How Canada emerged as a haven for Ukrainian Nazi collaborators

Damn you US puppet politicians! The Crimean population voted 94% to rejoin Russia. Stop spreading American lies Canada!

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http://www.wsws.org

By Roger Jordan
29 July 2019

Earlier this month, Canada hosted the third Ukraine Reform Conference, a gathering of diplomats and officials from over 100 countries aimed at bringing Kiev even more directly under the geopolitical and economic domination of the western imperialist powers.

After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the conference sidelines, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed “to stand with Ukraine against Russian interference and aggression,” and to support it in the struggle to end Russia’s “illegal annexation” of Crimea.

Trudeau’s portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and Eastern Europe turns reality on its head. It conceals the fact that Canada played a major supporting role in the US-orchestrated, fascist-spearheaded February 2014 coup that chased Ukraine’s elected president from power and brought a far-right, pro-western regime to power in Kiev; and that the 2014 coup was the continuation of a longstanding US-led, Canadian-backed drive to expand NATO to Russia’s borders and harness Ukraine to the West.

Moreover, Canadian imperialism has been playing a leading role in the subsequent US-NATO war drive against Russia. This includes supporting Washington’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia; taking command and providing the bulk of the troops for one of NATO’s four new “forward deployed” battalions in Poland and the three Baltic states; and deploying 200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel to Ukraine since 2015 to help prepare its army and National Guard to, in Trudeau’s words, “liberate” Ukrainian territory.

But Canada’s intimate alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalists did not begin in 2014, or even Dec. 1991, when Canada became the first western country to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign state. In the decades following World War II, Canada became a haven for far-right Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had collaborated with the Nazis both in their drive to find “lebensraum” (living space) through the conquest of the Soviet Union and their genocidal “final solution to the Jewish problem.”

Under conditions of the postwar US-led military-strategic offensive against the Soviet Union—what euphemistically came to be known as the Cold War—these ultra-reactionary political forces came to be seen as useful allies due to their virulent anticommunism and hostility to anything and anyone associated with the Soviet Union.

In the immediate postwar period, Canada’s then Liberal government, working in close cahoots with US and British intelligence, opened Canada’s doors to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. These included members of the infamous 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, also known as the Galicia Division.

Among the beneficiaries of this policy was Mikhail Chomiak, the grandfather of current Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. Chomiak served as editor of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist newspaper during the war, Krakivs ’ ki Visti, which used publishing equipment commandeered by the Nazis from a Jewish newspaper they had shut down. Chomiak emigrated to northern Alberta after fleeing to Vienna in late 1944 in the face of the advancing Red Army (see: Canadian media denounces exposure of foreign minister’s grandfather as Nazi collaborator).

The scale of the influx of Nazi collaborators only became public knowledge in the 1980s. A comprehensive study carried out by Alti Rodal on behalf of the federal government-appointed Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada uncovered records proving that US intelligence agents in Europe had funneled Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe through the Canadian immigration system using false papers. Rodal revealed that large numbers of identically typed applications were received by Canada’s immigration department from one address in West Germany. On closer inspection, this address turned out to be a US military base.

The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney established the Deschênes Commission in 1985, in response to a mounting public outcry over exposures of Nazis and Nazi accomplices who had found a safe haven in Canada and tasked the inquiry with identifying Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.

Around the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimated that upwards of 2,000 Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrated to Canada in the years after the war. A quarter-century later, in 2011, it would give Canada an “F minus” in its annual report ranking countries on their efforts to prosecute war criminals. This placed Canada on a par with Ukraine and the former Baltic republics, i.e. countries where the right-wing, nationalist regimes that have emerged since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union openly venerate the ultranationalists who aligned with the Nazis when they invaded the USSR.

War criminals in Canada

A significant number of those who made their way to Canada were members of the Nazi SS’s Galicia Division, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalist volunteers who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army during the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. This preplanned onslaught—launched in June 1941 when a 3 million-strong force comprised of German troops, their Axis allies and fascist volunteers invaded the Soviet Union—led to the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens and the Holocaust.

In waging war, suppressing the population, and pursuing the annihilation of the Jews, across Eastern Europe and above all in the USSR, Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS shock troops relied on the loyal collaboration of ultraright-wing, anti-Semitic forces. Among the Ukrainian nationalists, in both occupied Poland and the USSR, the Nazis found eager collaborators. The Galicia Division was formed in 1943 out of a faction of the Stepan Bandera-led Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera (OUN-B) and fought with the Nazis against the Red Army throughout 1944.

Massacres perpetrated by the division against Polish and Jewish civilians have been well documented, including at Huta Pieniacka, Podkamien, and Palikrowy. At Podkamien, 100 Polish civilians were massacred in a hilltop monastery, and at least a further 500 in surrounding villages as the Red Army approached the German-occupied area in March 1944.

Members of the Galicia Division were initially prohibited from entering Canada due to their membership in the SS. But in 1950, Britain made an appeal to the Commonwealth for volunteers to accept a total of 9,000 division members who were at that time residing in the UK after being disarmed by British troops at the war’s end.

