> On September 22, 2023, following an address to the Canadian parliament by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Rota introduced and recognized Yaroslav Hunka in the parliamentary galleries. He identified Hunka as a "war hero" who fought for the First Ukrainian Division; Hunka was applauded by members of all parties. Subsequent media reports identified Hunka as having been a member of the 14th SS Division in World War II. Two days later Rota issued an apology saying that more information had come to light, causing him to regret having invited Hunka.
Wow, this is basically a storyline from The Thick of It or similar.
(I have the vague memory of more or less exactly this playing out in some sitcom, possibly The Thick of It or Yes Minister.)
I'm somewhat surprised the nazi agreed to be showed off in Parliment. Maybe he doesn't think what he did back then was wrong? Maybe he thinks too much time has passed? Maybe he is old and senile and wasn't able to fully think about it at all? Maybe he thought it was funny and figured he'd go out with a bang?
Many who fought the Soviets in the SS did not think what they were doing was wrong. Read up on the Estonian Waffen SS devision. They have a peculiar history. SS Foreign regiments were controversial at the time, and some were declared as non-culpable in the Nuremberg Trails as they were classified as "conscripts". Obviously this man is different, as he volunteered in a regiment that was itself classified as criminal, however it's possible he was expecting similar treatment.
They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong exterminating Jewish people from their lands either. Let’s not try and obfuscate that fact by stating they were fighting the Soviets only.
I never said anything remotely related to that they were "just" fighting them. I just pointed out why some units were not charged, and why he may have expected the same. The fact of the matter was many _were_ fighting the Soviets, and the historical context here is vital. All of it, including the holocaust aspects of it.
He is old like in his 90s, in mental decline consistent with his age, and has little to loose because extradition proceedings take long time. On the flip side, he was given celebrity reception in the Parliament and he got his 15 minutes of fame.
>Although the Waffen-SS as a whole was declared to be a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials, the Galician Division has not specifically been found guilty of any war crimes by any war tribunal or commission. However, numerous accusations of impropriety have been leveled at the division
There are questions that have never been answered properly. From what I understand OUN/UPA,Galician Division did not have the machinery in place to kill 100k + Poles. Their tactics and their primary purpose was to protect and defend Ukrainian lives from Russian communists. Further more most of Western Ukrainians are a mix of Polish/Ukrainian peoples.
We need to be mindful that there is much Russian propaganda concerning many of these kinds of events as it was advantageous for the the Communists to try and seed lies into the historical record.
Surely just being part of a Waffen SS division should be enough to disqualify someone from getting praised in a parliament especially in a country that lost tons of its citizens fighting the SS?
I guess Nazis are fine, and not problematic, as long as they don't have literal war crime charges against them. I'm sure that will own the Russians lol.
Well, he was probably only 15-16 when they took him. It was actually quite interesting how they recruited. They would enter a village after blocking anyone from leaving, gather up all the young men, and bring them to a central location for a quick medical and physiological eval. If you were fit and passed, they basically loaded you onto wagons and you were gone. They also took a lot of children who were blond and blued eyed back to Germany for the Hitler youth. I read an account where a man gave a baby he was holding to a young girl on the street who he didn't even know to take to his wife because they were leading him off. The Germans has a way to make sure everyone behaved, they would hang a few dozen older guys or possible just kill an entire village and burn it to the ground. People in the West have a hard time understand what was actually going on in many of these countries at the time.
Here is an interesting caption from a magazine.
The German war on the civilian population in Ukraine was ruthless. The entire world heard about the total destruction of the Czech village of Lidice and the killing of all the men in its population of 400 on June 10, 1942. The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane razed on June 10, 1944 is also well known.
But the world never heard about the Ukrainian village of Kortelisy which the Germans burned to the ground on September 23, 1942 and killed all its 2,892 population of men, women and children. There were about 459 villages in Ukraine completely destroyed with all or part of their population by the German Army with 97 in Volhynia Province, 32 in Zhitomir province, 21 in Chernihiv province, 17 in Kiev province and elsewhere. There were at least 27 Ukrainian villages in which every man, woman and child was killed and the village completely destroyed by the Germans. (Ukrainska RSR u Velykyi Vitchyznianiy Viyni, vol.3, p. 150).
