Official Monuments to
Racists and Nazi-Fascists
Canadian People Oppose Nazi Memorials
- Dougal MacDonald -
On July 6, unknown individuals spray-painted
"Communism will win" and three hammer and sickle
symbols on a barrier
at the future Ottawa site of the long-delayed
so-called "Victims of
Communism Memorial." Various reactionaries howled
that the
spray-painting was a hate crime which is ludicrous
and a feeble attempt
to obscure that the proposed memorial itself is
the hate crime. In
fact, it is based on the Hitlerite definition of
communism as the main
enemy of humanity that must be destroyed. Thus
while it purports to
memorialize so-called victims of communism, the
memorial is actually a
monument honouring the Nazis and fascists who
fought against the
communists, the same communists who led the
liberation of the world
from the Hitlerites and their allies and who have
made many other
indelible contributions to a better world.
Around June 21, in a similar incident, the words
"Nazi war monument" were spray-painted on a
cenotaph located in
Oakville, Ontario's St. Volodymyr Ukrainian
cemetery, commemorating
soldiers in the 14th Waffen-SS division. (There is
also a statue
dedicated to the 14th Waffen-SS Division in an
Edmonton cemetery.) The
post-war military tribunal at Nuremberg declared
the Waffen-SS, which
was ultimately under the command of Heinrich
Himmler, a criminal
organization. However, in 1950, at Britain's
request, Canada still let
in almost 2,000 members as immigrants, without
regard to their sinister
backgrounds. In 1985 a so-called commission to
investigate war
criminals in Canada was launched by the Mulroney
government. In the
end, the ridiculous conclusion of the Deschênes
Commission
investigation was that not a single war criminal
was successfully
prosecuted, even though a number of them could
actually be identified
by name.
 Oakville regional
police at first declared the June 21 spray
painting of the cenotaph to
be a "hate crime" but had to apologize when
questioned by human rights
exponents as to how opposition to Nazism could be
considered a hate
crime. On Twitter, the local police chief agreed
with a post calling
for the monument to be removed. Oakville Mayor Rob
Burton stated: "It
is personally repugnant to me, I have family who
died fighting Nazis.
If Ontario laws permitted me to have it removed it
would have been gone
14 years ago."
The Guardian,
in a July 17 article about the
Oakville cenotaph, noted clear connections between
the Waffen-SS and
war crimes: "The 14th Division was made up of
Ukrainian nationalists
who joined the Nazis during the Second World War.
Members of the
division are believed to have murdered Polish
women and children, as
well as Jewish people." Numerous researchers
validate those assertions.[1]
 In Alberta,
two statues commemorating Ukrainians who fought
with Nazi Germany's
forces exist in Edmonton. One of them, partially
funded by taxpayers,
is of Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych, erected
in the mid-1970s. On
December 9-10, 2019, unknown individuals spray
painted "Nazi scum" on
the Shukhevych statue.
Previously on November 15, 2019, Daniel Moser
had
provided important facts on Shukhevych in the Alberta Jewish News:
"After his formal association with Nazi Germany
had ended, Shukhevych's
anti-Semitic murders continued. In 1943 declaring
independence, but
maintaining allegiance to Nazi Germany, Shukhevych
was supreme
commander of the newly formed Ukrainian Insurgent
Army (UPA), where
creating an ethnically Ukrainian country was
priority one. The UPA was
responsible for the mass killing of 60,000-100,000
ethnic Poles,
thousands of Jews, and many more."
Of course, those who want to falsify history and
whitewash their own crimes deny all this and
insist on venerating
Shukhevych as a freedom-fighting hero.
Another significant and related prior incident
was
the March 2017 outing of Deputy Prime Minister
Freeland's grandfather
Michael Chomiak as a Nazi collaborator and
propagandist in wartime
Poland from 1940-45. Much could be said about
this.[2]
What is important to note here is that Freeland
covered up the fact
that he was a collaborator and that she still
calls him a "freedom
fighter." When questioned, she chose to deflect
and instead blamed the
Russians for supposedly spreading fake news to
derail Canadian
democracy. What was even more nauseating was how a
vocal cabal of
journalists, professors, and pundits of various
kinds issued apologies
for her. Avoided at all costs was the opportunity
for Canadians to
assess what kind of government Freeland's Liberals
stand for, whether
this is the democracy Canadians want, and if it is
the democracy they
shed their blood for fighting in World War II
against the Nazis and
their collaborators.