When Canada’s External Affairs Department, prompted by complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), raised concerns about the division’s ties to the Nazis and role in Nazi atrocities, the British government insisted that it had carried out background checks. “While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity,” claimed the British Foreign Office. “Their behaviour since they came to this country,” added London, “has been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology.”

With this letter serving as political cover, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet declared that Galicia Division members would be permitted to immigrate to Canada unless it could be proved that they had personally committed atrocities against civilian populations based on “race, religion or national origins.” Simply having been a Galicia Division member would not be considered a valid reason to prevent entry, even though after the war all Waffen-SS members had been deemed complicit in war crimes.

The immigration of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals continued for more than a decade after the war and was a significant factor in Canada’s emergence during the Cold War as a political-ideological centre of far-right Ukrainian nationalism.

Speaking to a CBS “60 Minutes” programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. “One way of getting into postwar Canada,” he said “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”

Ottawa carried out this policy in close collaboration with US authorities, who similarly permitted ex-Nazis to settle in the US and recruited hundreds to act as spies against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied regimes in Eastern Europe. According to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, up to 1,000 former Nazis were made use of by the CIA in Europe, within the US itself, the Middle East, and in Latin America.

The open-door policy towards Nazi collaborators stood in stark contrast to the cold shoulder given by Canada to Jews desperately fleeing persecution. Abella coauthored a well-known book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, which was published in 1983 just prior to the establishment of the Deschênes Commission. Abella and Harold Troper detailed how Canada accepted a mere 5,000 Jewish refugees between 1936 and 1945. Most infamously, Canada was among the countries to refuse to provide asylum to the 900 Jewish refugees on the ship the MS St Louis, which sailed from Hamburg for the Americas in April 1939. Canada’s refusal to accept any of the refugees forced the St. Louis to return to Europe, where over 200 of its passengers later died in the Holocaust.

Exoneration of the Galicia Division

Due to the continued high-level protection members of the Galicia Division enjoyed from the government and other establishment circles, the Deschênes commission granted the Brotherhood of Veterans of the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army (Galicia Division) special intervener status in its hearings. This meant it was able to cross-examine testimony from witnesses, as well as make use of the standard right to submit legal documents and provide its own testimony.

The Nazi War Criminals commission also refused Soviet offers to gather testimony in the USSR, on the purported grounds that Moscow had refused to allow Canadian officials to interrogate witnesses in accordance with Canadian rules of evidence.

Outrageously, the Deschênes commission exonerated the Galicia Division of any wrongdoing in its December 1986 final report. Its most important findings in this connection read: “The Galicia Division (14 Waffengrenadierdivision der SS [gal. Nr. 1]) should not be indicted as a group,” and “Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission.”

The commission also summarily dismissed the charge that hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals had immigrated to Canada, declaring these figures to be “grossly exaggerated.”

Another Ukrainian nationalist outfit given special representation rights before the Deschênes commission was the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which has since renamed itself the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. In 1950, the UCC had successfully campaigned for the lifting of the ban on Galicia Division veterans entering the country.

The UCC continues to uphold the legacy of the Galicia Division. On Remembrance Day in 2010, the organisation saluted Ukrainian veterans of the Waffen SS as fighters for “freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland.” The press release came from Paul Grod, the current head of the UCC. Grod has accompanied both Trudeau and his predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on their trips to the Ukraine.

The case of Vladimir Katriuk

Nobody should believe that the Canadian ruling elite’s defence of pro-Nazi war criminals is a thing of the past.

In 2015, Vladimir Katriuk, a Ukrainian and member of the SS during World War II, died in Quebec at the age of 93. His personal fate exemplifies how the Canadian state actively connived to ensure Nazi war criminals escaped justice.

Katriuk, who came to Canada under a false name in 1951, was accused of war crimes, the most documented of which was his participation in a the Khatyn massacre, carried out in what is now Belarus, in early 1943. In the last years of Katriuk’s life, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre placed his name near the top of its list of the ten most-wanted war criminals.

Katriuk’s case first came to prominence in 1999, when a federal court ruled that he had gained Canadian citizenship on false pretenses, because he had neglected to inform Canadian immigration officials about his Nazi past. After a lengthy period of deliberation, the Conservative government decided in 2007 that it would not revoke Katriuk’s citizenship and claimed there was insufficient evidence for him to be charged with war crimes.

Katriuk, who later joined the SS, was identified by multiple sources as being a machine gunner at the Khatyn massacre, which occurred on 22 March 1943. A total of 149 villagers were either burnt alive or shot by members of Battalion 118, a volunteer auxiliary police battalion of which Katriuk was a member, with the support of a Waffen SS unit. Evidence of his participation in other lesser known crimes has also been documented, as mentioned in a 2012 article by Swedish academic Per Anders Rudling.