At least 160 Nazi concentration camps, some holding tens of thousands of prisoners, were established in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians were also sent to Auschwitz and other death camps in Poland. The janowska (Yanivska) Camp in Lviv was especially notorious because the Commandant, SS officer Gustav Wilhaus, used to sit on his balcony and with his automatic rifle use the inmates in the yard as target practice, even shooting children. The camp also had an orchestra and played a tune titled "The Tango of Death" specially composed for it. The orchestra was executed when the Germans closed the camp during their retreat. (Wytwycky, p. 59)
According to the official records of Germany there were 4,192,000 German war dead. If Germany itself, according to World Book Encyclopedia, lost only 2,196,000 military dead and 1,858,000 missing or a total of 4,054,000 why were Ukraine's losses so huge? There are several possible explanations. It is known that the Germans intentionally starved Ukrainian cities; that Ukrainian prisoners of war in concentration camps were starved to death; that disease was rampant and was not top be treated on Hitler's orders; and that because about 2,000,000 houses and apartments were burned at least 10,000,000 Ukrainians were left homeless in the war exposing them to freezing in the winter.
Wilhelm Keitel gave an order to the German Army in the East: "for the killing of a single German soldier we should retaliate by the execution of 50-100 persons" (Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, p. 166). The death penalty was applied to Ukrainian hostages: up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by guerillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War.
Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941 announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941 again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This should serve as a warning to the population."
The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid or merely information or directions to the UPA or Ukrainian guerillas. If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with its contents and passed it on." (History Teaches a Lesson). It is obvious that early in the war Germany had a policy of annihilation of Ukrainians because it planned to establish a German colonial population in the Lebensraum of Ukraine.
The USSR also sacrificed countless Ukrainian lives in its "cannon fodder" military procedures. Soldiers were marched across minefields by foot to clear them by their deaths. When the USSR retreated in June 1941 it executed over 19,000 political prisoners in Lviv and other west Ukrainian cities. Stalin was not interested in preserving Ukrainian lives. But does all this account for Ukraine's population loss of 7.5 to 11 million? Unfortunately the Government of Ukraine since independence in 1991 has not released any official figures for Ukraine's population loss in World War II.
One astounding theory is that Stalin used the war as a pretext to destroy Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens. This theory was proposed by an Englishman of Russian origin, Nikolai Tolstoy, in his book Stalin's Secret War. Nikita Khrushchev in his secret speech to the 20th Congress said Stalin wanted to exile all the Ukrainians to Siberia so this theory is not completely far-fetched. In June 1944 a Soviet decree, signed by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Lavrenti Beria, recommended that all Ukrainians be resettled in Siberia. One expert on Soviet history suggested that Stalin destroyed up to one million people of the USSR every year during the war so the statistic of 20 million total lost probably includes Stalin's victims.
> “In view of the scandalous events in the Canadian parliament, which involved honouring, in the presence of President Zelensky, a member of the criminal Nazi SS Galizien formation, I have taken steps towards the possible extradition of this man to Poland,” announced education minister Przemysław Czarnek.
> “Such crimes constitute grounds for applying to Canada for his extradition,” added Czarnek in the letter.
Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. Drag him home and try him.
Take a minute to think of what living in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied countries were like.
There's a point in Meip's (person who hid Anne Frank and her family) memoir where she relates a story of Otto Frank discussing a staff member who joined the Nazi party. (Remember, the Franks hid in the building where Otto Frank ran a business.) Otto pointed out that this man probably joined for the social connections, and called the man a "good man." He (Otto Frank) was well aware that people had to adapt to the "new normal" of Nazi rule, and that often meant joining and cooperating with them.
Later in Meip's memoir, she implies that the business where the Franks were hiding were selling foodstuffs to the Nazi army. Everyone had to do what they could to survive Nazi occupation.
Don't forget that Otto Frank ultimately is one of the reasons why we know so much about the Holocaust. He spent a good deal of his post-WWII life raising awareness of it.
I think you should reconsider this unfortunate comparison. Volunteering for the SS and exterminating civilians is nothing like "selling foodstuffs" or just "doing what you could to survive".
Of note, Canada's deputy prime minister has a masters degree from Harvard in slavic studies and wrote a book about Russia. They knew what army the guy fought for, it's unlikely that she or anyone else who knew about history could really not have known if they'd thought about it at all.
