The Marxist-Leninist Weekly

Painting "Partisan Oath" by S. Amsonov, 1941. Hundreds of thousands of men and women
behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied territories including Ukraine put their lives on the line in organized individual and collective resistance to end Hitler's enslavement of Europe and genocide. Canada's Foreign Minister was recently caught covering up the Nazi collaborator
past of her grandfather, who worked for a Nazi newspaper in wartime Poland,
where fascists killed nearly 6 million people.

The Apologies for Canada's Foreign Minister

Canadians face the important issue of figuring out what is behind the stories surrounding the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland. Facts show that her maternal grandfather was a Nazi collaborator in wartime Poland.[1] It has also come to the attention of the public that Freeland has been covering up her grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis and that, in fact, she too believes him to be a freedom fighter.[2] When questioned about these things, Chrystia Freeland chose not to answer and instead gave vent to the government's narrative which blames many things on the Russians including spreading "fake news" to derail democratic institutions in Canada.

It is noteworthy that the CBC has remained eerily silent as have the Prime Minister, the Government of Canada and the Liberal Party and others in the ruling circles. Freeland herself subsequently withdrew from the fray.

It was left to a vocal cabal of journalists, professors and pundits of various kinds to issue apologies for the foreign minister. Their shocking apologies for the crimes of the Nazi collaborators during World War II reveal a profound anti-communism which makes them no better than the Nazi collaborators themselves. When those who make a living touting "Canadian values" reveal themselves so utterly as Nazi sympathizers Canadians can conclude that by trying to vindicate what Chrystia Freeland stands for much is at stake. Nothing they can now do going forward will redeem the values they claim to stand for in the name of freedom and democracy.

These shameless Nazi apologists were joined by others, from those who have a well-known history of defending Nazi collaborators, to those who defend the Foreign Minister by equivocating in various ways.[3] Some praise the beleaguered Freeland in various shades of brilliance asserting that her record speaks for itself.[4] Others say she made a mistake in not revealing the skeletons in her closet.[5] Still more declare indifference to this past family relationship by drawing analogies to Biblical verses about "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children," and so on.[6] Only a few dare to speak truth to power.[7] They are joined by many on social media.

What is interesting is how both the information and the disinformation about Freeland's grandfather and whether or not she was aware of his record diverts from the record of her own words and deeds. It is her own words and deeds that reveal the dangers in which she and her government are embroiling Canada and Canadians in the present. What the ruling circles want to avoid at all costs is for Canadians to assess for themselves what kind of democracy Freeland and the Government of Canada stand for and whether that is the kind of democracy Canadians want. Is it the democracy they shed their blood for fighting in World War II in heroic battles against the Hitlerites and their brutal collaborators?

This issue of TML Weekly is dedicated to coverage of this controversy and related affairs. The aim is to put the actions of the past and the present in context so that Canadians can make sense of things for themselves.

Notes

1. Michael Chomiak was editor of a daily Nazi newspaper, Krakivski Visti (Krakow News), from 1940 to 1945 in Krakow, Poland and later Vienna, Austria when the cities were under German occupation. The Nazi authorities established this paper to "Ukrainize" the occupation, after they seized a printing press from its Jewish owner, Moishe Kanfer, who was later killed in the Belzec concentration camp.

Krakivski Visti was published by Ukrains'ke vydavnytstvo, a publishing house controlled by Volodymyr Kubijovyˇc (Kubiiovych) with the approval of Hans Frank, Reichproteckor of the General Gouvernement of Poland. Frank was a war criminal and mass murderer who was executed at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity -- presiding over the extermination of Poles and Jews.

Kubijovyˇc in turn was "Leader" (Providnyk) of the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC), formally established in June 1940, a year before the Nazi invasion of Ukraine as "the official umbrella organization" of the "nationalists" in the General Governement. Entirely financed by Germany, it is described as "the most important Ukrainian collaborationist institution in the General Government" by German-Polish historian Dr. Grzegorz Rossolinksi (Stephan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, p. 254).

The UCC was a criminal organization founded for the realization of the genocidal plans of the Third Reich. Through Krakivski Visti, the UCC carried out three basic activities that constitute war crimes: (1) propaganda for collaboration and ethnic cleansing; (2) the plunder of food and raw materials, and human trafficking of Ukrainians to be enslaved in Germany (in total, during the occupation of Western Ukraine to Germany, the Nazis stole 402,777 people); and (3) beginning from May 1943 recruited cannon fodder for the depleted ranks of Hitler's army through the organization of the Waffen SS, which afterwards committed the most ruthless crimes against humanity.

On May 16 1943, Chomiak called for the actual recruitment of Ukrainians into Hitler's SS. He published the May 6, 1943 "Appeal to Ukrainian Citizens and Youth by the Ukrainian Central Committee President [Kubiiovych] on the Formation of the Galician Division" -- the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen (Armed) SS.

Chomiak had fled to German-occupied Poland in 1939 after Polish-held territories in western Ukraine were reintegrated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. When Nazi-fascism was on the verge of defeat by the Soviet Union and the resistance movements of the peoples of Europe, including tens of thousands of organized partisan resistance fighters in Ukraine, Chomiak (and the entire UCC leadership) evacuated to Vienna with Nazi troops, ending up at the spa town of Bad Worishofen near Munich in March 1945. This was an area which came under U.S. control at war's end and where the entire "nationalist" leadership was gathered. Chomiak and family were housed there as "displaced persons" by the U.S. until October 1948 when they were brought to Canada.

2. Freeland, for her part, told her grandfather's story in Blacklock's Reporter in the following way, in December 2014, "My grandparents were from Ukraine and struggled against Communism. [...] My grandfather was a lawyer and editor, the first in his family to gain an education. He joined a campaign called Samopomich to help farmers and promote literacy. He was a teetotaler and would tell them, stop drinking and learn how to read! In 1939 my grandparents fled Ukraine to avoid arrest at the outbreak of World War Two. Two of their children were born in Poland, two more were born in a displaced persons' camp in Germany; two more were born in Canada. Ukrainians who arrived in Canada after the war saw themselves as political exiles. They were forced to flee."

She repeated this story in May 2015 in an essay for the U.S. Brookings Institution with the revealing title "My Ukraine," writing, "For the rest of my grandparents' lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine." Brookings, a major "think tank" based in Washington, is closely connected to the U.S. state, the Democratic Party and regime change operations in Europe and the Middle East.

3. Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at Royal Military College in Kingston wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on March 9, "It was fake news then and still is. Allegations about 'Nazis in Canada' ... have circulated for decades." Luciuk went on to relate how he personally intervened during the 1980s to make sure that "Not a single person was ever convicted of being a 'Nazi' in a Canadian criminal court of law."

Terry Glavin, in not one but two breathless denunciations -- for Postmedia on March 8 and in Maclean's on March 14 -- declared the revelation a "hoax" and "a textbook case of Russian disinformation by conspiracy theory." Between the lines, Glavin said that, even if it is true, it does not matter because the Nazi newspaper was an "intellectual lifeline" and that Chomiak "had no control over the Nazi mumbo jumbo." Echoing this argument, Justin Ling of VICE News wrote on March 6 that the anti-Semitic material in Chomiak's newspaper was "required by the Germans."

4. Paul Wells, writing for the Toronto Star on March 10, went so far as to say, "Chrystia Freeland is in the business of helping societies -- ours, Ukraine's, the world's -- stay on the side of sanity. The fact that her family existed in the damned 20th century gives her opponents ammunition. None of this takes away the legitimacy of her important work."

5. Paula Simons, writing for the Edmonton Journal on March 8, mused, "Naturally, Freeland's proud of the grandfather she loved, who became a leader in Edmonton's post-war Ukrainian community. Still, she might have been clearer about his complicated legacy..."

6. Colby Cosh, writing for the Globe and Mail on March 8, concluded, "Given what we know, entirely because Freeland's family has told us, this is not a question of 'sins of the grandfather,' much less those of 'an innocent granddaughter.'" Simons of the Edmonton Journal quipped, "Let's judge her on her merit -- not what her grandfather did, or didn't, do."

7. Among these are David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen who noted on March 8, "it actually isn't so outlandish. Michael Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator. [...] So much for Russian disinformation." Scott Taylor, writing for the Chronicle Herald on March 12, pointed out the cover-up and drew parallels with Canada's military buildup in Latvia, where public celebrations of the Nazi SS take place annually. David J. Climenhaga, writing for rabble.ca on March 12 said, "Who would ever have imagined major Canadian media companies would conclude collaborating with the Nazis when they were on a genocidal spree in your country was just another legitimate response to a difficult moral dilemma?"

What to Make of Foreign Minister's Attempts
to Deceive Canadians

The issues which have come to light about Chrystia Freeland demand her resignation for misrepresenting facts, concealing her past and deliberately hiding the truth about it to Canadians. Why? If she did not come clean about this what else will she not come clean about as foreign minister of Canada?