Even in the last weeks of his life, when a Russian extradition request was submitted for the Ukrainian-born Katriuk, a spokeswoman for the Conservative government justified Canada’s refusal to allow Katriuk’s extradition to face trial on the basis of the political situation in Russia and its alleged “aggression” against Ukraine. “While I cannot comment on any specific extradition request, to be clear, we will never accept or recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea or the illegal occupation of any sovereign Ukrainian territory,” a spokeswoman for then Justice Minister Peter McKay declared.

Nothing has changed under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Anxious to cover up the ultraright-wing character of the forces Ottawa and Washington have allied with in their drive to harness Ukraine to western imperialism and these forces’ ties to the Ukrainian nationalist collaborators with the Nazis, Foreign Minister Freeland has denounced the revelations of her grandfather’s ties to the Nazis as Russian-orchestrated “disinformation.”

When Trudeau visited Ukraine in 2016, he was accompanied by a strong UCC delegation and members of the Army SOS group, set up to procure military equipment for the pro-Kiev volunteer militias, which are drawn overwhelmingly from far-right, fascistic groups.

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Canadian media denounces exposure of foreign minister’s grandfather as Nazi collaborator
[18 March 2017]

The Many Reasons to Believe Vasily Prozorov’s Testimony About Ukraine’s Role in Downing MH-17

Vasily Prozorov’s testimony will likely be dismissed by Western governments that support Ukraine, but there is plenty of evidence to back his claims about MH-17.

Source: The Many Reasons to Believe Vasily Prozorov’s Testimony About Ukraine’s Role in Downing MH-17

http://www.mintpressnews.com

by Whitney Webb

March 27th, 2019

Former Ukrainian intelligence officer Vasily Prozorov’s testimony will likely be dismissed by Western governments that support Kiev, but there is plenty of evidence to back his claims.

KIEV, UKRAINE — A former top official in Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), who recently fled the country, has given explosive testimony regarding the involvement of the Ukrainian government in the 2014 downing of the MH-17 passenger plane. The incident, which killed all 283 passengers and 15 flight crew members on board, had been blamed on Russia by Ukraine’s government, the United States and much of Western media.

In addition, the former official, Vasily Prozorov, told a group of international reporters that Ukraine’s controversial Azov Battalion, known for its Neo-Nazi ideology and symbolism, ran and maintained secret prisons in contested areas of Eastern Ukraine where there is fighting between pro-government forces and pro-Russian separatists. Prozorov, who has sought asylum in Russia, also accused the United States and the United Kingdom of training an SBU division that returned to Ukraine to conduct terrorist attacks in the Donbass region, which has been the site of a civil war since the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014 in a U.S.-backed coup.

Prozorov’s identity was kept secret until the press conference began, in breaking with standard protocol. Prozorov then introduced himself, stating that he had been employed by the SBU from 1999 to 2018, but — after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 — had contacted Russian intelligence and began working undercover in the central office of the SBU. He does not describe himself as a defector, as he stated that his allegiance remains with the Ukrainian people while the allegiance of those who came to power with U.S. assistance in 2014 has long been suspect.

Prozorov then noted that, soon after the coup and before the civil war between Western and Eastern Ukraine had begun, the SBU — at Kiev’s behest — had begun to plan combat operations in the East and that the government had requested that plans be made that would result in mass civilian deaths among ethnic Russian populations, who were to be labeled as “accomplices to terrorists.”

The former SBU officer also detailed how the post-coup SBU had established secret prisons where prominent dissidents of the U.S.-backed government were interrogated, tortured and even killed. One of those prisons, located at an airstrip in Mariupol, was nicknamed “the Library” and Prozorov compared it to a “concentration camp” and showed images of severely beaten detainees he claimed had been imprisoned at the site. The former SBU officer also stated that SBU’s decisions, in regards to the black-site prisons and other areas, were often “led” by foreign advisers from the United States and the United Kingdom. The SBU’s use of torture in Ukraine’s civil war has been well-documented even though the SBU blocked UN efforts to probe its extent.

In addition, Prozorov asserted that the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, a militia that was incorporated into Ukraine’s Interior Ministry as a component of the country’s National Guard, also operates its own prisons in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) zones in Eastern Ukraine. The Azov Battalion receives funding from the government of Ukraine as well as from the U.S. government and has also received weapons from the Israeli government.

Insights into the MH-17 downing

Prozorov’s most shocking statements were related to the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, or MH-17, which was promptly blamed on Russia by the post-coup Ukrainian government, the United States and much of the Western world. Prozorov stated, noting first that it was his personal opinion based on his experiences, that the Ukrainian government had been an “accomplice to the Malaysian MH-17 flight disaster.”

He continued, stating:

The amazingly prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership was the first thing that made me feel suspicious. My unequivocal opinion was President Pyotr Poroshenko and his press-service had prior knowledge of the affair. Secondly, hostilities had been underway for several months by then, but the airspace over the area was not closed.”

He also noted that his efforts to learn more about the circumstances of the disaster within the SBU from a senior officer were met with the following reply: “Don’t poke your nose into this business, if you don’t wish to have problems.” However, Prozorov noted that “some information has leaked out in the end, though.”