Who is the 'they' you refer to? You are incorrectly assuming that there is some big consultation about every guest invited into the House. There is not. Indeed Freeland would have noticed this if she was involved with the vetting, but she's the deputy PM, she's not doing minutia like checking guest backgrounds.
Probably true, but as deputy PM and as a person also intimately acquainted with this issue she should have been very involved. She is of Canadian-Ukrainian background, lived there for some years post-Soviet, fluent in both Russian and Ukrainian, and has extensive networks there.
It's unclear to me in general why she hasn't been more prominent on this file in general (Ukrainian-Canadian relations during the war). Except that there have been controversies about some of her family's Ukrainian nationalist past, and maybe they're keeping her out of the limelight on this for that reason.
Or Trudeau sees her as a threat, and is doing to her what Chretien did to Paul Martin (keep them close but under wraps), I dunno.
In any case, she should have been involved, and would have known better. You hope.
There was a time a couple years ago when she was the clear "natural" successor to Trudeau. Since then her star seems to have faded, and he doesn't seem to know when to get off the stage, either.
The deputy prime minister should be involved in vetting other people's guests to the House of Commons? Personally? You don't think she has more important things to do? Vetting of guests should be done, and should be done much better than it was, but it's a job for (competent) staffers, not cabinet personally.
... Wait, how do you think this works? "I'm going to bring in a visitor, can everyone in parliament please give them the thumbs-up"? I mean, arguably it _should_ work like that, because "parliamentarian shows off someone who turns out to be a milkshake duck" does seem to be a recurring thing, but it is very much not how it works.
"Ms Freeland, you are a lifelong expert in Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Canadian history and politics, I'd love it if you looked over this list."
or
"Mr Speaker, I hear you're putting together a set of speakers for Mr Zelensky's visit, it would be great if you would share that set with me, as I have a special focus on this area"
I'm sorry, I don't see the confusion here. Unless you think that would be partisan interference with parliamentary procedure?
Putting it another way, if she was my MP I'd be pissed. Because she's not "just" the deputy PM & finance minister, she's an MP in the Canadian parliament in the governing party, and this has been one of her lifelong areas of study, and I would expect her to be applying her expertise on the public's behalf, because that's how she got voted in.
Yeah, it would have been good if the speaker had done that. However:
> He identified Hunka as a "war hero" who fought for the First Ukrainian Division
The speaker evidently did not think to so much as Google "First Ukrainian Division" (which would have made the nature of the situation clear) so it's... optimistic to assume that he'd think to check with an expert.
> "Mr Speaker, I hear you're putting together a set of speakers for Mr Zelensky's visit, it would be great if you would share that set with me, as I have a special focus on this area"
This probably wasn't even realistically on her radar; she's the _Minister for Finance_, which is, like, an actual job which requires a lot of work. Organising events like this is for backbenchers, and, apparently, speakers. Like, if she'd been chatting to the speaker at the coffee machine and he'd mentioned who he was inviting, I assume she'd have gone "wait, you're inviting a member of _what_?!", but it's not clear how you expect her to even have known about it otherwise.
I don't care about parliament, it's iterated below that it's a simple slip up. I agree with the poster who said a simple apology would suffice on their end.
It's the man himself. That's what really matters. Too many of these monsters got away in the ratlines and recruitment programs after the war. He should be drug and tried like the rest who were responsible for the atrocities of the time.
> Do you expect each MP to individually vet the guests that other MPs have invited to the house?
They have cell phones, don't they? Maybe do a quick search before you give a standing ovation to a Nazi war criminal, _especially_ if you hear "fought against the Russians in WWII". If that doesn't set off more red flags than Red Square during an October Revolution Parade then maybe the MP is just too stupid to be in Parliament.
I don't even think he should resign or be fired...a public apology of "I didn't know, and I'm sorry for that" should suffice. The problem is perpetually outraged people on the internet who can never forgive a mistake...they're a barbaric mob going around looking for who to let their anger on...if only they had better things to do.
Do people think public officials are all-knowing and incapable of making mistakes?
No, but if a Canadian engineer put their stamp on work that was this sloppy, an apology wouldn't suffice. They'd be suspended at least, or likely even lose their license permanently. Even if the work was prepared by their subordinates and just handed to them to sign off on it.
Why should the Speaker of the House be held to a lower standard of diligence, especially when their actions have international geopolitical consequences?