She has shown she is willing to address questions of war and peace, about which Canadians are very concerned, in a deceitful and arrogant way. This is not right or acceptable. A person who has a clear conscience does not resort to such double talk and shenanigans.

Not only does she defend her high-profile Nazi grandfather, she does not repudiate the Third Reich and Nazi collaboration in the Second World War. Instead she inveigles about "Russian disinformation to destabilize Canada." She presents the government as well as the grandfather as a victim rather than taking an advanced stand in defence of the highest ideals of humanity. The war against Fascist Germany and the Axis Powers cannot be viewed as an ordinary war nor a European war nor can collaborators be turned into "freedom fighters" and victims. The extension of this criminal logic is that Hitler and his generals were "freedom fighters." The Third Reich turned Ukraine into a slaughterhouse of citizens of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Armenian and Roma nationality and of the Jewish faith.[1] People rose to defend their rights and their land against the enemy and fought until the last drop of blood for their cities and villages, displaying the courage, initiative, and skills that were inherent in their people.

For Freeland, a misrepresentation of the truth is transformed into the truth, the victimizers into the victims, simply because she says so. If you disagree, you are at least a fellow-traveller of the Russians if not a terrorist, and you literally deserve to be exterminated as is happening in Ukraine today. It makes one wonder what Freeland is really up to. If she does not come clean about Nazi and fascist collaborators, what other collaborators is she defending or will she defend as the foreign minister of our country? Nazi and fascist collaborators in Ukraine! In this sense, the central issue has nothing to do with Ukraine, Poland or Russia. This attitude, besides other things, simply states: We have the right to do whatever we wish. On this basis, Freeland could do or justify literally anything. This attitude is a serious threat to the freedom, peace and security of the peoples.

Freeland has to be held to account for trying to mislead Canadians on this matter. And look how she is wriggling, her own story changing in the media over just a few days!

It seems that the Liberals are very silent! There are two possible reasons. They are relying on the monopoly media to spread disinformation and innuendos as the first line of their defence. Or, behind the backs of Canadians, a "night of the long knives" is underway.[2] The Canadian Liberals in whose name this Foreign Minister is acting should also be called on to step forward and tell us whether this reprehensible and cowardly behaviour is what they stand for.

Freeland is the second foreign minister in the Trudeau government caught red-handed in a brazen deception of Canadians. Predecessor Stéphane Dion created the impression in January and March 2016 that a $14.8 billion arms sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a done deal by the previous Harper government when he had already signed the papers himself. "He said it would not be right for Canada to go back on its signature due to harmful consequences," TML pointed out. "He repeated that Canada's aim was to bring stability to the region and advanced various other pragmatic excuses to justify aggression and war. He covered up the use of Canadian weaponry in Saudi Arabia's 2011 military intervention in Bahrain to quell protests." The Liberal Party, during the 2015 federal election, promised to end Canada's "combat mission" in Iraq and gave the impression that they also opposed the extremism of the Harper government and stood for peace. Rather than end Canada's combat mission in Iraq, the Liberals announced increases in the number of Canadian special forces sent to participate in the U.S.-led war. These forces are fighting with Peshmerga militia to carve up Iraq and carve out an independent Kurdistan. Military deployment in the Middle East is unprecedented in history. Enough is enough. The circle of deception is closed.

Further, it merits attention that the Canadian Foreign Minister and the media have kept mum about her own financial ties and past services to the big Ukrainian oligarchs such as Viktor Pinchuk, the second richest oligarch in Ukraine, with whom she collaborated at his annual Yalta Economic Forum. It was the oligarchs and their U.S. patrons who were the financiers and organizers of the coup d'état of an elected government on February 23, 2014 and who are the financiers and organizers of the private punitive militias -- some 50 in number -- now integrated into the hastily formed National Guard being trained by the U.S. and Canada.[3]

The denouement of the Foreign Minister comes in the context of the Trudeau government extending Canadian military intervention in Ukraine for two more years. It is noteworthy that during all the hullabaloo in Ottawa and elsewhere about "Russian disinformation," not a single individual spoke against the right of Canada to interfere in the affairs of other countries or warned about the role of the United States, the commander of this interventionist force. Canada must withdraw its military forces and get out of the U.S.-Ukraine Military Commission which, after it was formed in 2014, invited Canada and Britain to join its ranks. This U.S. agency operates outside of NATO and outside of the United Nations.[4]

No matter what the pretext, this is unacceptable. By no stretch of the imagination can Ukraine be considered an independent or a democratic country as the ministry of Global Affairs and the Trudeau government claim. Nor can Canada's military mission in Ukraine be considered a peaceful, non-combat or a bilateral one. This is simply not true. It is the United States which calls the shots. Canadian military intervention in Ukraine and Eastern Europe is extremely threatening to the struggle of the people for their freedom and independence, and to peace and security on the world scale. It cannot be taken lightly. Canada should break off all diplomatic, economic and trade relations with Ukraine.

There is no place in modern governance for fascists and unrepentant fascist apologists, double dealers and swindlers. Canadians are justly condemning Freeland's shameless behaviour and arrogance. Go all out to demand the Foreign Minister's resignation, now!

Notes

1. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, in the entry "Nazi war crimes in Ukraine," states: "According to recent Soviet figures a total of more than 5,265,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed during the occupation of Ukraine. The figure presumably includes the 900,000 Ukrainian Jews whom Western scholars estimate to have been murdered. The Germans destroyed 714 towns and urban areas and 28,000 villages and farmsteads, and left approximately 10,000,000 people homeless. Total material losses have been estimated at a value of some 1.2 trillion prewar rubles."

2. An allusion to the split engineered in the cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker by the Kennedy administration and U.S. intelligence in 1962-63 over his refusal to place U.S. nuclear weapons in Canada in a coup d'état to install the Lester Pearson Liberals. Prominent journalists such as Charles Lynch of Southam News were incorporated into the operation. See Richard Sanders, "1962-1963, 'Knocking Over' "Dief the Chief": How the U.S. Ambassador Helped Engineer 'Regime Change' in Canada," Global Research, March 31, 2003

3. Seventeen of these units maintain a separate "Joint Staff" claiming they are an "alternative to the Chiefs of Staff of the regular armed forces." The "Joint Staff" did not set up headquarters in Kiev but in Dnipropetrovsk, which also is the residence of the billionaire oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, then acting as governor and who has been financing various volunteer battalions since the putsch in February 2014.

4. The Globe and Mail reported on December 8, 2014 that "Canada is operating independently of NATO to provide additional military assistance that will help Ukraine defend itself from Russia." Steve Chase, "Canada to offer Ukraine military aid outside of NATO," Globe and Mail, December 8, 2014.

Attempts by Nazi Collaborators of Yesteryear
and Warmongers of Today to Escape
the Verdict of History

The issue of where foreign minister Chrystia Freeland stands vis-a-vis her grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis during World War II has brought a very important matter to the fore -- that of moral choice. As if the millions who gave their lives to save humankind from Nazi-fascism do not know what sacrifices had to be made, one journalist's shameless apologies for Nazi collaborators says that in a war situation one has to do undesirable things to survive. This is a well-known device of the Anglo-American imperialists who use it in films and literature to promote collaboration and divert attention from the heroic deeds of the millions who died and were injured and suffered so greatly defeating the Nazis, fascists and Japanese militarists during the war. In this way, the heroic resistance is eclipsed in favour of the promotion of Anglo-American imperialist aims.

The apologetics, amongst other things, are based on the argument that Chomiak had no moral choice whether to comply with the Nazis or not. This is, of course, precisely the bone of contention. Unless his actions and those of others are put in context within the historical circumstances, the apologists of the Nazi collaborators can even suggest the Nazis and fascists were the "good guys" and the communists the "bad guys." In fact today, in the current political climate, anyone who suggests the opposite was true and the communists were leading the people everywhere to defeat the Nazi scourge, is blithely branded a Russian spy and/or enemy of the state or someone who should watch out lest they play into the hands of "bad guys." This is precisely what Chrystia Freeland did when she ranted against Russian "fake news."

There Was and Always Is a Moral Choice

Partisan forces in Europe in World War II. Top left: Russian women partisans, members of the Antifascist Front of Women. Top right: Jewish partisans in Belarus. Bottom left: Young Yugoslav partisans. Bottom right: Members of the Sydir Kovpak partisan detachment in Ukraine.

In their thousands and millions, Ukrainians, Poles and the working people throughout Europe joined the anti-fascist forces led by the Red Army and the Soviet Union during the war. They sacrificed their lives for peace, freedom and democracy. The brutality and racism of the Nazi regime and its war were not a polite café discussion. The moral choice to resist or collaborate was in the people's face, especially on the Eastern Front. Join with others in the anti-fascist alliance for peace, freedom and democracy or collaborate with the Nazi onslaught in the name of high ideals, which is what Chomiak and others who collaborated with the Nazis did. Who was who and who took what moral choice was sorted out in the battle and plain to see.

Holding Nazis and Their Collaborators to Account for Their
Crimes Against Humanity

For good reason, moral choice was one of the principles established as a criterion by the Nuremberg Trials for judging who had committed war crimes during the war. Excuses for war crimes such as following orders and lack of choice because of harsh circumstances were not accepted by the judges at Nuremberg.