He then concluded:

On the basis of my own analysis I can speculate who was an accomplice in the crime and who was involved in concealing evidence. In my opinion, there were two men involved – the current deputy chief of the Ukrainian presidential staff Valery Kondratyuk and chief of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence directorate, Vasyl Burba.”

Valery Kondratyuk, left and Vasily Burba, right

Prozorov’s full conference can be watched here (in Russian). A summary with English subtitles can be watched here.

Claims well-supported by independent reporting

Though some may be quick to dismiss Prozorov’s testimony as “Russian propaganda,” many of his claims fit with independent reporting on the Ukrainian conflict. For instance, in regard to Prozorov’s claim of “black site” prisons, the SBU denied the UN access in 2016 to many detention centers in Mariupol — where Prozorov says “the Library” prison is located — and Kramatorsk. The SBU claimed that it blocked the UN inspectors access in order to protect “government secrets.” The UN had first tried to access the areas after several human-rights groups had found credible evidence of torture taking place at facilities in the area.

Prozorov’s claims that the post-coup SBU had made plans to murder ethnic Russians in the Donbass are also supported by publicly available evidence. For instance, when the civil war began, the Kiev-based government stated its intention to specifically target civilians in order “to clean the cities.” In 2016, then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who has been called “Washington’s man in Ukraine,” called pro-Russian civilians in the region “subhumans.” In an interview aired by the U.S.-funded, pro-government Ukrainian news channel Hromadske TV, a Ukrainian journalist aligned with the government asserted that the contested region was home to 1.5 million people “who are superfluous” and “must be exterminated.” With such sentiments having been openly stated by prominent politicians and journalists aligned with the current government in Kiev, Prozorov’s assertions seem hardly unreasonable.

US Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Robert Ashley, right, meets with Vasyl Burba, Chief of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine. Photo | Defence Intelligence of Ukraine

In regard to Ukraine’s alleged role in the downing of MH-17, it is worth noting that past reports by late American investigative journalist Robert Parry described in detail how the “independent” MH-17 investigation was almost completely dependent on information from Ukraine’s SBU in piecing together the event. According to Parry:

[This control by the SBU, combined with its past obstruction of the UN torture probe],suggests that the SBU also would steer the JIT away from any evidence that might implicate a unit of the Ukrainian military in the shoot-down, a situation that would be regarded as a state secret which could severely undermine international support for the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev. Among the SBU’s official duties is the protection of Ukrainian government secrets.”

In addition, one of Parry’s sources maintained that the CIA had, like Prozorov, found evidence that Ukraine’s government had indeed been “an accomplice” to the MH-17 incident:

A source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the CIA’s conclusion pointed toward a rogue Ukrainian operation involving a hard-line oligarch with the possible motive of shooting down Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official plane returning from South America that day, with similar markings as MH-17. The source said a Ukrainian warplane ascertained that the plane was not Putin’s but the attack went ahead anyway, with the assumption that the tragedy would be blamed on the pro-Russian rebels or on Russia directly.”

Another reason Prozorov’s testimony should not be outright dismissed as propaganda is the fact that he pushed back on previous Russian media reports involving U.S. infiltration of the SBU. When asked by a reporter if he could confirm reports that foreign military officials, including Americans, occupied their own floor at SBU headquarters, Prozorov adamantly denied those claims, stating that after 2005 there were CIA officials present in SBU headquarters but that the practice had been discontinued. He stated that U.S. intelligence officials regularly visited SBU headquarters after the 2014 coup but were not based in the building.

Thus, while Prozorov’s testimony will likely be dismissed by mainstream Western media outlets and Western governments that support Kiev, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that many of his claims — including his most shocking — deserve careful consideration, not outright dismissal. Indeed, were Prozorov a defector from a country currently at odds with the U.S. — be it Russia, Venezuela or Iran — it is highly likely that mainstream media would repeat and his promote his claims regardless of their veracity. However, because he has sought asylum in Russia, his recent statements are unlikely to gain international traction merely because of where he is now located, in spite of the evidence supporting many of those statements.

 

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism

Ukrainian Security Official Says Ukraine Shot Down MH-17

Source: Ukrainian Security Official Says Ukraine Shot Down MH-17 – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

http://www.globalresearch.ca

298 Passengers and crew were murdered by Ukraine in order to create a propaganda attack on Russia.  The filth that comprise the Western media and governments hid the truth for the sake of Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda. 

The security official says that his suspicions were aroused by “the amazingly prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership,” which “indicated prior knowledge of the affair.”  Perhaps readers will remember that at the time I pointed out that the event was clearly staged as the same propagandistic accusation against Russia appeared everywhere instantly long before any investigation.  Indeed, the investigation was stillborn as it could not be concocted to indicate Russia’s guilt.

Don’t be surprised. Western governments and media only lie.  Never do they tell the truth.  Remember:  Russiagate.  Weapons of mass destruction.  Iranian nukes.  Assad’s use of chemical weapons.  Gulf of Tonkin.  9/11. Russian invasion of Ukraine.  JFK assassination. MLK assassination.  Bobby Kennedy assassination.  Skripal poisoning. Maduro starving his own people.  An endless list of lies.  The entirety of the West is nothing but a lie factory. 