If it were any random MP, perhaps. But he's the Speaker, and that role requires he has moral authority and the confidence of the House. Will be interesting to see if the House decides to vote him out.
Indeed the tribal mob politics has gotten completely out of hand here.
The only upside here is all the parties in parliament applauded the guy, so there's limited possibility for it becoming a "F*ck Trudeau" crowd issue. Their own tribe were right there, applauding the same guy.
They did introduce him as fighting against the Russian in WWII... It's easy to put all the blame on a single scapegoat, this is the results of a lot of incompetent people. Shameful moment.
Who else fought against Russians in WW2? Did they think the guy is Finnish? Do you actually believe the parliament of a first world country with all the staff and process that it has did not know about it?
Why did Trudeau call it Russian propaganda when confronted about it, even if we assume that he magically didn't know anything about the guest?
> Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable.
But he fought against the Russians. His past is here irrelevant.
North American democracies have never had issues with Nazis, as long as they can help them beat the Russia. They even got the highest possible positions, like for example, the chief of NASA that landed on the moon before the Soviets.
The US was shipping huge quantities of material aid to the Soviets long before 1944. And invaded Italy and North Africa years before, if you had any knowledge of history.
If you're going to be one of those tiresome "Russia would have won WWII alone!" nationalists then this conversation isn't worth having, but I'm happy to show evidence you're wrong, if you aren't.
It's not like it wasn't explicit strategy of the US to try to work on two fronts -- defeat the NAZIs while also containing the Russians. At the end of the war a giant rush to prevent Soviet takeover of swathes of Europe and the far east, and some historians have spent whole careers analyzing how seriously the Americans considered opening a new front against Russia right at the end of the war. And there were certainly strong voices in North America pre-WWII that saw Hitler as a fairly useful bulwark against the red menace.
Despite the way popular history paints these things, the game that folks in the allied command played was not some grandiose good vs evil fight with two clear sides. It was complicated and dirty and awful things were done by everyone including the Americans.
> The US was shipping huge quantities of material aid to the Soviets long before 1944.
And those "huge" quantities were just a small drop in the sea of the total effort. Their significance was more for propaganda purposes than actual military impact.
> And invaded Italy and North Africa years before, if you had any knowledge of history.
If you had any knowledge of history, you may be aware of the fact that the total German Afrika Korps consisted of merely 35,500 soldiers [1], while there were millions fighting on the Eastern Front. And you managed to drag those Africa operations for years.
And Italy was selected as a target for the invasion exactly because it was strategically relevant. It was again defended by a minor German force for more than a year. It wasn't even a distraction for the Nazis.
But I understand the USA didn't want to actually engage fighting Germany and end the war. It was in their interest to let them slaughter each other, regardless how many civilians get killed.
> If you're going to be one of those tiresome "Russia would have won WWII alone!" nationalists then this conversation isn't worth having, but I'm happy to show evidence you're wrong, if you aren't.
I never claimed Russia would have won WW2 alone. What I said is that the Soviets (not only Russia) did win against the Germany alone. The influence of other "allies" war minor.
The USA had its role fighting against the Japan, but that was a completely separate fight. And even there, the Soviets helped the USA, by binding significant Japanese forces on their borders, that would otherwise be used against the USA, and maybe change the flow of war. They even did a similar move like the USA in Normandy, by defeating the Japanese expeditionary army in China. The only difference, they left China afterward, while the USA army stayed in Europe as an occupying force, and is there up until now.
> Lend-Lease trucks were particularly important to the Red Army, which was notoriously deficient in such equipment. By the end of the war, two out of every three Red Army trucks were foreign-built, including 409,000 cargo trucks and 47,000 Willys Jeeps. [Note, Glantz's 2/3 stat is a higher ratio than Ellis indicates, but Ellis still points to 2:1 import/production, and regardless there may be other caveats in play]
The shipment of finished trucks, planes and tanks was very important in the early years of the war, and forced a stalemate in early battles (we both know, that Moscow was about a hair from being captured). Yes, the material aid became relatively less significant as Soviet production ramped up, but that wouldn't have happened if the USSR had collapsed in 1942 or 1943.
Oh lol I almost missed this gem.
> The only difference, they left China afterward, while the USA army stayed in Europe as an occupying force
Absolutely incredible to describe the US forces in Europe as "occupying" and not mention what the Soviets did.
