Minister Freeland's Grandfather,
Michael Chomiak,
the Nazi's Top
Ukrainian Propagandist:

Fake News,
Mighty Wurlitzers,
Historical Amnesia and the
Elephant (or Bear) in the Room

By Richard Sanders, editor, Press for Conversion! magazine of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, March 22, 2017

"It takes a village to raise a Nazi" (old African proverb, slightly modified)

2 - The Liberal Government's Warm Embrace of Ukraine's Nazi Collaborators

3 - Historical Amnesia and the Blinding Effects of Propaganda

4 - The Nazis as Victims?  Sure, just Blame the Russians!

5 - Canada needs Truth and Reconciliation, not Denials and Obfuscation

6 - Historical Denial among Canada's ultranationalist Ukrainians

7 - Michael Chomiak, The Ukrainian Central Committee and its Nazi Newspapers

8 - Aryanisation and the "Mighty Wurlitzer"

9 - The Ukrainian Canadian Congress and its Fascist Roots

10 - Getting them Early: Building the ultraNationalist Cause among Children and Youth

11 - The Freeland-Chomiak Parallels in Advocacy Journalism

12 - Was Freeland an "Accidental Journalist," or Groomed for the Job?

13 - In 1989, Freeland was Declared an "Enemy of the Soviet State"

14 - A Chomiak-Freeland Fixation on Jewish Oligarchs running the Kremlin

15 - Freeland's Kremlin-Oligarch Theory goes Global with Jewish Plutarchetype

16 - Institutionalised Confidence Scams: An Open Conspiracy of Oligarchs, Politicians and Journalists

17 - Escaping the War Racket starts with Seeing the Elephant

18 - Just Following Orders?  Which Orders?

19 - Is there a Bear in the Room?  Kill it!

20 - The Collective Care and Feeding of Russophobia

21 - The Need for Truth and Reconciliation

Press for Conversion!

If you appreciate the work that went into this research, please subscribe &/or donate. You can mail this coupon to COAT, or use the Paypal link on our homepage.  Subscription prices:
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Captive Canada:
Renditions of the Peaceable Kingdom at War, from Narratives of WWI and the Red Scare to the Mass Internment of Civilians
Or, how we learned to stop worrying, keep calm and carry on loving the myths that define and confine us.

This issue (#68) deals with the mass internment of Ukrainian Canadians, this community's left-right split and the mainstream racist, xenophobic anti-communism of progressive "Social Gospellers" (like the CCF's J.S. Woodsworth) who were so captivated by their false beliefs that they carried out the genocide of First Nations and turned a blind eye to government repression during the 20th-century "Red Scare."

The main thesis is captured here:
"The Canada Syndrome,
a Captivating Mass Psychosis"

Part 15
Freeland's Kremlin-Oligarch Theory goes Global with Jewish Plutarchetype

In her 2012 book Plutocrats, Freeland expanded upon her earlier book's focus on the supposed preponderance of Jewish oligarchs controlling the Kremlin, to examine "the rise of a new super-elite" of the "global super rich" who control much of the world's economy.  In the first chapter, when introducing her readers to a newly devised definition of the term "plutonomy,"[i] she describes the "striking" "emergence of this new virtual nation of mammon."[ii]  (Emphasis added.)

Freeland's phrase, the "new virtual nation of mammon," is itself "striking," at least for anyone who may be interested in the use of language to conjure people's imagination. "Mammon"[iii] is a longstanding antiSemitic epithet that, for hundreds of years, has been wielded to great effect as a linguistic weapon against Jews.  It was, for instance, employed throughout the Middle Ages during Christianity's holy wars against Jews.  It was in fact part of the repertoire of linguistic devices used to rouse people into frenzied murderous pogroms. 

Although the word "mammon" simply meant "riches" in Mishnaic Hebrew, its use in the New Testament led to the creation of a whole Christian mythology around the fake news that Mammon was a false Jewish God of money.  ("Ye can not serve God and Mammon," Matthew 6:24)  "Mammon simply means money or wealth in the Hebrew of the time," explained Rabbi Julian Sinclair, "but most English versions of the Gospels leave the Hebrew word untranslated, which lends to the love of money a Jewish sound."[iv]

For centuries, many European Christians used the heavily-loaded word "Mammon" in their crusade to demonise all Jews by associating them with a specific archetype, namely, the diabolical worshippers of money.  Historian Paul L. Rose has researched the "long ancestry" of abuse around misuse this term. He explains that the term "mammon" was instrumental in spreading the idea among Christians that "Jews were the demonic servants of a false devil-god of money opposed to God and the truly human."[v] 

Freeland's phrase the "nation of mammon" loads the key word even further by implying that the worship of money is tied to a specific "nation" of people. "Nation" ‑ from the Latin natio meaning "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock" ‑ now generally refers to a large grouping of people which shares a specific language, culture or ethnicity. Which "nation" of people are we supposed to associate with the Hebrew word "mammon"?

