Shameful Equivocation by Modern-Day Collaborators

To their great shame, revelations about Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland's cover-up of her grandfather's role as a Nazi collaborator in wartime Poland and Austria has led many Canadian media pundits to expose themselves as apologists for the Nazi-fascist occupation of Europe during World War II and its collaborators.

In their eagerness to exonerate the foreign minister for lying about her family history and, over the course of many years, presenting her Nazi-collaborator grandfather Michael Chomiak as a "victim of communism" and Russian aggression, some have gone as far as to justify Chomiak's actions and those of other participants in the genocide of the European Jews and other myriad atrocities as morally acceptable or even as making the best of a bad situation. Others say that from the relative peace today, no judgement can be cast on those who decided, for one reason or another, to aid the fascist enslavement of Europe.

These modern-day collaborators, like those of the past have made their bed with an imperialist ruling elite that requires an official media and intelligentsia to provide endless justification for their irresponsible actions. They adhere to a belief that making a living depends on fulfilling this need. Experience shows that to militate against it would mean sacrificing one's career and loss of privileges. This professional sycophancy has now led many of the "leading lights" of Canadian journalism and official political discourse to equivocate on the morality of Nazi collaboration just as their fellow sycophants did during the Second World War.

At that time, it was observed that the elite and those closest to the rich and powerful were most likely to collaborate. As one example, the wealthy French fashion designer and businesswoman Coco Chanel used the German occupation of France in 1941 to petition the Nazi authorities to remove Jewish directors of her perfume company and grant her sole control. Later, archival documents showed that, to preserve her privileges and lifestyle, Chanel worked directly for German intelligence.[1]

Prominent members of the ruling elite of Europe and their retinues pursued their primary preoccupation with defending wealth, privilege and private property against the claims of the working class, embodied by the Soviet Union on their doorstep that was showing the world that it was possible to have a modern, democratic nation-building project outside the control of imperialism and finance capital. The Hitlerite concept of "Judeo-Bolshevism" which blamed Jews for the success of the revolution in Russia and the growing strength and prestige of the communist and workers' parties was in part aimed at their expropriation for personal gain. Within this, there were those from the elite who were willing accomplices of the Nazis and shared their aims but who took action to protect certain individuals, of whom Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, are hailed as the greatest examples.[2]

The working people, on the other hand, were and are the most likely to join and take action to build the resistance against Nazi-fascism and imperialism. In untold numbers, they organized collective and individual actions, often losing their lives, knowing that all efforts to bring an end to the genocidal rule of the fascists would contribute to securing a future for their children and countries. They rendered incalculable assistance to the armies of the anti-fascist alliance, particularly the Red Army which played the greatest role in liberating Europe.[3]

In Ukraine, like elsewhere following the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany in 1941, working people organized themselves into partisan units to operate behind enemy lines. In Ukraine during the years of occupation, partisans were responsible for eliminating 464,682 Nazi soldiers and collaborators, wrecking 4,958 trains, destroying 1,566 tanks and armoured vehicles, 13,535 motor vehicles and 2,206 bridges and putting out of commission 5,294 steam locomotives and 51,981 railroad cars. Along with military duties, partisans conducted political work among the population, including organizing resistance to the efforts of the Nazis to use the Ukrainian people and other peoples as a slave labour force for the German monopolies.[4]By 1944, 47,800 Ukrainians were organized into anti-fascist partisan units.[5]

Among these were Oleg Koshevoy (age 16) and Ivan Turkenich (age 20) who organized more than 100 anti-Nazi students and young men and women workers into a partisan organization called the Young Guard ( Molodaya gvardiya ) in the city of Krasnodon, Ukraine.[6]Among the achievements of these youth were the liberation of 70 prisoners from a concentration camp on November 15, 1942; saving 2,000 Ukrainians from deportation to Germany as slave labourers by destroying the lists with the burning of the German Labour Exchange in Krasnodon on December 6, 1942; destroying motor vehicles, ammunition and fuel supplies; and various political work, including flying the flag of the Soviet Union from the highest buildings in Krasnodon on November 6 and 7, 1942 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union.[7]