Are we to believe that eminent Canadian journalists, to say nothing of government ministers and MPs who claim to be champions of freedom and democracy, are ignorant about the Nuremberg principles? The significance of those principles cannot be overstated. People paid for them with their blood and tears.

The adjudicators during the 1945 trials at Nuremberg involved all who had fought for freedom against tyranny. Trial proceedings were based on original documents mostly captured from the belligerents. The authenticity of those documents, which laid bare the racist and violent plans of the fascist aggressors to conquer the world by any means possible, was clearly established. The consensus achieved during those trials laid the basis for the establishment of the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the World Trade Union Movement.

Whose interests are served to cast doubt on the historic judgment at Nuremberg and the principles and institutions the victory over fascism created with the blood of millions?[1] Whose interests are served by prevaricating over the motives of those who fought and died to defeat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and militarist Japan; casting doubt on the communists who were always in the forefront leading and sacrificing themselves; and suggesting that "minimal" Nazi collaborators did so for some greater cause or because the moral choice at the time was too difficult? The overthrow of the historic judgment of WWII can only be to serve pro-war, racist and imperialist forces running amok today, led by the U.S. militarist state.

How can a journalist worthy of the name not know that a stark moral choice existed in WWII and that many Canadians put their own lives on the line to fight the Nazis and their collaborators who were responsible for heinous crimes against humanity? Can we accept the apologetics for the Nazi collaborators of the past and for the antics of the current foreign minister, as anything other than apologetics for a foreign policy pushing war and aggression today, and in the current context of an aggressive U.S.-led NATO blaming Russia for all the problems of the world in the most irrational way?

Canadians cannot accept such apologetics for collaborators of the past or today. Nobody worthy of calling themselves champions of peace, freedom and democracy can accept such a thing. Canadians are being asked to reverse the verdict of history to allow the imperialists of today to run amok. Canadians must settle scores all over again with those who would seek to embroil humanity in racist division, aggression, war and occupation. Canadians once again will show they are up to the call of history and will fashion an anti-war government and make Canada a zone for peace.

Today's Crimes Against Humanity

The problem surrounding Chrystia Freeland is not her grandfather per se but that she champions the same cause today as he did in his day. She goes about it in a similar way as well and has become the foreign minister of a government embroiling us in committing acts of aggression, war and crimes against humanity. Those who justified their crimes against humanity in the past by arguing they had no choice, moral or not, are similar to those who justify crimes against humanity in the present, with the twist that they have made a moral choice to act in the name of high ideals, such as those espoused by the doctrines "responsibility to protect," and "responsible conviction," which contradict the Nuremberg principles.

The historical fact remains that the Canadian people joined the anti-fascist side in the past and gave up their lives for peace, freedom and democracy and they expressed no doubt as to where they stood. Similar opposition to imperialist war is developing today. The ruling imperialist elite are fearful of this development within the Canadian body politic and are doing everything possible in the media to lend credence to the actions of warmongers such as the Trudeau government and those of other members of the aggressive NATO alliance who are behind the current war hysteria against Russia. The media find Russian hackers under every bed. They find Russians infecting the motivations of all those today who raise the banner of peace, freedom and democracy. They crudely justify CIA hackers, huge increases in already bloated military budgets, the NATO occupation of Eastern Europe, the encirclement of Russia, the provision of arms to Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Saudi Arabia, and inviting U.S. troops and spies onto Canadian soil -- all in the name of high ideals.

Chrystia Freeland should be removed as foreign minister not because of what her grandfather did but because she has taken up from where he left off, which is to rescue the Nazis and their cause in Ukraine and blame Russia for everything she and her associates and collaborators are doing. Even now when the irrefutable truth about her grandfather has been brought to the attention of the public, she had the effrontery to blame the information on Russian "fake news."

Such disinformation about fake news and disruption to democratic institutions has become a weapon of choice of the Trudeau government and the Trump administration, and their retinue in the media and universities. As if surveillance and disruption by intelligence agencies is something hitherto unheard of, they have become the conspiracy theorists par excellence about Russian or CIA hacking and disruption of our "democratic institutions." In doing so, they are establishing governments of police powers, justifying the criminalization of conscience, depriving people of the right to speak, and blocking a way forward for society. The Trudeau government has even abandoned its electoral reform agenda and turned it into support for more spying on Canadians to weed out Russian hackers and Russian disruption of our democratic institutions!

Left: First Nations soldiers from Moose Factory. Right: Chinese-Canadian soldiers.

The heroic deeds of the Canadian people during World War II are eloquent testimony of the moral choice Canadians made. They chose to oppose the collaborators of the Hitlerite police powers in the past, just as they oppose the supporters and collaborators of imperialist police powers in the present.

Why would anyone who opposed the Hitlerites and their collaborators in the past support them today? Canada's ruling elite and media think disinformation about what constitutes freedom, democracy and peace will undermine Canadians and fool them into supporting warmongers and apologists for crimes against humanity today. But this false ideological belief is blowing up in their faces.

Canadians are working out how to establish an anti-war government so that those who push unacceptable moral choices and are unfit to govern can be replaced with those whose moral choices are acceptable and are therefore fit to govern.

Note

The first Nuremberg trial (formally known as the International Military Tribunal) was convened November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg, Germany, to try more than 20 high Nazi officials, including four members of the Armed Forces High Command. The proceedings lasted nearly eleven months and the verdict was rendered October 1, 1946. Legal teams from each of the four allied nations -- the United States, Great Britain, Soviet Union and France -- shared responsibility for the prosecution.

U.S. Chief Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, made the opening statement at the Nuremberg Trial:

"The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."

"This trial is part of the great effort to make the peace more secure. It constitutes juridical action of a kind to ensure that those who start a war will pay for it personally. Nuremberg stands as a warning to all those who plan and wage aggressive war."

The prosecution broke the indictment into four counts, which they decided they could prove based on the evidence:

Count 1: Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War -- prosecuted by U.S.
Count 2: Crimes Against Peace -- prosecuted by Great Britain
Count 3: War Crimes -- prosecuted jointly by USSR and France
Count 4: Crimes Against Humanity -- prosecuted jointly by USSR and France

The Nuremberg Principles On November 21, 1947, one year after the end of the first Nuremberg trial (IMT), the United Nations passed General Assembly Resolution 177 in order to codify the "Nuremberg Principles." The original language reads:

177 (II). Formulation of the principles recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal.

The General Assembly
Decides to entrust the formulation of the principles of international law recognized in the charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal to the International Law Commission, the members of which will, in accordance with resolution 174(II), be elected at the next session of the General Assembly, and
Directs the Commission to:

(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and

(b) Prepare a draft code of offences against the peace and security of mankind, indicating clearly the place to be accorded to the principles mentioned in sub-paragraph (a) above.

In order to fulfill this mandate, the International Law Commission (which had been created under UN Resolution 174) duly codified seven principles, listed below, and adopted them on July 29, 1950.

1. Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

2. The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

3. The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

4. 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.

5. Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

6. The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

7. Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle 6 is a crime under international law.

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!"

On January 15, 1943 most of the Young Guards were captured and taken to be
tortured and later executed. Painting "Unconquered" by F. T. Kostenko.

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.

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).

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."

Liberals Advance Despicable Memorial Project

Canadians deride the proposed monument and reject the Conservative government's falsification of history and anti-social offensive -- now taken up by the Trudeau Liberals. Left: Parliament Hill rally, September 19, 2015; right: even the National Post criticizes the monument as ugly, a waste of money and political bullying, March 2015.

The Trudeau government is going ahead with plans to erect an anti-communist monument in Ottawa. This is the case despite opposition expressed by Canadian from all walks of life. The most prominent amongst those who support the monument seem to have a personal stake in resurrecting Nazis and Nazi collaborators under the guise that they were "victims of communism." For the government of Canada to give this Canada's official backing is not only despicable; it is unacceptable.

The project has been widely opposed since it was first proposed in 2009 by former Prime Minister Harper and his Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney and the private organization called Tribute to Liberty. Tribute to Liberty's links to Latvian collaborators with the Nazis and their hatred for the communists and Jews are verifiable. If the government were to come clean about Tribute to Liberty's definition of who is a "victim of communism" it would put an end to this despicable project. All of it is based on the Hitlerite definition of communism as the main enemy of humanity that must be destroyed. This was the premise of the Hitlerites in Germany and their alliance with fascist Italy and militarist Japan, officially called the Anti-Comintern Pact.[1]

At various times, this extremist position has been adjusted, whether to add "Canada, a Land of Refuge" at the end of "Memorial to the Victims of Communism" or the short-lived effort of the National Capital Commission to add the word "Totalitarian" before "Communism" to claim that the monument is not stigmatizing a particular ideology that is not illegal in Canada.