> Absolutely incredible to describe the US forces in Europe as "occupying" and not mention what the Soviets did.
How do you call a foreign force in a foreign country that came with the force, and refuses to leave, although there is no reason to stay there? If you think they are "partners" to Europeans, ask yourself why are there no "partner" European forces on the US soil.
> Yeah I think we're done here.
Great. Then tell your army to pack their stuff and GTFO from Europe. We don't need you here.
> And those "huge" quantities were just a small drop in the sea of the total effort. Their significance was more for propaganda purposes than actual military impact.
Opinions differ:
> "I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."
> Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.
> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."
[…]
> Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.
[…]
> The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile multiple-rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.
Framing is America foreign policy, WW2->Coldwar was US helping Soviets defeat the Nazis on the battlefield and subsequently coordinating with Nazis to try to undermine Soviets / Communists post war or for various US interests.
Doesn't change the fact though that both the US and SU have been fairly "pragmatic" after the war when it comes to Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun (yes, the Soviets had "their" Nazi scientists too which helped them kickstart the transition into the jet and space age (just not as prominently on display as von Braun): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim)
Eh. In those parts of europe Soviets/Russians was the evil. First, Soviets/Russians came in 1939. Atrocities started (Katyn, Rainiai, mass deportations to Gulag, pick your favourite). Then Nazis came as a new management and stopped those atrocities just to start their own. Few years later, Soviets rolled back in to resume what they started few years ago.
And then there's another can of worms of how Poland acted to it's neighbours in 1920.
Big portion of that blood is on soviets hands. Both for stabbing Poland and Baltic states in the back. And then running pro-soviet underground resistance that did little to stop nazis but was very successful in triggering well-known nazi response. As well as running their own atrocities on locals that took guns from nazis to defend from pro-soviet resistance.
I'm not very familiar with this particular person. But in those parts of europe it was common to join Nazi-adjoint (SS or otherwise) formations to defend against inevitable comeback of Soviets. After experiencing Soviets first-hand in 1939-41, many people weren't exactly looking forward for them coming back.
I have an old friend who is Jewish and whose father survived a NAZI concentration camp in Poland. He was basically an infant when we went in.
He naturally hated the NAZIs and the German nation of the time, but he maintained a lifelong deeper distrust and probably-bigoted hatred for Poles (and Slavs from that part of the world in general) because it was Polish neighbours who put him in there, and he saw plenty of enthusiastic Polish accomplices.
Germans back in Germany or on the western front could often claim plausible ignorance of what the NAZIs were up to with the concentration camps. Volunteering in an SS militia in the lands where the bulk of the extermination of Jews was happening is another form of evil entirely.
The holocaust is the most horrible crime of the 20th century, probably of all of human history. Being an accomplice to it, even just in thoughts and ideology, is repugnant with no excuse.
Why? Is history too complex? If at least one person was encouraged to read about events in this part of the world during and around WWII, my goal is reached.
You've been here for 15 years. You shouldn't have to ask why posting comments depicting the SS as after-all-not-so-bad and really-just-defensive, might come across as flamebait or trolling.
I'm sorry, but this is just a historical fact that core Wafen-SS was very different from some auxiliary units. There's Nuremberg trials and plenty of research came after that.
As far as I understand Hacker in HN stands for hacking both technology and mainstream culture to build a better future. And discussing troublesome historical events is a part of it. IMO a huge portion of political divide in West is precisely because many historical events are brushed under the carpet with very vague understanding.
Personally I like reading HN threads that go deep discussing such topics in other parts of the world. Of course, as long as discussions are civil and based on facts rather than name calling.
The part that you seem to be missing is in this guideline: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Part of what "thoughtful" means is taking into account how your posts might be landing with others, especially those on the other side of divides like this one.
I'm not going to try to persuade you that you owe better to someone who you perceive this way; however, you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it, and on that basis I have to ask you not to post like this again.
I do not subscribe to the idea the regular german army was entirely clean. And all war is dirty!
Furthermore you are absolutely correct that Soviet rule was not something you'd wish for.
Waffen SS was however a truly heinous organisation. If you consider it common to join the SS I would state that it also paints a rather extreme picture of those persons.
I think it is very dangerous to apologise for SS "just because they killed Soviets".