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

See This:

BREAKING: Ukrainian Security Boss Admits Ukraine Shot Down MH-17, Planned Ethnic Genocide in Donbass

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http://www.fort-russ.com

Joaquim Flores

March 21,2019

MOSCOW – Top ranking SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) agent in charge of the ATO operation through 2014 when the operation commenced, Vasily Prozorov, has just made some stunning statements to international media, and has recently escaped to Russia. Moreover, without exaggeration, this is a major blow to the foreign policy positions of Kiev. It is also a very weighty argument for those forces in Europe who want to quickly move the peace process in Ukraine from its present stalemate.

In speaking to journalists, Prozorov’s presentation can be summarized with these points:

– Kiev from the very beginning did not plan to resolve the conflict in the south-east of Ukraine by peaceful means

– Kiev initially planned a large number of victims among the population of Donbass, then they wanted to declare them accomplices of terrorists

– In the area of ​​the ATO there are Ukrainian secret prisons (as he called them concentration camps)

– The neo nazi Azov unit also had its secret prisons. This is not Russian propaganda, people were actually killed there.

– Specialists from the USA and the UK prepared a division of the SBU (Department No. 5) who went to train in the US and abroad to organize terrorist attacks and sabotage in Donbass

– The Ukrainian side was involved in the Boeing crash of the MH17 flight

The Ukrainian side was involved in the MH17 flight disaster over Donbass, a former officer of the Ukrainian security service SBU, Vasily Prozorov, told a news conference on Monday.

“It is my personal opinion and it relies on certain information. The Ukrainian side is an accomplice to the Malaysian MH17 flight disaster,” he said.

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The Neo-Nazis in Canada’s Military

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Yves Engler

November 26, 2018

Photo Source Savannah River Site | CC BY 2.0

Given that people who espouse neo-Nazi ideology are attracted to the military, it is disappointing to learn what a poor job the generals do to uncover and expel them. Or perhaps the inaction reflects a deeper problem.

A recent stream of stories about right-wing extremists in the Canadian military prompted the leadership to scramble to get ahead of the story. But, the Chief of the Defence Staff’s effort to simply blame low-ranking individual members was neither convincing, nor satisfying.

Ricochet reported that three soldiers in Alberta operated an online white supremacist military surplus store that glorifies white ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

VICE concluded that Nova Scotia reservist Brandon Cameron was a prominent member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division.

The three founders of Québec anti-Islam/immigrant “alt right” group La Meute are ex-military. Radio-Canada found that 75 members of La Meute’s private Facebook group were Canadian Forces members.

On Canada Day 2017 five CF members disrupted an indigenous rally in front of a statue of violent colonialist Edward Cornwallis in Halifax. The soldiers were members of the Proud Boys, which described itself as “a fraternal organization of Western Chauvinists who will no longer apologize for creating the modern world.”

The CF’s response to these embarrassing stories is to claim these soldiers don’t reflect the institution. In a Toronto Star article titled “Right-wing extremism not welcome in Canadian Armed Forces — but ‘clearly, it’s in here,’ says top soldier”, John Vance claimed racist individuals slip through “unknown to the chain of command.”But, is that answer convincing or does the CF hierarchy share blame for far rightists in the force?

Over the past four years over 1,000 Canadians troops (a rotation of 200 every six months) has deployed to the Ukraineto train a force that includes the best-organized neo-Nazis in the world. Far right militia members are part of the force fighting Russian-aligned groups in eastern Ukraine. Five months ago Canada’s military attaché in Kiev, Colonel Brian Irwin, met privately with officersfrom the Azov battalion, who use the Nazi “Wolfsangel” symbol and praise officials who helped slaughter Jews during World War II.According to Azov, the Canadian military officials concluded the June briefing by expressing “their hopes for further fruitful cooperation.”

Sympathy for the far right in Ukraine has been displayed by the CF on other occasions. In February 2016, for instance, “nearly 200 officer cadets and professors of Canada’s Royal Military College” attended a screening of Ukrainians/Les Ukrainiens: God’s Volunteer Battalion, which praised far right militias fighting in that country.

More generally, Canadians have fundraised for and joined rightist militias fighting in the Ukraine.For their part, top politicians have spoken alongside and marched with members of Ukraine’s Right Sector, which said it was “defending the values of white, Christian Europe against the loss of the nation and deregionalisation.”

(In a story titled “US-Funded Neo-Nazis in Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists” Max Blumenthal recently described how Washington’s support for the far right in the Ukraine has blown back. He reported, “an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country’s national guard.”)

In addition to supporting fascistic elements in Eastern Europe, the CF’s authoritarian, patriarchal and racist structure lends itself to rightist politics.

Ranging from Private Basic/Ordinary Seaman to General/Admiral,there are nineteen ranks in the CF. In deference to authority, lower must salute and obey orders from higher ranks. In addition to the hierarchy, the CF has been highly patriarchal. Until 1989 women were excluded from combat roles and the submarine service was only opened to women in 2000. As has been discussed elsewhere, extreme patriarchy represents a sort of gateway ideology to the far right.