Many articles and books have since repeated Freeland's catchy phrase for plutocracy, the "new virtual nation of mammon."[vi]

Use of the word "mammon" as a veiled swear word against Jews had never faded from memory. It has been in continual usage for centuries, and has a definite popularity among certain online communities. It can, for example, be found on more than 500,000 webpages housed within the world's 67 largest internet "hate sites."[vii] 

It is possible that Freeland has no idea that the word Mammon has been used by antiSemites for centuries. But perhaps, as a professional wordsmith, she have known better than to use it. Considering the Jewish ethnicity of many of the plutocrats whom she chooses to highlight, it may not be just a mere coincidence that she selected this particular turn of phrase.

Freeland's book Plutocrats postulates what she calls an explanatory "model" using "archetypes" to explain how certain specific people manage to become plutocrats. Her idea has to do with how people with an "outsider's" perspective who become "insiders" are better able to exploit "revolutions," such as those in globalisation and technology.  To illustrate her novel idea, Freeland begins by hand picking a few oligarchs from the US, Russia and Europe.  These are men who she says fit her specific "archetype" for plutocrats.

The first three on her carefully selected list are all Americans who attended Harvard.  This she explains is because "the archetype best equipped" to explain why some succeed in becoming plutocrats is: "Harvard kids who went to provincial public schools.”  The three "literal examples" of her explanatory "model" are: Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Schwarzman and Lloyd Blankfein. All of these men, perhaps only coincidentally, are well-known Jewish businessmen. (Freeland did not mention that Zuckerman ranked 35th, with $17.5 billion, and that Schwarzman was 184th, with $5.5 billion, on Forbes' list of 1,153 of billionaires for that year, 2012.[viii] Blankfein did not even make it onto the 2012 billionaires' list, so it's not clear why Freeland draws him to the readers' attention, except that he fits her anecdotal "archetype." 

Since Freeland chose to use billionaire Harvard students to argue her premise, she could have chosen from many other examples of Harvardian billionaires.  It turns out that "Harvard has graduated some 52 billionaires, with a collective fortune of $205 billion."[ix]  Freeland for example could have drawn her readers' attention to such Harvard billionaires as Bill Gates.  But, although Gates was the world's second richest man in 2012 (with $61 billion),[x] he is not Jewish.  Gates' wealth however was two and half times more than Freeland's two Harvardians combined (Zuckerman and Schwarzman), and Zuckerman never even graduated from Harvard.

It may be worth noting here that of the world's five richest men that year, four of them were raised in Christian families: Carlos Slim Helu (Catholic),[xi] Bill Gates (Catholic),[xii] Warren Buffet (Presbyterian)[xiii] and Amancio Ortega (Christian,[xiv] likely Catholic[xv]). Their combined wealth in 2012 was $211.5 billion, far more than wealth accumulated by the Jewish billionaires highlighted by Freeland.  The fact that the world's top five oligarchs included a disproportionate number of Catholics may have been of interest to Freeland, as she herself has Catholic family influences.  Her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was deeply committed to the Ukrainian Catholic faith and was for a time, as we've seen, the editor of Canada's top Ukrainian Catholic newspaper, The Ukrainian News. And, as we've also seen, Freeland herself worked for that Ukrainian Catholic newspaper in the late 1980s. 

But since Freeland seemed so keenly interested in drawing readers' attention specifically to Jewish billionaires, it might be worth noting that the one nonChristian billionaire in Forbes' top-five list for 2012 was Jewish, namely, Bernard Arnault.  He is the CEO of LVMH a French company making luxury products enjoyed by the "super-rich." Although his company's major subsidiary, LV, was exposed in 2004 for having collaborated closely with the Nazi regime in Vichy France throughout WWII,[xvi] LVMH has not relinquished its ownership of LV. 