In January 1943 all but 11 members of the Young Guard were captured. All were tortured and executed. Juliana Gromova, age 19, who was known for her work among the population urging them to disobey enemy orders and disrupt the occupation, was severely beaten and abused. Gromova, along with other Young Guards, was executed on January 16, 1943 and her body thrown into a 58 metre deep mine pit in Krasnodon. Remaining members were executed on February 9, 1943. Krasnodon was liberated by the Red Army five days later, on February 14, 1943.[8]

The Young Guards who gave their lives swore an oath to "avenge without mercy the burning and ravaging of our towns and villages, the shedding of the blood of our people... And should my life be needed for this vengeance, I shall lay down my life without a moment's hesitation. If under torture or in cowardice I violate this sacred pledge, then may my name and kinsfolk be cursed for all time and may stern punishment be inflicted upon me by my comrades. Blood for Blood! Death for Death!"

While these teenage boys and girls were tortured to death in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, Michael Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada's Foreign Minister Freeland was attending dinner parties in Poland with Nazi officers and Emil Gassner, head of the press department in the German Generalgouvernement, the administrative body in charge of Nazi-occupied Poland and western Ukraine. While Ukrainians were rounded up as slave labourers and chose death over tyranny, Chomiak oversaw a newspaper hailing Hitler as liberator and issuing propaganda against Polish and Ukrainian Jews and Russians as they were sent to their deaths. The fact is that the sacrifice of those who joined the united front and resistance to Hitlerite fascism contributed immensely to its defeat. Their deeds were heroic. Those who call themselves journalists or intellectuals in Canada have to settle scores with these facts when they have the audacity to suggest Chomiak defended Ukraine or Ukrainian culture within that context.

The Nuremberg Defence

A main premise of those today defending the actions of Freeland's grandfather Chomiak -- the editor of an anti-Semitic, anti-Communist Nazi newspaper in Krakow that was seized from Moishe Kanfer, a Jewish publisher, who was later killed in the Belzec concentration camp -- is known as the "Nuremberg Defence." The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 found that the "superior orders" defence, colloquially known as "just following orders" was not an acceptable defence against war crimes. Nuremberg Principle IV states, "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

For instance, Terry Glavin of Postmedia wrote on March 8, "the newspaper, Krakivski Visti, was the only intellectual lifeline left to the people of the dismembered Ukraine at the time, and that Freeland's grandfather, the journalist Michael Chomiak, had no control over the Nazi mumbo jumbo he was obliged to print as the newspaper's titular editor." Glavin's characterization of Nazipropaganda as "mumbo jumbo" is as irresponsible as irresponsible gets and his claim is false; Krakivski Visti was never distributed in German-occupied Ukraine but in Krakow, Poland and Vienna, Austria under German occupation and among Ukrainian slave labourers in Germany. The aim was to indoctrinate them as well as to discourage them from waging resistance. Ukrainian culture and literature continued in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic except in those territories taken by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945.[9] Glavin's suggestion that no moral choice existed for Chomiak, or that collaboration was the moral choice, was rejected with contempt by the Nuremberg Trials and is a repugnant slander against the tens of millions who chose to give their lives for the cause of peace and freedom.

Paul Wells, writing for the Toronto Star on March 10, said, "There's no evidence Chomiak wrote any of the anti-Jewish diatribes" in the paper and that "if Chomiak was still alive at the end of the war, it's because he took pains to stay on the right side of the murderers who had occupied Ukraine and Poland for the war's duration. Everyone did. Everyone had to."

Justin Ling of VICE News wrote on March 6 that "Some of those articles[in Krakivski Visti that sought to dehumanize the Jewish population]were required by the Germans, according to records of correspondence from the paper's editors." Ling tries to explain that this anti-Semitic material often accused the "Russian Bolsheviks" of "being predominately Jewish" and repeats the Goebbels Hitlerite lie that "Russian Bolsheviks" "carried out mass killings of Ukrainians at the time" to justify it.