The CF has also been a hot bed of white supremacy.For decades institutional racism was explicit with “coloured applicants”excluded from enlisting in several positions until the 1950s. Despite making up 20 percent of the Canadian population, visible minorities represent 8.2percent of the CF (it may be slightly higher since some choose not to self-identify). In 2016 three former CF members sued over systemic racism. Their suit claimed that“derogatory slurs, racial harassment and violent threats are tolerated or ignored …. Victims of racism within the Canadian Forces are forced into isolation, subjected to further trauma and, in many cases, catapulted toward early release.”

Chief of the Defence Staff John Vance’s effort to blame right-wing extremism on a few bad apples won’t do. The CF needs to look at how its decisions and culture stimulates right-wing extremism.

More articles by:Yves Engler

Yves Engler’s latest book is ‪Canada in Africa: 300 years of Aid and Exploitation.

Five years on from Euromaidan: Did ordinary Ukrainians benefit from the Western-backed ‘revolution’?

It has been five years to the day since Ukraine’s ‘Euromaidan’ protest movement began, with anti-government protesters demanding an end to corruption and a closer relationship with the European Union. But what became of the dream?

Source: Five years on from Euromaidan: Did ordinary Ukrainians benefit from the Western-backed ‘revolution’? — RT World News

RT. COM

21 Nov, 2018

An aerial view shows Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square crowded by supporters of EU integration during a rally in central Kiev ©  REUTERS / Vasily Fedosenko

It has been five years to the day since Ukraine’s ‘Euromaidan’ protest movement began, with anti-government protesters demanding an end to corruption and a closer relationship with the European Union. But what became of the dream?

On the evening of November 21, 2013, pro-West protesters began flocking to Kiev’s Maidan Square, carrying banners and waving EU flags. Hours earlier, then-president Viktor Yanukovych had suspended preparations to sign a European Association Agreement, which would have been a potential step on the road to joining the EU – and a move which Russia had warned would be “trade suicide” for the post-Soviet state. The West, on the other hand, was determined to wrangle Ukraine out of Russia’s “orbit” and lure it into its own.

Read more

Ukraine has a Nazi problem and a Western media problem

Ukraine was facing an economic crossroads. The country was being pulled in two directions, asked to choose between closer alignment with the EU or Russia. When Yanukovych chose Russia by refusing to sign the Association Agreement, it sparked outrage within the EU and a protest movement which would quickly be hijacked and used to engineer a Western-backed coup – a shortcut to bringing a pro-West government to power.

Such interference, manipulation and exploitation of Ukraine’s internal political and societal divisions was not without consequences. More than 10,000 died during an insurgency in the eastern regions which began when the ethnic Russian population began to fear it would be swallowed into an anti-Russia nationalist state backed by Western powers. But the West ignored dangerous signs of growing nationalism – and outright Nazi-style fascism – in Ukraine, bargaining that anything was better than Russia ‘winning’ in a game of geopolitical chess.

Five years on, what has become of the protesters’ dreams to rid Ukraine of corruption and build an equal, transparent and functional democracy? The sad answer is that Ukraine’s revolution was a disaster which left the country teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state.

An anti-corruption revolution?

Corruption is still rampant in Ukraine. A recent assessment by the International Monetary Fund suggested that corruption wipes about two percent off the country’s GDP growth per year.

The IMF and World Bank also scolded the Ukrainian government for the “limited results” that have been seen in fighting corruption, with no high-level officials convicted – something which is said to be keeping investors out of the country.

People attend a rally against Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev, Ukraine March 9, 2018. © REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

World Bank Country Director for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine Satu Kahkonen said that “governance issues” were forcing investors to steer clear. “It’s basically a high level of corruption and the rule of man instead of the rule of law” that have prevailed in Ukraine, she said. “We’re getting a lot of inquiries from various investors, they come to talk to us, and we see the opportunities in Ukraine, but time after time we hear the concerns about the governance.”

Higher living standards?

Ukraine is also emerging as Europe’s poorest country, with a GDP per capita of just €2,960 – well below Estonia’s €22,420 and Slovenia’s €26,590 GDP per capita.

In fact, according to a recent Credit Suisse report, Ukrainians rank among the world’s poorest people, coming a dismal 123rd out of 140 countries, with the net wealth of the country’s citizens lagging behind Bangladesh and Cameroon. Another recent study by the United Nations Development Program found that, despite continuing economic growth, 60 percent of Ukrainians live below the poverty line.

An old woman sells fruit in central Kiev, Ukraine October 4, 2018. © REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

Less income inequality?

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s richest 100 citizens have seen their wealth increase significantly in the years after the Euromaidan protests. A recent report from the Novoe Vremya magazine showed that the wealth of the country’s richest people is growing 12 times faster than Ukraine’s total GDP. Pro-West President Petro Poroshenko is the country’s sixth richest man, increasing his wealth by 10 percent to about $1.1 billion, all while average Ukrainians see little or no improvement in their own living standards or net wealth.