The Ottawa "Victims of Communism" memorial
project
which
the Liberals are so gung ho to complete was said
to have been first
proposed to the Harper government in 2008 when
Jason Kenney, then
Harper's Secretary of State for Multiculturalism
and now Premier of
Alberta, was approached by Czech Ambassador Pavel
Vosalik. Not
coincidentally, in 2009, Canada's House of Commons
unanimously adopted
a resolution to designate August 23 as the
national day of remembrance
in Canada for the victims of Communism and Nazism.
It should also be
noted that the U.S. completed its own
anti-communist memorial in 2007,
dedicated by war criminal George W. Bush. Due to
continued opposition
from the people, the Canadian memorial has been
repeatedly delayed, as
well as scaled back both in size and location.
Following the fall of
Harper in 2015, the Trudeau government revived the
project and a design
was chosen in June 2018. The memorial is currently
being built in the
architect's studio and will be shipped to the site
in the Garden of the
Provinces and Territories when completed, forever
tainting that Garden
if its placement there is permitted.
The shadowy group behind the memorial is known as
Tribute to Liberty (TTL), whose treasurer and
ex-chair is Alide Forstmanis, aided by
her husband Talis. TTL's links to Latvian
collaborators with the Nazis
and their hatred for the communists and Jews are
verifiable. During the
Nazi occupation of Latvia, Talis Forstmanis'
father Fricis was
technical editor at an anti-Semitic,
anti-communist publishing house
called Zelta abele and like Freeland's grandfather
Michael Chomiak he
worked for a Nazi newspaper called Tevija
(Fatherland). Tevija was the only paper
published
in Nazi-occupied Latvia from July 1941 to October
1944. The cover of
the first issue bore a photo of Adolf Hitler, with
the statement,
"Henceforth Latvia is free from communists and
Jews." Subsequent issues
featured anti-Semitic, anti-Soviet and
anti-communist propaganda and
quotations from Hitler and Goebbels. Today, Talis
Forstmanis is
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 and escaped to areas of Nazi Germany
later controlled by
the U.S. Now Latvia is a centre of Europe's
neo-Nazi revival.
TTL at first attempted to raise money from the
people of
Canada to fund the vile memorial project but this
was an utter failure
due to opposition from Canadians from all walks of
life. The whole
fund-raising campaign was an abject failure even
though proponents
tried to claim that Canadians were all for the
memorial. In the end,
the project was so unpopular that the Government
itself started
donating money to keep it going. Cost for the
memorial planned by the
Harper regime was originally projected at more
than $5 million, then
cut to $3 million in 2015. The Trudeau government
cut the cost even
further and then handed over $1.5 million to
the private
project,
as well as another $500,000 "for design." TTL is
still unable to raise
popular support and on its website it is begging
for donations.
The final design for the memorial resulted from a
competition among
five architects which ended in June 2018 with the
selection of a group
headed by Toronto architect Paul Raff.
It is important to ask the question, who are the
so-called victims of communism that the monument
in Canada will
supposedly commemorate? Will they include all
those so-called
nationalists and "freedom fighters" who actively
collaborated with the
Nazis in the occupied countries to fight against
the Soviet Union and
who massacred civilians in those countries during
the anti-fascist war?
Will they include Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and
their minions, who
slaughtered more than 50 million people in the
name of opposing the
"Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy" only to be soundly
defeated in the end by
the Soviet Union, the communist resistance, and
the occupied peoples?
Or will the so-called victims remain nebulous and
unnamed but consist
simply of the standard list of ever increasing
fictitious numbers that
populate the tirades of Trump, Johnson, and others
of their ilk?
The "victims of communism" memorial proposed for
Canada takes its cue from that already built in
the U.S. It is part of
the ongoing campaign in Europe and North America
that is aimed at
falsifying history, blocking society's path to
progress, preventing
democratic renewal and concealing and continuing
the crimes of
Anglo-American imperialism against the working
class and peoples of the
world. This is not just an attempt to build a
single memorial but an
organized campaign to reverse the people's verdict
which long ago
condemned Nazism, fascism and militarism to the
dustbin of history. The
people who should be commemorated by a monument in
Canada are the
countless millions of victims of cold war
democracy worldwide who have
been slaughtered by those in power to protect and
advance their
anti-people interests. It is certainly not in the
interests of either
the Canadian or world's people to have monuments
to the alleged
"victims of communism" which are cynically
designed to cover up a
despicable revanchist attempt to rehabilitate
avowed enemies of the
peoples.
Notes
1. See
Littman, Sol, Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion
(Toronto: Black Rose, 2003).
2. See
entire issue of TML
Weekly, March 18, 2017.
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 28 - August 1, 2020
Article Link:
Official
Monuments to
Racists and Nazi-Fascists: Canadian People
Oppose Nazi Memorials - Dougal MacDonald
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
|