The Liberal government, aware of the public opposition to the project, declared that the site of the project should not be the space in front of the Supreme Court of Canada and that it should not receive public funding. It subsequently moved the project to the site originally proposed by the National Capital Commission and declared that it would limit its public funding to $2 million dollars (which CPC(M-L) and others have already pointed out is $2 million too much).[2]

Conception of "Canada, a Land of Refuge"

The conception "Canada, a Land of Refuge" when applied to the anti-communist monument, is based on the false claims that "millions of Canadians ... have been affected by communism" and that millions have come to Canada "fleeing injustice and persecution" by communists. Notwithstanding all efforts to appear reasonable, the March 2 unveiling of five finalists for the design of the anti-communist monument confirms that the Liberals espouse the same extremist views and unacceptable conception of "Canada, a Land of Refuge" as Tribute to Liberty and its backers. The designs all promote in one way or another either the Hitlerite or the anti-communist Cold War definition of a "victim of communism." This view remains totally silent about who were the freedom-fighters and who were in fact aggressors and genocidal forces.

The monument designs feature overwrought and pretentious descriptions such as "the dark of Communism and the light of freedom that is Canada," the "vastness of the suffering of individuals under communist regimes" and utterly baseless claims made by fascist apologists of "100 million deaths attributed to communism worldwide." As if the Hitlerites, fascists and Japanese militarists were communists, and as if it was communists who razed Korea to the ground during the Korean war, or were those who invaded Vietnam or established a 40-year long military dictatorship over Greece, or apartheid in South Africa, or promoted Pinochet in Chile and unleashed Operation Condor across Latin America and the Caribbean, or were those who caused the massacres of the peoples of India when India was divided between India and Pakistan and so on, and on and on.

One proposed design features a statue of Lenin frozen on an angle as if being toppled. This echoes the ongoing dismantling and destruction of countless statues and memorials in Eastern Europe that honour the contribution of the Soviet people, resistance fighters and Red Army in liberating Europe from Nazi-fascism. The same attack on the memory of the anti-fascist war is seen in parades of former Waffen SS being held in Latvia and other countries.

Rally in Riga, Latvia opposes the annual march to rehabilitate
Latvian members of the Nazi's Waffen SS, March 16, 2017.

Among the most common claims of the government and media in support of the memorial project is Tribute to Liberty's contention that "more than 8 million Canadians are descendants of someone who fled or was forced to leave a Communist regime for a variety of reasons." The Trudeau government is only too happy to accommodate these false ideological beliefs. Despite this, for instance, the largest migration of Ukrainians to Canada, 170,00 people, occurred between 1891 and 1914.[3] From 1924 to 1939 the roughly 70,000 Ukrainians who migrated to Canada came from Poland and Romania, which had fiercely anti-Soviet, anti-communist governments. The resettlement of Ukrainians in Canada following the Second World War, some 34,000 people, was the smallest, and more Ukrainians have since migrated to Canada following the collapse of the Soviet Union.[4] To label all Canadians with Ukrainian origins, whose community has always been a fighting contingent of the Canadian working class for its rights including in the communist and workers' movement, as "victims of communism" is unacceptable.

This conception further covers up that it is the Canadian state that has been responsible for attacks against sections of the people for defending their rights, including Ukrainian Canadians and other immigrants.[5]

6th Convention of the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) , in front of the
Ukrainian Labour Temple in Winnipeg, Manitoba, January 26-28, 1925. In 1940, the Canadian government banned the ULFTA, seized its assets of various kinds and gave them to the
pro-fascist Ukrainian National Federation.

New Round of Dubious Consultations

Giving the false impression that the only issue to be decided is design, Heritage Canada launched a design competition and the final proposals submitted were made available for public viewing on March 2. It is now calling for public input once again.

The Heritage Canada website announced, "In February 2016 the Government of Canada sought input from Canadians on aspects of the Memorial design. We are now asking you to share your thoughts on the design concepts proposed by the finalist team."

Referring to the survey of February 2016 is hypocritical to say the least. The questions were limited to restrict the discussion to design concepts and almost no opportunity was given for people to express views about the project itself. Nevertheless, a significant number of people raised serious questions about the purpose of such a memorial and there were many requests that the project be cancelled. There were also many suggestions that another type of monument be built and many also objected to the use of public funds for this project.

Below are the answers to question #4 of the survey which tried unsuccessfully to keep the comments restricted to design.

Question 4. Do you have any thoughts or ideas concerning the design of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism?

Makes a suggestion with respect to the Memorial name/theme	168
Expresses concerns about the Memorial purpose	144
Requests that Memorial project be cancelled	139
Comments about the design of the Memorial	96
Suggests other type of monument be built	91
Expresses concerns about use of federal funding for the Memorial	88
Comments about the scale/size of the Memorial	53
Comments about location of the Memorial	51
Other	37
Expresses support for the Memorial project	25
Expresses concerns about the survey/consultation itself	9
Total 504 Respondents	901

To draw conclusions from a survey of 504 respondents who submitted 901 views, out of an adult population of close to 20 million Canadians shows the fraudulent consultation process used by the Trudeau government to impose its self-serving agenda. Despite the small number who participated, a government press release declared, "Public consultations reveal that Canadians want a human-scaled monument that reflects core Canadian values."

The new survey on the design proposals announced on the Heritage Canada website is a further insult to Canadians whose views have been systematically ignored.

"Taking the Memorial vision into consideration enter up to 3 adjectives that describe your impression of each design. Only one word can be entered in each box."

Answering this question with a one-word adjective presents a challenge. How many ways can one say "unacceptable"? Distasteful, improper, inadmissible, objectionable, offensive, repugnant, undesirable -- all of the above are fitting answers.

The rest of the "survey" is just as ridiculous, eliminating any possibility for people to express their own views. This is another example of what the Trudeau government means when it talks about the "importance of consulting Canadians."[6] Eight years and a series of rejected designs and rejected locations later the Trudeau government still thinks it can get away with erecting this despicable monument. Based on self-serving, old Cold War definitions of rights, the project is an attack on the striving for freedom, democracy and peace Canadians and the peoples of the world sacrificed so much to achieve in the Second World War -- with the Soviet Union making the greatest sacrifice.

The designs on display on March 2 all reflect the desperation of the architects to depict historical fallacies and extremist views and somehow make it acceptable to Canadians. Not surprisingly none of the proposals succeed in making any contribution to elevating the consciousness or culture of the people.

It is clear that the Liberal Government is once again using fraudulent consultations to impose its irrationality and despicable project.

As TML Weekly pointed out in a report on last year's survey, "The cause to which this monument is dedicated is bogus and un-Canadian because Canadians never gave their lives in any war so they could espouse the definitions of freedom, democracy and human rights of the Nazis. The more the Liberals push the monument and the more fraudulent the methods they use to declare that it is popular, the more they expose their own pro-Nazi schemes."[7]

Notes

2. Tribute to Liberty's 2016 registered charity information return from the Canada Revenue Agency, like that of all previous years, states that it did not "carry on any political activities during the fiscal period..." Despite this, a March 19, 2015 Globe and Mail report noted:

"A review of Tribute to Liberty's official filings with the CRA reveals a clear intention to engage in political activity. When asked if it planned to engage in political activities, it answered "Yes" in its 2009 application for charitable status. It said this would involve contacting MPs and senators to gain their support for the project."

Despite Tribute to Liberty's political lobbying activity, its charity status was never questioned by the Harper government. It proceeded to remove all mention of political lobbying from its website when the Harper government decided to pursue cases against others whose charity work it did not agree with and deprive them of charity status.

In 2016, the Government of Canada gave Tribute to Liberty $42,248 while the bulk of its funding, $159,368 came from outside Canada. In 2015, it received $176,599 from the federal government. The group continues to accumulate funds and in 2016 indicated that it has $1,103,602 in its bank account but very little comes from Canadians.

On February 2, 2008, Alide Forstmanis, posted on the website of the Western Standard newspaper, in response to media reports that then Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney would be speaking at a Tribute to Liberty dinner: "While Minister Kenney does support our project of having a permanent memorial built in Ottawa to the Victims of the Crimes of Communism, there will be no public money going toward having the memorial built. We are raising funds in the private sector for this important and much-anticipated project." The effort to raise funds privately over the past 9 years to build the anti-communist monument was an utter failure due to Canadians' lack of support for the project.

3. "Immigration History: Ethnic and Cultural Groups, Ukrainian," Library and Archives Canada

6. Other examples from on-line questionnaire on finalists' design proposals for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, Canada, a Land of Refuge:

The Memorial will serve as a powerful place of meaning and catalyst for discussion. It will invite visitors to commemorate and learn more about tragedies that others -- including, for many Canadians, their own ancestors -- endured under communist regimes worldwide. At the same time, the Memorial will remind visitors of Canada's commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights. To achieve these objectives, the Memorial design needs to perform several functions. Which designs do you think meet the following criteria?

Please provide any additional comments that you would like to share about any of the proposed designs.