Political reforms?

While some recent reforms in education, pensions and healthcare were welcomed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in its latest country report, there has still been a lack of “meaningful progress” in the reform of governance and an “inefficient court system continues to obstruct the administration of justice.”

European values?

Scant attention has also been paid by the Ukrainian government – and Western powers and media – to the increasingly worrying growth of neo-Nazi sentiment in Ukraine. When, in October 2017, Ukraine witnessed its biggest neo-Nazi march in years, Western media all but ignored it. In fact, in deeds and words, Ukraine’s government has almost encouraged this kind of sentiment, by praising as an “inspiration” the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fighters who the Nazi marchers were commemorating. In recent months, mainstream media have done more to acknowledge this creeping fascism in Ukraine, but the admission comes far too late.

People, including Ukrainian nationalists and members of far-right radical groups, light flares during a procession to mark the Defender of Ukraine Day in Kiev, Ukraine October 14, 2018. © REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

On the world stage, too, Ukraine’s pro-West President Petro Poroshenko has faded into near irrelevance, barely acknowledged by US President Donald Trump at recent Armistice Day commemorations in Paris, as geopolitics returned to business-as-usual with Kiev fading from the headlines.

Finian Cunningham: Western Collapse… Scapegoating Trump and Putin

“The US and its minions among European allies have destroyed any foundations of international order from their unabated wars and campaigns of mass murder. Their corporate-capitalist plunder has eviscerated the planet.”

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http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian CUNNINGHAM

29.07.2018

Western Collapse… Scapegoating Trump & Putin

Former US President Barack Obama was in South Africa last week for the centennial anniversary marking the birth of the late Nelson Mandela. Obama delivered a speech warning about encroaching authoritarianism among nations and the “rise of strongman politics”.

Coming on the heels of the summit in Helsinki between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, media reports assumed that Obama was taking a swipe at these two leaders for supposed growing authoritarianism.

Obama’s casting of the “strongman” as a foreboding enemy to democracy is a variant of the supposed threat of “populism” that Western political establishments also seem concerned about.

Trump, Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, Italy’s Salvini, Victor Orban in Hungary and Sebastian Kurz in Austria, among many others, are all lumped together as “strongman politics”, “populists” or “authoritarians”.

Here we are not trying to defend the above-mentioned political leaders or to make out that they are all virtuous democrats.

The point rather is to debunk the false narrative that there is some kind of dichotomy in modern politics between those who, on one hand, are supposedly virtuous, liberal, democratic, multilateralists, and on the other hand, the supposedly sinister “strongman”, “authoritarian”, or “populist”.

In Obama’s pompous depiction of world political trends, people like him are supposedly the epitome of a civilized, democratic legacy that is now under threat from Neo-fascists who are darkly rising to destroy an otherwise happy world order. That world order, it is presumed, was up to now guided by the magnificence of American political leadership. In short, the “Pax Americana” that prevailed for nearly seven decades following the Second World War.

Following the Helsinki summit, the Western media went full-tilt in hysterics and hyperbole. Trump was assailed for “embracing a dictator” while repudiating Western democratic allies.

In a Washington Post article, the headline screamed: “Is Trump at war with the West?” It was accompanied by a photograph of Trump and Putin, bearing the caption: “The New Front”.

Meanwhile, a New York Times piece editorialized: “His [Trump’s] embrace of Putin is a victory dance on the Euro-American tomb.”

Another NY Times op-ed writer declared: “Trump and Putin vs. America”.

The Western establishment political and media commentary promulgates the notion that the US-led Western order is breaking down because of “populist”, “strongman” Trump. In this alleged assault on the pillars of democracy and rule of law, Trump is being aided and abetted by supposedly nasty, like-minded authoritarians like Russian leader Vladimir Putin, or other nationalistic European politicians.

The premise of this establishment narrative is that all was seemingly salubrious and convivial in the US-led order until the arrival of various renegade-type politicians, like Trump and Putin.

That premise is an absolute conceit and deception. If we look at Obama’s presidency alone, one can see how the supposed guardians of democracy and international order were the very ones who have actually done the most to decimate that order.

Obama, you will recall, was the US president who notched up seven simultaneous overseas wars conducted by American military, arguably without a shred of international legal mandate. Under international law, Obama and other senior officials in his administration should face prosecution for war crimes. He also greatly expanded the executive use of assassination with aerial drones, reckoned to have killed thousands of innocent civilians in several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, merely on the suspicion of being terrorists.

It was Obama who ramped up the covert war policy of his predecessor GW Bush in Syria, arming and directing terrorist proxies in a failed bid to overthrow the elected government of President Assad. That US-backed covert war in Syria, along with Obama’s overt regime-change war in Libya, largely contributed to the refugee crisis that has destabilized the politics of the European Union.

So here we have the supremely bitter irony. Obama now lectures audiences with his pseudo-gravitas about the specter of strongman politics and xenophobic populism, when in fact it was politicians like Obama who created much of the refugee problems that have given rise to anti-immigrant politics in Europe.