Ling is not much different from reactionary Rebel Media provocateur Gavin McInnes who, in a video released March 11, repeated the Hitlerite fraud of the "Holodomor" genocide of Ukrainians crafted by Nazi propagandists along with the lie of "Judeo-Bolshevism" that was used to justify the Holocaust. "Holodomor was Ukrainians, I think it was 10 million Ukrainians that were killed. That was by Jews. That was by Marxist, Stalinist, left-wing, Commie, socialist, Jews," McInnes said.

Paula Simons, writing for the Edmonton Journal on March 8, went further than others and declared that not only was no moral choice available, the actions of collaborators cannot be judged today. "From the vantage point of Canada in 2017, it's easy to condemn Chomiak's choices. In a war zone, squeezed between Hitler and Stalin, things weren't so simple." Fortunately, collaborators were judged according to the anti-fascist verdict of the Second World War, not the criteria of venal pundits moving heaven and earth to find arguments to overturn that verdict. The collaborators of the ruling elite emerged from the anti-fascist war discredited while the people showed themselves to be the most honourable.

Today Canada's ruling elite has become integral to the U.S. imperialist plans and wars to dominate Europe and control Asia. Within this, Russia is made a main enemy and the measures proposed by the imperialists are based on strengthening the police powers to be used against anyone targeted.

Canadian troops are deployed in Ukraine to support its army and fascist militias against "separatists" and "Russian sympathizers." Canadian troops will be sent in June to Latvia, where hundreds of thousands who are declared "ethnically Russian" are barred from voting or civic participation, to combat "Russian cyber-attackers" and generally to mass troops on Russia's borders. Canadians are told to expect stepped up militarism as demanded by the U.S., including increasing war spending and placing U.S. missiles in Canada. Canadians continue to voice their opposition whatever way they can to Canada's armed forces being involved in aggressive foreign military action.

To turn this opposition to imperialist war into a powerful organized force that puts its weight behind the call No Means No was the spirit of those who organized to defeat the fascist menace in Europe and Asia during the Second World War. People fought to safeguard this victory by establishing arrangements which would not permit the peace to be violated, and through which they could hold the rulers to account. At the same time, the intelligence agencies of the Anglo-American states and NATO did their utmost to make sure this was not the case using the fascist methods and agents of the past. There is no more important problem facing Canadians today than to work out how they can stay the hands of the warmongers and prevent further tragedies, the likes of which made the words "Nazi collaborator" among the most reviled for the working people.

Notes

1. Hal Vaughan, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War. Vintage, 2011.

2. Pauline Easton and Dougal MacDonald, "Why Does Canada Celebrate Raoul Wallenberg Day?" TML Weekly, February 7, 2015 and Rich Gibson, "Film Review: Schindler's List," TML Weekly,February, 2015.

3. See TML Weekly, May 9, 2015, Supplement "70th Anniversary of the Victory over Fascism in Europe."

4. "Partisan Movement in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45," Great Soviet Encylopedia, 3rd edition (1979).

In the partisan movement, the communists were mandated to play a leading role to organize resistance struggles immediately after the war broke out. A Resolution of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) dated July 18, 1941 demanded that "leaders of party organizations personally lead the entire struggle in the rear of the German troops, so that they inspire by their personal example, bravery, and self-sacrifice..."

5. "Soviet partisans in Ukraine, 1941-5," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (1993).

6. Oleg Koshevoy and Ivan Turkenich Molodaya gvardiya.

7. Molodaya gvardiya.

8. Juliana Gromova, Molodaya gvardiya.

9. The great destruction of Ukraine's cultural monuments and institutions during the German occupation, in addition to human losses is indicated in the section "Nazi war crimes in Ukraine," of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine , which Glavin and the like obscure: "The losses suffered by the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR alone are estimated at 126 million rubles. The Germans destroyed 116 institutions of higher learning along with 8,104 schools (another 10,052 schools were partially destroyed). Many architectural monuments were levelled, as were 151 museums -- museum exhibits commonly being either plundered or damaged beyond repair. More than 50 million books were burned or stolen; 634 print shops (77 per cent of the Ukrainian SSR total) were ruined; and more than 200 theatres were destroyed. During their retreat from Ukraine the Germans followed a 'scorched earth' policy and destroyed everything useful to their enemies."

(TML Weekly No. 9, March 18, 2017)