Tribute to Liberty's Definition of Victims
of Communism

Graphic and monument pay tribute to Imants Sudmalis, a Latvian partisan fighter against the
Nazi occupation. He was killed by the Germans in 1944. Sudmalis was a member of the Communist Youth Union of Latvia and an editor of the party's newspaper, then an organizer of resistance following the occupation. The sponsors of the Memorial to the Victims of
Communism, Tribute to Liberty, propose to honour Latvian Nazi collaborators as victims.

Alide Forstmanis (nee Brodelis) is the Treasurer and former Chair of Tribute to Liberty (2008 to 2012), an organization established in 2008 to lobby the Canadian government to build a public "Memorial to the Victims of Communism" in the capital, Ottawa. She is one of nine members of the Board of Directors and one of two with identified positions, including Chair Ludwik Klimkowski. The listed address and contact information of Tribute to Liberty, according to the Canada Revenue Agency, matches that of Forstmanis and her personal e-mail address is listed as the charity contact e-mail. Alide Forstmanis' husband is Talivaldis (Talis) Forstmanis.

Forstmanis was the initiator in March 2008 of a petition to the Parliament of Canada to support the building of the "Memorial to the Victims of Communism," one of the first public calls for such an effort.[1] The thrust of the petition made clear that the purpose of the monument is not to commemorate victims, but make criminalization of communism official state policy and continue the cause of the Hitlerites to eradicate communism from the face of the earth. Forstmanis wrote, "the Cold War victory remains incomplete and we must do our best to make everyone recognize the true nature of this mad ideology. A free society must not allow itself to be content until everyone recognizes Communism is a road to terror and oppression. [...] Communism is not a thing of the past, but rages in many countries today, and poses a threat to the free world of the future."

Alide Forstmanis and her husband are from Sweden, born to Latvian parents. Both cite their family history as "victims of communism" in their support for the anti-communist monument project. In a parallel with the story of Chrystia Freeland, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs who has not come clean about her grandfather's role as a Nazi collaborator, Alide's mother was a nurse in Nazi-occupied Latvia and later in Germany treating German soldiers, and Talis Forstmanis' father was an editor in a fascist publishing house and for a Nazi newspaper in occupied Latvia.

Alide Forstmanis noted her mother's wartime activity on the Tribute to Liberty website along with a donation to the project in the name of a "victim of communism," someone called Katie Subins. Forstmanis states, "During WWII Katie and my mother nursed wounded [Nazi -- TML Note] soldiers in Latvia and later in Germany."[2]

Talivaldis Forstmanis' father was Fricis Forstmanis, aka Fricis Dziesma.[3] During the Nazi occupation of Latvia from 1941 to 1944 Fricis was technical editor at an anti-Semitic, anti-communist publishing house called Zelta ābele and like Freeland's grandfather Michael Chomiak, he also worked for a Nazi newspaper called Tēvija (Fatherland).[4]

Tēvija was the only daily newspaper published in Nazi-occupied Latvia from July 1, 1941 (the day Latvia was captured by fascists) to October 1944. Its first issue bore on its cover a photo of Adolf Hitler along with the announcement "Henceforth Latvia is free from communists and Jews."[6] The issue announced to Latvians the occupation of the capital, Riga with the words, "The glorious German army had the pleasure of liberating the old gray Riga from the yoke of the Bolsheviks. We promise that we will fight together with the Latvians until we drive the last Bolshevik from this land. God bless Latvia!"

Issues regularly featured prominent anti-Semitic, anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda and quotes from Hitler and Goebbels.[7] Like Kravivski Visti, which Chomiak edited, Tēvija played a major role advertising for the recruitment of groups such as "Arājs Kommando," a volunteer unit of Latvian fascists responsible for pogroms against Jews, Roma, communists and others. Later, it promoted the creation of the Latvian divisions of the Waffen-SS Nazi paramilitary. These included the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian) created in 1943 and 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian) in 1944, together making up the "Latvian Legion." The volunteer units that carried out atrocities were later integrated into the "Legion."[8]

A characteristic editorial in Tēvija reads, "Finally, the time has come when almost all the nations of Europe learned to recognize their common enemy -- the Jew. Almost all the peoples of Europe have begun a war against this enemy, both on the battlefields and in internal construction."[9]

The publishing house, Zelta ābele, was owned by Miķelis Goppers, who like Forstmanis fled to Sweden to escape justice following the defeat of the Nazis in Latvia. Goppers and Zelta ābele published, in 1942, the infamous anti-Semitic fraud Latvia: Year of Horror (Baigais Gads) which, using photos of Nazi atrocities and fraudulent accounts, presents communism as a Jewish conspiracy to dispossess the Latvians. The book falsifies the history of Latvia and its membership in the Soviet Union on the eve of the war and presents the mass actions of Latvians as a conspiracy of Jews to "annihilate nothing less than the soul of the Latvian nation."

The myth of Baigais Gads created by the Nazis, continued to be repeated by exiled Nazi collaborators and their descendents after the war and then was given official status by the post-Soviet Latvian government. The blog Latvian History in a June 13, 2016 entry explains the origins of the myth:

"The needs for this myth can be explained for Nazi goals in Latvia on 1941-1942. Nazi political directives set by Adolf Hitler was [to] clear [the] Soviet Union [of] Jews and Bolsheviks. However, the Nazi policy was to create the image that the extermination was done by the locals as revenge against the Soviets. Germans would only instigate the actions with propaganda and assist the locals. [...] Ultimately the myth creates an idea of Latvian genocide, that must be avenged... [The book Latvia: Year of Horror] contained selected or faked documents and images many of them highly graphic. [...] The book's narrative was that [the] Republic of Latvia because of its weakness and mistakes led itself to Soviet occupation that was carried by Jews according to their plan of world domination. All main repressions were carried out by Jewish Bolsheviks. Nazi Germany came as liberators and rescued Latvians from the danger of Jewish Bolshevism and now Latvians must do their part for creation of the New Europe. There was never talk of restoration of Latvian independence -- Latvian future only lies with Nazi Germany.. [...] After the defeat of Nazi Germany the "Horrible Year" lived on through Latvian exiles. It was mentioned in their publications and often became part of their identity."[5]In the 1990s, an English translation of the book was produced with a new, anonymous introduction written in Canada, approvingly citing Toronto Sun articles repeating Hitlerite lies about the "predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders."

- "Prisoners, accompanied by largely Jewish crowd and the coerced crowd of demonstrators, enter the street. A prisoner addresses the crowd. His face is clearly contorted with hate and a desire to destroy."

- "The former Spanish Civil War Red Front volunteers are greeted by Jewish functionaries."

- "Most Jews were ecstatic. The [pro-Soviet] demonstrations on August 5 turned into Jewish national celebrations."

- "The organizer of the Workers' Guard and People's Militia, a man with a lengthy criminal record, was a Jew Izak Bucinskis."

- "They lined up for kosher meat. They worshiped the cruel Jewish God who demands that animals be slaughtered slowly and tortured according to religious ritual."

Talis Forstmanis wrote a pro-Nazi rendering of his father's and Latvia's history in a December 28, 2015 letter to the National Post. In it, he presents the huge loss of life in Nazi-occupied Latvia, including of the vast majority of Latvian Jews, as the fault of the Communists. He said, "My father always carried a camera with him. His best man was tortured to death by the Communists. Many friends' families 'disappeared,' never to be seen again. Latvia lost around 25 per cent of its population during this time. Those who are still alive, and who have knowledge of these tragic events, are supporters of the Victims of Communism memorial to be built in Ottawa. It has become clear that many in Canada are ignorant of history."[10]

Canadians know well the history of the anti-fascist struggle and are proud of their contributions. Today, Talis Forstmanis is also the treasurer of the Canadian branch of Daugavas Vanagi, an organization founded by and for Latvian veterans of the Waffen-SS who fought for Nazi Germany during the Second World War and escaped to areas of Nazi Germany later controlled by the U.S. Among the founders of Daugavas Vanagi were Vilis Janums, a Regiment Commander in the 15th Waffen Grenadier division of the SS and Nazi Iron Cross recipient. Another founder, Andrejs Eglītis was a war correspondent in Berlin for Tēvija. All served in one way or another in the Nazi Latvian Legion.[11]

Masha Bruskina, a 17-year-old Belarusian partisan in Nazi-occupied Minsk, October 26, 1941
holds a sign reading "We are the partisans who shot German troops," on
her way to be executed.

Like Freeland's grandfather, the "victims of communism" identified by the founder of Tribute to Liberty were active participants in the Nazi-fascist enslavement of Europe and the holocaust. Both played key roles in the inhuman propaganda campaign that directly facilitated the genocide of European Jews. Both identified their cause as synonymous with the Hitlerite cause to wipe communism off the face of the earth, which Tribute to Liberty espouses today and seeks to make the official policy of Canada and a preoccupation of Canadians.

In this, they will never succeed. Canadians, who hold their anti-fascist contribution and their democratic sentiments dear, now have a clear example that the ruling elite would like to extinguish both and have the people accept a warmongering, anti-communist agenda that was rejected by humanity. To pass off fascists and Nazi collaborators as victims of communism is a charade that could not last. Canada should officially repudiate this fascist anti-communist monument project and all attempts to revive fascism today, in Ukraine, Latvia and Canada.