It really is a conceited delusion among US and European establishment politicians, pundits and media that somehow a once virtuous, law-abiding US-led Western order is being eroded by rabble rousers like Trump, Salvini, Orban and so on, all being orchestrated by a “strongman dictator” in the Kremlin.

For the record, Putin, the supposed “strongman” in the Kremlin, warned more than a decade ago in a seminal Munich speech that the international order was being eroded by rampant American unilateralism and disregard for law in its pursuit of illegal wars for US hegemony. That was at the height of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which killed more than one million civilians and forced millions more into infernal destitution.

In truth, the Pax Americana that is presumed to have prevailed over the past 70 years was never about order, peace or justice in the world. The notion that the US guided the world with its “moral authority” and maintained stability throughout is one of the most fatuous delusions of modern history.

From the atomic holocaust in Japan and during subsequent decades, the US has waged wars non-stop in almost every year, whether from covert operations in Latin America and Africa, to full-on genocidal wars in Indochina. The past quarter-century has seen an acceleration and expansion of these US wars, sometimes with the assistance of its military axis in NATO, largely because Washington viewed that its license to kill for mass murder was unchecked after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is the real dynamic underlying why the Western order is now seen to be collapsing. The US and its minions among European allies have destroyed any foundations of international order from their unabated wars and campaigns of mass murder. Their corporate-capitalist plunder has eviscerated the planet.

The chaos from these wars, including economic impacts of gargantuan costs to Western populations, has created social conditions which engender politics of protest, anti-establishment, anti-austerity, anti-war, anti-immigration, and so on.

If the supposed order is shaking for the establishment political class and its flunkies like Barack Obama it is because of their own criminal depredations – depredations which have been going on for decades under the guise of Pax Americana.

The writers at Monthly Review had it so presciently right years ago, when they analyzed the actual Western order as “Pox Americana” – a diseased affliction.

This is the historical context which accounts for why US and European establishments are decrying “strongmen” and “populists”. They are essentially scapegoating others for the historic failure of institutionalized Western criminality led primarily by “democratic” regimes in Washington.

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands out as the one international leader who put a brake on the US-led criminal assault on global peace. Putin’s stand first emerged with his landmark speech in Munich in 2007, and then came into clear expression when he helped put an end to the US-led covert criminal war on Syria.

That is why Putin is so vilified and demonized by the Western establishment. The poachers have been stopped from raiding the globe, and in their exasperation, they have whipped up all sorts of disparaging epithets like “strongman” and “authoritarian”.

No one has practiced more fascist-style criminality and brutality towards law and peace than the polite-sounding pseudo-democrats who have been in office for the past 70 years in the US and Europe.

The Western political establishment and its elite-driven capitalism is rotten to the core. Always has been. Its own erosion and oozing corruption is the source of the putrid smell that it now wishes to waft away by scapegoating others.

Human Rights Activists Demand Israel Stop Arming Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Azov militia emblem

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theantimedia.com

July 10, 2018

Written by Middle East Monitor

(MEMO) — The arming of neo-Nazi groups by Israel has come under the spotlight once again. This time it’s weapons that are ending up in the hands of a right-wing Ukrainian militia that openly espouses neo-Nazi ideology.

Concerns were raised by a group of more than 40 human rights activists who filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice demanding the cessation of the arms deal. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the petitioners have argued that these weapons serve forces that openly espouse a neo-Nazi ideology and cite evidence that the right-wing Azov militia, whose members are part of Ukraine’s armed forces, and are supported by the country’s ministry of internal affairs, is using these weapons.

While details of the export licenses for armaments are not disclosed to the public, the appearance of Israeli weapons in the hands of avowed neo-Nazis, the activists say, should be a consideration used in opposing the granting of such a license.

The Haaretz pointed out that this was not the first time in which the defence establishment has armed forces that embrace a national socialist ideology, citing its arming of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups on a number of occasions.

Previously Israel had armed anti-Semitic regimes, such as the generals’ regime in Argentina, which murdered thousands of Jews in camps while its soldiers stood in watchtowers guarding the abducted prisoners with their Uzi submachine guns, the Haaretz said. Israel has also armed Nazis, such as the war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia.

In addition to arming neo-Nazi groups, Israel is reported to have sold arms to regimes accused of committing genocide. Last year a similar petition addressed to the Israeli High Court called for the suspension of arms trade with Myanmar. Eitay Mack, the petitioners’ lawyer noted that the EU and the USA had imposed an embargo on Myanmar and said that Israel was the only Western state supplying weapons to the military junta. The treatment of Rohingya Muslims was denounced by the UN as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

A similar petition to the High Court of Justice called for the cessation of arms sale to South Sudanwhere Israeli weapons were being used in a conflict where nearly 300,000 lives were said to have been lost and two million people displaced.

Israeli arms also ended up in the hands of groups that carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Over a million were killed in the genocidal mass slaughter of Tutsi.

It’s not clear if the petition will be successful. On previous occasions campaigners hit a brick wall after the Israeli government issued a gag order against the country’s High Court.