A related story, that Freeland also did not mention, is that the fifth richest man in 2012, Ortega, owns a famously antiSemitic fashion company.  In 2012, his firm was sued for $40 million by its former attorney for discriminatory policies against Jews, Gays and Blacks.  Ortega's company has also been publicly denounced for profiting from the production of stylish handbags bearing swastika motifs, concentration-camp garb bearing the Star of David, as well as jewellery and T-shirts with Black faces saying "white is the new black."[xvii]

But these interesting truths about what Freeland did not say in her 2012 book Plutocrats have distracted us from our narrative about what she did say in elucidating her so-called "model" of the "super rich." To further exemplify her particular image of the global plutocrat, Freeland moved immediately from her listing of three relatively insignificant US plutocrats (all of whom were Jewish), to provide some Russian examples.  Here she harks back to her earlier writings on the Kremlin's "Faustian deal" with Jewish bankers by stating that:

"Most of the Russian oligarchs who were clever and driven enough to get degrees from elite Moscow universities before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but were mostly Jewish and therefore not fully part of the Soviet elite, have a similar insider/outsider starting point."[xviii]

Then, for her final biographical anecdote to paint her initial portrait of what a global plutarch looks like, Freeland presents us with the case of Hungarian-American George Soros, a very famous businessman and financier, who she calls "another representative of the genre."[xix]  It perhaps goes without saying that Soros too is Jewish.  For decades, Soros has been a key player in pushing Ukrainian politics in directions generally favoured by Freeland and her three key communities (Ukrainian ultra nationalists, the Canadian government and the corporate media).  Through his Open Society Foundation (OSF), which ‑ like Freeland ‑ is now banned from Russia, Soros took over much of the financing for the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Wurlitzer after the Agency began to privatise this propaganda arm of the US government.

Although Freeland was overly fixated on using Jewish examples to illustrate her plutarchic archetype, this is not to say that she is antiSemitic.  In the acknowledgements for her 2012 book, Freeland notes that "Many plutocrats have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends (though that does not mean we always agree)." She then provides a list of 18 plutocrats, the first of which is George Soros, who has ‑ for decades ‑ been a great friend and very generous financial supporter of ultranationalist Ukrainian causes.[xx]  Freeland's list also included several other Jewish plutocrats, including two from the original "Group of Seven" Russian oligarchs: Mikhail Fridman and Vladimir Gusinsky,[xxi] although she does not say which, if any, of these plutocrats are her "friends." 

Immediately after provided the reader with an overwhelmingly Jewish preponderance of global oligarchs, to illustrate what we might call her "plutarchetype," Freeland then guides us even further down the rabbit hole. And, as Alice in Wonderland once said, things become "curiouser and curiouser." She (Freeland, not Alice) moves straight into a most surreal speculation about the nature of "plutonomy" that had been postulated by three Citibank investment advisors.  These glorified stock brokers ‑ who Freeland calls "an elite team of strategists at Citicorp"[xxii] ‑ had come up with some seriously hare-brained, pseudoscientific speculations that how wealth acquisition and immigration patterns are influenced by genetically-determined dopamine levels in the brain.  This, Freeland notes, they believe is "hard-coded in our DNA."[xxiii]  What?  The reason certain people become plutocrats may be a genetic thing?

But besides supposedly shedding light on why individual plutocrats get rich, the historical success of economic superpowers such as Britain, the US and Canada, are ‑ according to this wild speculation ‑ also explained by genetically-caused brain chemistry.[xxiv] Freeland favourably presents this outrageous notion and makes no effort whatsoever to expose it for what it is, ridiculously far-out conjecture on the supposed biological determinants behind the creation of "super rich" individuals and nations. The idea that certain specific groups of individuals are predestined by their genetic make-up to acquire vast amounts of wealth is a profoundly preposterous quack theory.

Freeland did not explain that the purpose of the Citigroup report, by her "elite team of strategists," was to get investors to buy stocks in certain specific luxury-oriented companies.  One stock in particular that her experts were flogging in their dopamine report is worth mentioning, namely LVMH.  This is the French company that had collaborated with the Nazis throughout WWII.  Predictably, in the fine print appended to their bizarre report, the Citigroup's "elite" theorists were forced to divulge that the bank employing them owns (1) LVMH stocks, (2) is paid by LVMH for services rendered and (3) that they are personally compensated for boosting LVMH profitability.[xxv] 

In other words, the whole exercise was an elaborate corporate confidence scheme in which this "elite team of strategists" were acting as witting "shills" for LVMR.  Their work as accomplices in this corporate scam is to lead the investors (i.e., the "marks") to believe that they are receiving sage advice from an objective, unbiased source.  As "shills" their personal goal included lining their own pockets by enticing the readers of their report to invest in specific companies that then kick back some of the rewards to them. This of course is all perfectly legal because the deceit is ostensibly disclosed, albeit in tiny print that most marks don't bother to read.