The main Waffen SS and ethnic units in eastern europe were two different things.
You're thinking about SS units formed in Nazi Gerrmany-proper. Ethnic units, while technically a part of Waffen SS, were quite a different story. At least up here in between Nazis and Soviuets. Recruitment was mostly about defending from Soviets. In most cases leaders were well-known figures from interwar era. And usually those leaders did a lot to make sure their units ain't used for stuff you typically think of when you hear „Waffen SS“. At the end of the war, those units were the starting point for post-WW2 anti-soviet resistance. Both people and guns/ammo.
"While technically he was a literal Nazi in the literal SS..."
Buddy, think about what you are writing. You don't need to defend these people. What they did, what they were a part of, is in fact bad and they should feel bad.
Was wondering why you were going so hard to defend the SS and then saw you’re in Lithuania. A country that still tries to downplay/deny its role aiding the Nazis in the holocaust. Must be something in the air there.
I'm in no way defending him or the government's actions here. I want to add though that Canada did have a commission in 1986 look into this person's unit (Galacia Division) did not find evidence implicating them in war crimes. If there is evidence of course I'm all in favor of extraditing and prosecuting him and others
The report also found that Canada was home to several thousand ex-Nazis who couldn’t be directly implicated in war crimes given the available evidence.
This was the inquiry’s verdict on the Galicia Division, the Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit in which Yaroslav Hunka – the man applauded Friday in the House of Commons – was a veteran.
It's still a nasty stink to have people whose ideological leanings went that way, standing up in parliament and getting recognition.
And it does a disservice to the Ukrainian people. Because it emphasizes the ugly side of Ukrainian nationalism instead of the legitimate side of their cause, and gives Putin and Lavrov an ideological weapon at home and abroad in BRICs countries, etc.
The line from the west should be clear: we will help defend you. Your cause is just. But the far right imagery has to end, they need to put their foot down about it. Was looking at photos of the liberation of (what's left of) Andriivka the other day and right there in a western news media article was an unfurled flag of a far right militia with a quasi-Nazi insignia. That's f'd up.
From my understanding of friends who grew up in the Canadian Ukrainian community, there have always been two sides to it, with "progressive" or "left" branches and nationalist and right-wing branches. I remember a friend telling me his parents sent him to a Ukrainian summer camps where they practiced shooting rifles to "fight against Russians" and stuff. In Canada. It's a messed up history.
There's this general error as seeing too many things in black and white, as a battle of two sides, one being the good and the other the evil. No, not all Ukrainians are heroes or saints, nor were they so. Right now they are invaded, true, but this doesn't erase any dark spots from their past. So let Putin bark his lies for as long as he want, and let those who must pay for their past deeds, pay for them. Or not, if a court decides they are not guilty - remember the guy is only charged, not convicted.
from Olesya Khromeychuk's "‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians: Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division" on the Deschenes Commission:
"These conclusions were based partly on the assumption that the Division underwent a thorough screening by the UK authorities while in SEP/POW camps in Europe, although that screening, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, was far from thorough. This, however, did not discourage the Deschênes Commission from relying on it, as is evident from the conclusions which cite the screening report of 1947"
"The confidence of the Deschênes Commission in the British screening report’s conclusions seems to imply that the Commission was either ill-informed as to the meticulousness of the screening of the ‘Galicia’ performed by the UK authorities in the aftermath of the Second World War, or that it chose not to subject the report to close scrutiny. According to Rodal, a key explanation for the Deschênes Commission’s collective exoneration of the Division is what she refers to as the ‘ethnic factor’,28 and ‘persistent lobbying efforts and backing from a demographically significant Ukrainian ethnic constituency.’29"
"While lacking conclusive documentary evidence, the assumption that those Ukrainians who joined the ‘Galicia’ Division in its post-Brody recruitment phase might have participated in war crimes in the earlier years of the war is highly credible."
Ah well so he's just a Nazi. That makes it much much better. As long as you didn't commit provable war crimes, SS Nazi officers get to have a standing ovation in parliament here in Canada. Not even 2 years after the same prime minister was so principled against Nazis that a single flag in a protest was used to classify the entire protest as pro Nazi. What a joke.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (in fact practically exclusively) for political and nationalistic battle, and ignoring our many requests to stop.