Notes

1. "Monument to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa," petitiononline.com, addressed to Parliament of Canada.

6. A list of editors identifies Fricis Forstmanis as illustrations editor. Anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik cartoons were a regular feature of the newspaper. See Didzis Bērziņš, "Anti-Semitic Nazi Propaganda in 'Tēvija' Newspaper in July 1941: The Discourse of Latvian Participation." Latvian National Archives, 2009.

10. During the fascist occupation of Latvia from 1941 to 1945, around 400,000 Latvians were killed according to postwar Soviet statistics. This included 70,000 of Jewish faith at the hands of Nazi death squads and many Roma and those of Russian and other ethnic backgrounds. More than 150,000 soldiers died in the battles to liberate Latvia from Nazi rule including Latvian troops in the Red Army.

According to estimates of the OSS, U.S. precursor to the CIA in a confidential 1944 study, at the time of the Nazi invasion of Latvia in 1941 75,000 Latvians sought refuge in the Soviet Union and from June 1941 to July 1944 60,000 Latvians were taken as slave labourers to Germany, while a similar number of Latvian Jews and others were executed. The OSS repeated claims of the Latvian Red Cross made under Nazi occupation that from 1939 to 1941, 1,488 Latvians were executed and 34,340 relocated within the Soviet Union.

Arguments About "Minimal Compliance"

The case of Chrystia Freeland's grandfather and her own pro-Nazi views has seen some who call themselves journalists jump through hoops to come to her defence. Some have emerged who are so happy with her Liberal Party and literary activities but nonetheless seem troubled as to why she has remained silent about her grandfather's Nazi affiliations. One journalist goes so far as to say that Freeland is one of Canada's foremost intellectuals who helped her paternal uncle write an essay about the Nazi collaboration of her maternal grandfather but somehow managed to stay silent about who he actually was and his pro-Nazi activities. He even throws darts at anyone who suggests the record shows he played a role in assisting the German Nazis. The journalist concludes his item saying "what Freeland did amounts to a kind of intellectual minimal compliance."[1]

"Minimal compliance"! How can the journalist say that "a true intellectual, one of the very best in the country," is herself capable of some "kind of intellectual minimal compliance" with the truth? It boggles the mind.

This journalist's pathetic apology for Ms. Freeland precisely describes what the apologists said Michael Chomiak, her grandfather, did in serving the genocidal Nazi regime. They say Chomiak was only in "minimum compliance" with the Nazis, as he was serving the glory of a greater cause to maintain the culture of the Ukrainians in Krakow and other German-occupied areas. The fact that this was done with the full knowledge that his Nazis handlers were pursuing the indiscriminate slaughter of all those resisting their barbaric war is to be dismissed. It is unconscionable!

Note

1. Michael Harris, "From Russia with loathing: Freeland and the media," iPolitics March 9, 2017.

The Name of Vladimir Lenin Is Monumental --
No Anti-Communist "Monument" Can Tarnish It

Today I read with disgust a short article in one of the free daily newspapers, "Monument has five final submissions."[1] The Ottawa-based columnist describes one of the "submissions" of a design for the anti-communist monument that is planned to be erected in Ottawa, conceived by the previous Harper administration and approved by the present Trudeau Liberal government. The design he describes with such relish is a statue of Lenin, which the macabre imagination of the anti-communist designer would put in a posture of falling down or being pulled down -- like the statue of Saddam Hussein, for example, which the marauding American troops in Iraq pulled down for the visual effect this would have world-wide in the corporate media. The powers that be are constantly trying newer and better ways in their efforts to manipulate people's consciousness by appealing to the anti-conscious. Monuments are one of the items in their arsenal.

I threw the daily newspaper into the pile I keep for bundling up kitty litter, where it rightfully belongs; but after some moments of reflection, decided to retrieve it, because this article and this act of approbation for something so vile and debased, cannot go unchallenged.Vladimir Lenin was a giant, as compared to the tiny compressed minds of those who would attempt to vilify his life and his work. The life and work of Lenin was monumental, giving rise to the first socialist state in modern times, affecting the course of history as never before, inspiring millions upon millions of people with the knowledge and hope that they can, indeed, change the world.

Erecting some kind of nefarious statue or anti-communist "monument" is an attempt by the financial oligarchy and its representatives to cancel out in the minds of people the consciousness of history: their motive is that people should not be aware of and inspired by the tremendous achievements of Lenin, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the proletariat and small peasantry, during that glorious era when socialism was first ushered in, in concrete form.

The jackals who would attempt to vilify this grand achievement are no more than a comma or dot in history -- if that. Their names will be forgotten, unlike the names of Vladimir Lenin and other fighters and theorists for the people who will live on forever. The names of these true heroes, representing the best and finest of what humankind is capable of, will live on for as long as human beings continue to inhabit the Earth. History will continue, despite the worst efforts of the jackals to stop it. The proletariat and peoples of the Earth will continue on their paths to change the world in their favour, despite the best efforts of the ruling class and its representatives to stem the tide of change that is beginning to happen. Despite the anti-consciousness of these latter elements, they are aware at some level that the theory and practice of Lenin and later Marxist-Leninists are essential for the success of the forward march of humankind. This is why these individuals try so desperately, through such despicable tactics as an anti-communist "monument" to stem the approaching tide of change through futile attempts to confuse people, especially the proletariat, so that they will not take up their historical mission of attaining political power and liberating all humankind.

Note

1. "Monument has five final submissions," Metro News, March 3-5, 2017 p.10.

For Your Information

War Crimes, Ukrainian Nationalists and
the Canadian State

Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, writes in the Ottawa Citizen on March 9: "I've heard it all before. It was fake news then and still is. Allegations about 'Nazis in Canada' -- the most recent regurgitation targeting Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland -- have circulated for decades.

"Understandably, just after the war's end, Jewish Canadians were alarmed at the prospect of 'Ukrainian Nazis' escaping justice by posing as Displaced Persons. In response, the Liberal government initiated high-level inquiries, ensuring no such villains resettled here. Yet claims about 'thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada' resurfaced in the early 1980s, resulting in a Conservative government establishing the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes. Tellingly, its 1987 report rebuked those who had spread 'increasingly large and grossly exaggerated' figures about 'Nazi war criminals.'"

The learned professor goes on to take credit for the fact that not a single person was ever convicted of being a "Nazi" in a Canadian criminal court. In reaction to the formation of the Deschênes "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" Luciuk helped create the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA) to whitewash the war crimes of Nazi collaborators in the Ukraine. In its own words, it was founded "in 1984 to meet the defamatory accusations that 'Ukrainian war criminals' were being harboured in Canada." Luciuk however never uses the word war criminal which was the prohibited class and the issue then and now.

In making this assertion, Luciuk rejects the conclusion of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UN WCC) that the Waffen SS was a criminal organization and its members guilty of war crimes. In doing so, he rejects the decision Never Again! of the world's people following the defeat of fascism and that aggression is the supreme international crime.

The UN WCC, the International Military Tribunal, that presided over the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, expressly declared the Waffen SS, the armed wing of the Nazi Party, to be a criminal organization. Until 1943 the Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS) was comprised only of German units. After its defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad an increasingly desperate Nazi Germany organized collaborators into Waffen SS Divisions in all occupied countries, including two Ukrainian divisions.

The UN WCC, ascribed war criminal status to members of organizations it determined to be criminal organizations. Only those who had not voluntarily joined but had been forcibly conscripted were excluded from criminal status.[1]

In October 1947, the Polish representative on the UN WCC put forward specific charges against the members of the Ukrainian SS Galizien and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These included the wanton devastation and destruction of property; complicity in deportation; systematic terrorism; putting hostages to death; complicity in mass murder.

The Short Statement of Facts transmitted by the Polish representative on the UN WCC states:

"The above listed persons took part in organizing -- according to the instructions issued by the Hitlerite authorities -- of UPA (Ukrainska Powstanesa Armia - Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and SS - Schuertzen - Galizien, later called 'Halyczyn.' Both were used for deportation of the civilian Polish population, for destruction of whole villages and for murdering their inhabitants.

"A letter dated November 3, 1947 to the Main Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes in Poland states that the investigation had been suspended by the United Nations War Crimes Commission in London until specific information is provided regarding the position, the level of authority, and the time span in office of the following major figures accused of committing crimes against the Polish people in several regions..." Seven individuals were named.[2]

Surviving members of the SS Galizien surrendered to the British and were interned in Rimini, Italy, an area controlled by Polish II Corps forces (part of the British army). Although they had changed their name to First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, their identity as an SS unit was well known. Through the intervention of the Vatican, the SS members were not deported to the Soviet Union as required under the Yalta Agreement. Instead their status was changed from prisoners of war to surrendered enemy personnel. Later their status was again changed, this time to "displaced persons." In 1947 they were allowed to emigrate to Britain and later to Canada. Their names have never been released, but about 7,100 members of the SS Galizien emigrated to Britain.[3]

In 1950, all surviving members of the Waffen SS Galizien who wished to immigrate to Canada were "cleared" for immigration to Canada, despite the fact that the Waffen SS was a prohibited class and not eligible for immigration at that time.

The Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC) was extremely active in pressing the Canadian government to allow members of the SS Galicien to emigrate to Canada, as well as for the admission of leading members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the UPA.[4]

The UCC was directly organized by the government of Mackenzie King following the arrest and incarceration of the leaders of the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) and the declaration that the association was illegal. The presses, halls and other property of the ULFTA were handed over to the UCC.

There is indisputable evidence of the war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against the peace committed by the Waffen SS divisions, and the closely-associated and overlapping memberships of the OUN and UPA.[5]

What inquiry if any the Canadian Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes (Deschênes Commission) conducted as to how these forces, who betrayed their own people and were responsible for countless civil deaths and the deaths of anti-fascist partisans, had been "cleared" of war criminal status is unknown.[6] The government refused to follow the Commission's recommendations and did not release the 560 page report of the Director of Research, Alti Rodal. The New York Times reported that the report concluded that the U.S. had used Canada as a "dumping ground" for Nazis no longer considered useful intelligence assets. A heavily redacted version supported the conclusion that members of the Galizien Division had participated in war crimes.

There has never been an official acknowledgement that Canada acted in contempt of its own laws and the will of the Canadian people who had sacrificed so much to defeat fascism. The role of individuals and organizations such as the UCC in lobbying for admission of war criminals and Nazi collaborators has not been officially investigated either.

Anglo-American Imperialist Refusal to Prosecute War Criminals

As the 1985 Deschênes Commission reported, war crimes trials were shut down by the British and Americans as an integral part of Cold War policy. The Deschênes Report quoted a 1948 memo from the British government explaining that it would no longer prosecute war criminals on the basis of the Cold War logic that "it was now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible."

The Parliamentary Summary regarding the Deschênes Commission states: "Faced with the reality of a new and dangerous enemy, the western powers became reluctant to pursue the remnants of the old. Their limited security resources were re-deployed to uncover suspected Soviet agents and Communists, rather than to identify and track down Nazi war criminals. In Canadian immigration policy, which was rapidly liberalized after the war, the restrictions against the entry of ex-enemy aliens were systematically relaxed."

In this way world reaction, led by U.S. imperialism, declared its refusal to accept the verdict of the world's people that a new definition of democracy had come into being which did not permit the existence of fascism. It was a negation of the demand for new arrangements on the international scale to establish that aggression was the supreme international crime and to bring to justice those guilty of war crimes, crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity.

Even the justification about not pursuing "remnants of the old" is disinformation. U.S. imperialism in particular was actively pursuing and recruiting the "remnants of the old" -- that is, leading Nazis, collaborators from the countries occupied by the Nazis and war criminals. But it was not to bring them to justice; it was to secretly arrange their escape and safe passage to the U.S. and to incorporate them into the state apparatus, especially the military and intelligence services.

From the time that the tide turned with the defeat of Germany at Stalingrad, the hopes of the imperialist powers that Nazi Germany would crush the Soviet Union and its nation-building project were dashed. The Cold War signalled not the emergence of a "new and dangerous enemy" but the same agenda to smash the new which had arisen with the Great October Revolution. U.S. imperialism now assumed the mantle of Nazi Germany, incorporating top Nazi scientists, military intelligence and others into its war machine, with the aim of accomplishing what Nazi Germany had been unable to do.

Today the Cold War is over, but the danger of a new world war remains and grows more serious with each passing day. The campaign of disinformation about the past is directly related to the warmongering of the present. It is a crime against the memory of all those Canadians who sacrificed to defeat fascism. It is a grave crime against the millions of Ukrainians who fought to defeat the Nazi scourge and who as a nation suffered the loss of millions of lives.

Notes

1. Judgement of the International Military Tribunal, here.

2. "Short Statement of Facts, United Nations War Crimes Commission charges against German war criminals of Ukrainian origin registered number: 6697/P/U/1124, case number 1124 received October 23, 1947," from Genocide and Rescue in Wolyn: Recollections of the Ukrainian Nationalist Ethnic Cleansing Campaign Against the Poles During World War II, Tadeusz Piotrowski editor, McFarland & Company (2000)

3. Tottle, Douglas, Famine, Fraud and Fascism, The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, Progress Books, Toronto, 1987; Daniel Foggo, the Telegraph, 22 June 2003.

4. New York Times, August 9, 1987; Per Anders Rudling, "The Honor They So Clearly Deserve:' Legitimizing the Waffen-SS Galizien," The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Volume 26, 2013.

5. Serbyn, Roman, "Alleged War Criminals, the Canadian Media and the Ukrainian Community," www.ukemonde.com (provides a sanitized history of the Galizien Division).

6. Kevin C. Ruffer, "Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA's Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists," Studies in Intelligence, 1998, (contains declassified CIA documents); Simpson, Christopher, Blowback, America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals
in Canada (Deschênes Commission)

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission) was established in February 1985 "to investigate the charge that a considerable number of Nazi war criminals had gained admittance to Canada through a variety of illegal or fraudulent means." Its report was released in December 1986.

Established at a turning point when no force could act in the old way, the Deschênes Commission showed the utter refusal of the ruling circles to provide modern definitions. Instead it revealed the drive to reverse the verdict of the peoples following the anti-fascist victory that democracy could not permit the existence of fascism.

The recommendations of the Commission were then used to enact police powers to permit arbitrary revocation of citizenship and deportation. Ostensibly to prevent the granting of citizenship to war criminals and/or to make its revocation easier, the Commission recommended amendments to the Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act. To the same end it also recommended that immigrant applicants be asked specific questions about their past military, para-military, political and civilian activities, and that a written, signed record of the applicant's answers be kept during her or his lifetime. All of this was to set the precedent that Canadian citizenship could be revoked and citizens deported. Such measures had been carried out before in Canada but required invoking the War Measures Act such as at the time of the Winnipeg General Strike.

Section 10(1) of the Citizenship Act now states, "the Minister may revoke a person's citizenship or renunciation of citizenship if the Minister is satisfied on a balance of probabilities that the person has obtained, retained, renounced or resumed his or her citizenship by false representation or fraud or by knowingly concealing material circumstances." This power is completely arbitrary and subject to Ministerial prerogative or police powers. It was, for example, not used against cabinet minister Maryam Monsef when it was revealed that she was born in Iran, not in Afghanistan as stated on her application for refugee status, but has been used as grounds for deportation of other Canadian citizens.

The parliamentary summary explains that the Deschênes Commission report states that in 1948, as the Cold War was intensifying, "the governments of the Commonwealth, including Canada, received a telegram dated 13 July 1948 from the British Commonwealth Relations Office. This proposed an end to Nazi war crimes trials in the British zone of Germany. 'Punishment of war crimes is more a matter of discouraging future generations than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual ... it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.' Faced with the reality of a new and dangerous enemy, the western powers became reluctant to pursue the remnants of the old. Their limited security resources were re-deployed to uncover suspected Soviet agents and Communists, rather than to identify and track down Nazi war criminals. In Canadian immigration policy, which was rapidly liberalized after the war, the restrictions against the entry of ex-enemy aliens were systematically relaxed."[1]

The report of the Deschênes Commission has nothing to say on the role of the Canadian state in admitting those who were suspected or known war criminals. The government did not publish the report of the Research Director and only a heavily redacted version has ever been available. The narrow terms of the public inquiry precluded investigating what the government knew about those it admitted. It did not inquire as to how, for example, all surviving members of the Waffen SS Galicien Division were "cleared" for immigration to Canada in direct violation of Canadian law at the time of their entry.

The number of war criminals admitted to Canada is not known. The Deschênes Commission produced three lists of individuals containing the names of 883 old men. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre put the number of collaborationist Ukrainian Waffen SS members alone (members of voluntary divisions under the command of Nazi officers) admitted with British complicity to Canada in 1950 at 2,000. In all, 9,000 members of the Ukrainian Waffen SS went to the U.S., Britain, Canada and elsewhere. An official list with their names is contained in the National Archives in Britain but remains classified. In 1997 the CBS program 60 Minutes reported that about 1,000 SS men and Nazi collaborators were permitted to immigrate to Canada from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Approximately 2,000 German war criminals were identified as living in Canada and receiving "victim pensions" for war injuries.

Following the Deschênes Commission, four individuals were eventually charged. The only case that came to trial, that of Imre Finta, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity resulted in acquittal. The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. This ended the prosecutions and the three remaining cases were dropped.

