Freedom Fighters":

"In a statement issued here today by its Director for Eastern European Affairs, Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, of the Center termed the decisions an outrageous distortion of the history of World War II and the Holocaust."

According to Zuroff:

"The passage of a ban on Nazism and Communism equates the most genocidal regime in human history with the regime which liberated Auschwitz and helped end the reign of terror of the Third Reich. In the same spirit the decision to honour local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns Hitler's henchmen into heroes despite their active and zealous participation in the mass murder of innocent Jews. These attempts to rewrite history, which are prevalent throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe, can never erase the crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in these countries, and only proves that they clearly lack the Western values which they claim to have embraced upon their transition to democracy."

Meanwhile the extremism of the Harper government is such that it can entertain the likes of Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament Andriy Parubiy, who was greeted like a hero by the Harper Conservatives on Ferbruary 23 in Ottawa. Parubiy co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, a neo-Nazi party which glorifies the wartime activity of anti-Semitic collaborators in the Second World War, including the OUN and UPA.

The Harper government's decision to send Canadian troops to Ukraine constitutes interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state but, more importantly, he is implicating the Canadian military in the war crimes being committed against the people in Donetsk and Luhansk by the Kiev government. Furthermore, in joining with the U.S. and Britain, who have also deployed troops to Ukraine, the Harper government is violating the Minsk peace agreement of February 15 which bars foreign troops from Ukrainian soil.

In this collusion with the neo-Nazi government in Kiev, the Harper Conservatives stand condemned for being in contempt of the vast majority of Canadians who fought and made great sacrifices to defeat the scourge of Nazism during the Second World War.

Note

1. See"Canada's Financial Assistance to Ukraine: Plunder in the Name of Economic Stabilization, Democracy and Human Rights," Louis Lang, TML Weekly , February 14, 2015 - No. 7.

(TML Weekly No. 18, May 2, 2015)