We've cut you a ton of slack for years. I bent over backwards to try to clarify the intended use of the site, on many occasions. But this sort of chortling flamebait makes it clear that you don't want to use HN as intended. Not cool.
Look Dang, your forum, your rules. You do great job moderating and been patient/understanding/fair over the years so I'm not going to appeal just respond.
I've been throttle to 5 replies for years so I end up 50/50 random topic posting and PRC geopolitics discussion. I either run of comments in a few minutes of browsing/commenting shooting the shit on casual threads if interest or exhaust ability to respond in any serious discussion chain on PRC which I like to discuss in depth. Of which I bow out when attitude turns unproductive. Like how often do my comments get flagged? Without metrics you have, my feeling is if you look response / score to my comment, up/down votes tend to cancel out, aka it's controversial, aka it's middle ground and not flamebaity. At least I hardly get flagged. Some people like my comment, some don't. But the people who don't like it, really don't for obvious reasons. That's life.
As for this particular comment being flamebait, politely disagree. I'm a Canadian commenting on an embarassing Canadian geopolitical shitshow that is directly related to recent Indian-Canadian drama with overlapping concerns for extradition relating to Canada's structural issue of harbouring diasphora with problematic backgrounds. Yeah I shared a quippy article from Beaverton, a Canadian satire site commenting on the situation because it's funny. Joked about Canadian establishment wanting this problem to go away. Which they do. It's crass humor but also relevant to topic about CANADIAN politics, which no one has ever accused me of being nationalist for. Like of all comments to ban my account on for nationalist battle, this is the most ridiculous/unrelated.
I'd rather have you on HN than not, because we need minority voices and informed commenters. I just don't know how to get around the fact that you're not using the site as intended.
I'm going to take an HN break for a bit and come back on a new account where I'll keep PRC to other comments at 1:10 ratio. That is if you permit. I'll still avoid engaging to deep if comment chains gets counter to spirit of HN, but that's not going to stop people from flagging my PRC comments and giving you work. Let's be real, acrimonious reaction to my PRC minority voice content is largely outside of my control - it's the default dynamic almost everywhere on the web. If that's not something you want to deal with, I'll just step away from HN as a commenter.
Given that the existence and past of this man has been public knowledge for decades, rather than having been revealed in the last week, it's hard to take this call seriously. The Polish government minister should probably log off Twitter.
I'm no expert on Polish affairs, but there's been some recent turn in events in Poland that seems to be whipping up the internal nationalism vs. Ukraine (around grain exports and stuff) and it's such a huge sea change from a year ago when it was all brotherly support and solidarity. Unclear what the nationalist ruling party in Poland is trying to accomplish with this.
It all just seems ridiculous to me. I think about my wife's maternal grandmother (actually both sides of her family really) whose family was from that area (Galicia) and emigrated dirt poor to Canada pre-WWI. She was able to flip between speaking something-like-Polish and something-like-Ukrainian on a whim without even seeing it as two different languages, really.
Like most of Europe (my own father was born in Alsace during the war, also an ethnic border zone), the lines on the map and the official ethno-nationalisms hide a much more complicated diversity, and I always mistrust the people who have made their political careers out of boosting some tribalism vs another marketing a simplistic vision of language-ethnicity-nation.
Your grandma being "race blind" or whatever does not change the actual atrocities that happened in Galicia. And yeah how dare the polish government not like an ally praising the member of an SS division known for massacring poles and being anti pole. Silly nationalist nonsense!
I get how explosive these issues remain, but please make your substantive points without crossing into flamewar. It's always possible and will make your arguments more effective.
You are right, sorry about that. I just found the thread weird and a bit too sympathetic to an SS soldier, so I took most of the comments in bad faith. As you said though, that does not make for a very productive debate
The vile, seething hatred deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of people overcome all rationality. See how many even on this website seek vicious token vengeance against an old man who was not guilty of any crimes they themselves implicitly support in their own countries foreign policies and actions. There is so much historical context lost when the fat virtue signalers project their first-world peace-time morals onto a people who were subject to war, famine, hatred, degradation and humiliation. Imagine being down-voted for showing sympathy for an old man. What a disgusting pit of snakes we find ourselves in.
Wow, this is basically a storyline from The Thick of It or similar.
(I have the vague memory of more or less exactly this playing out in some sitcom, possibly The Thick of It or Yes Minister.)