Once the narrow limits of considering whether war crimes charges could be laid against a few individuals had been established, the Commission proceeded with this task in a manner guaranteed to avoid exposure of the reactionary Ukrainian organizations which had done such yeoman's service for the bourgeoisie and of the despicable role of Anglo-American imperialism and the Canadian state. The Commission held no hearings and collected no evidence outside Canada, i.e. where the crimes had been committed. Justice Deschênes established very narrow conditions for collection of evidence in the Soviet Union, and at the same time announced that he would not take part in the hearing of evidence abroad. The Soviet authorities were given an ultimatum as to how evidence would be collected in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet authorities took their time deciding how to respond to this request. Deschênes soon concluded that the response from the Soviet Union had "taken too long" and there was "no time" for hearing evidence abroad. Given these arbitrary decisions, it was not hard to eliminate the vast majority of suspected war criminals from the list. Everyone whose case required evidence to be collected outside of Canada was removed. All the members of the Waffen SS Galizien were summarily removed and it was declared that they had been cleared of war crimes at the time of their entry. And so it went. In the end one person was denaturalized and returned to Holland, one trial led to an acquittal, and the Crown dropped the charges on the rest of the cases it had begun.[2]

The Commission falsely asserted that war crimes charges against the Ukrainian Waffen SS division were first registered in 1950, when in fact they were first received on October 23, 1947. This is an important error, since in 1947, after being held for two years as prisoners of war, the status of members of the SS Galizien was changed to displaced persons, paving the way for their immigration to Britain and Canada. Further, only those who had been forcibly conscripted were exempt at any time under Canadian law, while the members of the Waffen SS Galizien called themselves volunteers. Thus to suggest that they or any other Nazi collaborators were exonerated by the Commission is just one more falsification of history.

The reactionary Canadian organizations made virulent objections to the Commission on the basis that Canadians of Ukrainian origin were under attack. This was the cover used to shield both the Canadian state and the reactionary Ukrainian "leaders" it had sponsored and to maintain the claim that they "represented" all Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) was cobbled together by government fiat while at the same time the cultural, political and defence organizations established by the workers and farmers through their own efforts were criminalized, their leaders jailed without charges, their halls and printing presses seized and turned over to the made-in-Ottawa UCC. It was this state-sponsored and organized UCC which had been so insistent that the members of the SS Galizien and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) leaders be permitted to immigrate to Canada in the face of strong protest at the time from many Canadian organizations, and the organization of veterans of the Waffen SS Galizien remained a member of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.[3]

The investigation of Nazi war criminals in Canada was an exercise in disinformation. Since the Commission's report, previously classified CIA documents now available leave no doubt that U.S. imperialism and Britain knew exactly who they were dealing with. U.S. imperialism saw the reactionary and fascist Ukrainian organizations as an intelligence asset and a source for recruitment of saboteurs and terrorists to be used in a coming war against the Soviet Union.

A massive disinformation campaign was needed and a massive disinformation campaign was carried out. In the service of the Cold War, war criminals, ex-Nazis and collaborators were reborn as "victims of communism." Now added to the Nazi propaganda of millions of deaths in the Ukraine, invented by the Hearst newspaper empire, was the propaganda of the "wholesale slaughter" of people repatriated to their homelands, especially to the Soviet Union. The "victims of communism," had to be "saved." How many people displaced by the war or forced into slave labour by the Nazis in Germany and the occupied countries became the victims of such propaganda will never be known. The aim was to terrorize the people as to the fate which supposedly awaited them under Soviet rule should they return to their villages and homelands.

It must never be forgotten that at the time of the Second World War these so-called "victims of communism" perpetrated the most heinous crimes against the people in the name of fighting "Jewish Bolshevism." Their aim was to preserve the outmoded social, political and economic order over which they ruled and to re-establish their lost power and privileges within the Czarist autocracy and other similar regimes within the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Not for one minute is there any acknowledgement of the many crimes committed by these "victims of communism" and their heirs. To suggest that they were exonerated by the Deschênes Commission has no relation to the facts.

The parliamentary summary on the Commission stated: "The public hearings of the Commission had many highlights, but the most emotional aspect of the hearings and public debate outside the hearings seemed to pit the Canadian Jewish community against the Canadian East European and Baltic communities. The latter were afraid that the inquiry would become a witch hunt against their members who had revolted against Soviet tyranny during the war to the point of allying themselves with the Nazis."

In 1986, John Sopinka, then legal counsel for the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and later a Supreme Court Justice, went before the Commission to state: "It is my submission that there is no evidence that Ukrainians were in any general way the allies of Nazi Germany during World War II. Far from being the allies of Nazi Germany, Ukrainians found themselves in the unenviable position of having to battle both Nazi and Soviet repression."

Such slanders against the Ukrainian people are being repeated today. The truth is that an estimated 4.5-5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army while many more fought as partisans. Ukraine suffered proportionally the most deaths at the hands of the Nazis of any nation. The undeniable fact is that in the face of this heroic resistance, the Ukrainian Nationalist organizations of Western Ukraine swore allegiance to Hitler, and proclaimed that their "independence" required the establishment of a new fascist order in Europe, and the ethnic cleansing of all lands which would form part of their "independent Ukraine."

Notes

3. Wsevolod W. Isajiw, Yuri Boshyk, Roman Senkus, Ed., The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons After World War II, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1992 (contains a detailed account of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee's efforts to bring the SS Galicien to Canada despite being prohibited under Canadian law.)

Tottle, Douglas, Fraud Famine and Fascism, Progress Books, 1987 states that, "In 1946, Ukrainian Canadian Committee President Wasyl Kushnir visited the SS-men in Rimini, some of whom were still dressed in their Nazi uniforms. Upon Kushnir's return to Canada, the UCC lobbied to secure their entry into Canada. This was seemingly difficult -- SS members were barred from entry. Appearing before the Senate's Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour, Kushnir was asked if military men were among the displaced persons under discussion. Kushnir replied in the negative, supporting Senator David's claim that the SS-men were workmen by adding that they had been forcibly deported."

The SS Galicia Division has been accused of killing many Polish, Ukrainian and Yugoslav partisans who fought to liberate their countries from Nazi German occupation. The Soviet Red Army crushed the unit in the battle of Brody in 1944; it was rebranded as the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army before surrendering to the allied forces in 1945. In 1947 thousands of members of the SS Galicia were allowed to immigrate to Canada, the U.S. and Britain. They have their own memorial in Oakville, Ontario.

The Apologies for Canada's Foreign Minister

Notes

What to Make of Foreign Minister's Attempts
to Deceive Canadians

Notes

Attempts by Nazi Collaborators of Yesteryear
and Warmongers of Today to Escape
the Verdict of History

There Was and Always Is a Moral Choice

Holding Nazis and Their Collaborators to Account for Their
Crimes Against Humanity

Today's Crimes Against Humanity

Note

Shameful Equivocation by Modern-Day Collaborators

The Nuremberg Defence

Notes

Liberals Advance Despicable Memorial Project

Conception of "Canada, a Land of Refuge"

New Round of Dubious Consultations

Notes

Tribute to Liberty's Definition of Victims
of Communism

Notes

Arguments About "Minimal Compliance"

Note

The Name of Vladimir Lenin Is Monumental --
No Anti-Communist "Monument" Can Tarnish It

Note

1. "Monument has five final submissions," Metro News, March 3-5, 2017 p.10.

For Your Information

War Crimes, Ukrainian Nationalists and
the Canadian State

Anglo-American Imperialist Refusal to Prosecute War Criminals

Notes

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals
in Canada (Deschênes Commission)

Notes

For the Record
Exposing the Falsification of History

The Apologies for Canada's Foreign Minister

Notes

What to Make of Foreign Minister's Attempts to Deceive Canadians

Notes

Attempts by Nazi Collaborators of Yesteryear and Warmongers of Today to Escape the Verdict of History

There Was and Always Is a Moral Choice

Holding Nazis and Their Collaborators to Account for Their Crimes Against Humanity

Today's Crimes Against Humanity

Note

Shameful Equivocation by Modern-Day Collaborators

The Nuremberg Defence

Notes

Liberals Advance Despicable Memorial Project

Conception of "Canada, a Land of Refuge"

New Round of Dubious Consultations

Notes

Tribute to Liberty's Definition of Victims of Communism

Notes

Arguments About "Minimal Compliance"

Note

The Name of Vladimir Lenin Is Monumental -- No Anti-Communist "Monument" Can Tarnish It

Note

1. "Monument has five final submissions," Metro News, March 3-5, 2017 p.10. For Your Information

War Crimes, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Canadian State

Anglo-American Imperialist Refusal to Prosecute War Criminals

Notes

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission)

Notes

For the Record Exposing the Falsification of History

What to Make of Foreign Minister's Attempts
to Deceive Canadians

Attempts by Nazi Collaborators of Yesteryear
and Warmongers of Today to Escape
the Verdict of History

Holding Nazis and Their Collaborators to Account for Their
Crimes Against Humanity

Tribute to Liberty's Definition of Victims
of Communism

The Name of Vladimir Lenin Is Monumental --
No Anti-Communist "Monument" Can Tarnish It

1. "Monument has five final submissions," Metro News, March 3-5, 2017 p.10.

For Your Information

War Crimes, Ukrainian Nationalists and
the Canadian State

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals
in Canada (Deschênes Commission)

For the Record
Exposing the Falsification of History