Minister Chrystia 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

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

1 - Introduction

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 Nationalist 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

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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 back issue (#68) deals with Canada's mass, civilian internment programs from reservations and residential schools, to concentration camps for Ukrainians during the WWI-Red Scare era (1914-1920),  forced-labour "Relief Camps" in the 1930s, WWII internment camps and the Cold War's "Profunc program" (1950-198s) which prepared plans to roundup thousands of leftists.  Also highlighted is the mainstream racism and antiRed xenophobia of progressive "Social Gospellers" (like J.S. Woodsworth, co-founder of the NDP's precursor, the CCF) who were so captivated by their narratives that they helped carry out the genocide of First Nations and turned a blind eye to state repression during the 20th-century "Red Scare." 

Read the intro to "Captive Canada" here:
"The Canada Syndrome,
a Captivating Mass Psychosis"

But besides revealing many aspects of her maternal grandfather's support for the German war effort, this research exposes shocking new information about Chrystia Freeland's own career as a propagandist.  To decide whether Freeland is suitable as a Foreign Affairs minister, Canadians should explore this research which documents her longstanding ties to extremely Russophobic organisations that are deeply rooted in the Ukrainian fascist tradition which predates WWII. Canadians should also be aware that during the early years of her journalistic career Freeland wrote for ultranationalist Ukrainian publications linked not only to her grandfather and other fascist collaborators, but to the CIA's mighty Wurlitzer propaganda machine.

For example, in 1986 at age 18, Freeland received a Canadian government-funded job writing articles for The Encyclopedia of Ukraine. This project was the postwar brainchild of her grandfather's WWII boss, Volodymyr Kubijovich.  Kubijovich headed the top Ukrainian collaborationist network established and funded by Nazi's military intelligence agency, the Abwehr.  Another publication, for which Freeland worked in the late 1980s, The Ukrainian News, had been edited by her grandfather (1981-1982).  A third was the US-based Ukrainian Weekly, which has used thousands of items from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the best-known propaganda creature of the CIA.  It featured Freeland's work on the same page as an ad for a book honouring the Nazi's Waffen SS Galicia Division as a heroic Ukrainian force fighting Germany's noble war against Soviet communism.

But besides showing that Freeland's ultranationalist-advocacy journalism often turned from the same page as that of her Nazi-propagandist grandfather, this report exposes a host of fascist skeletons still being hidden from public view in the large, interconnected wardrobes of Canada's postwar Ukrainian émigré community and the Government of Canada.

While past Liberal governments turned away Jewish refugees trying to escape Nazism, and even interned 2,000 such refugees in Canadian POW camps during much of WWII, the Liberals eagerly brought thousands of former soldiers of the Nazi's Waffen SS Galician division and other Ukrainian veterans of fascist military formations, to live in Canada right after the war. These fascist collaborators are still revered as heroes by many ultranationalist Ukrainian Canadians, who Freeland counts among her closest friends and supporters, because they fought valiantly against Canada's WWII ally, the Soviet Union.

In this context, Minister Freeland's Nazi heritage is not surprising. In fact, it is just the tip of a much larger scandal that is hiding just beneath the surface of Canada's polite society. The ultranationalist Ukrainian-Canadian community, of which Freeland is the most high-profile symbol and spokesperson, suffers from a serious case of historical amnesia. This pathological social condition prevents the afflicted from being able to acknowledge the truth, let alone reconcile for the well-documented complicity of Ukrainian fascists in the genocidal mass murder of Jews, Poles and Soviets.

Also explored here is the curious matter of Freeland's fixation on exaggerating statistics about what she called the Kremlin leaders' "fiendishly complicated" "Faustian bargain" with a "pact" of "mostly Jewish" bankers.  In various articles, books, interviews and speeches she has repeated the false claim that this cabal of "mostly Jewish" oligarchs controlled about half of Russia's economy.  Her much-repeated hyperbole, using tropes of a "Frankenstein's monster" and the "new virtual nation of mammon" (the supposed Jewish God of money), is eerily reminiscent of Hitler's Big Lie about a diabolical Jewish-Muscovite beast ruling from the Kremlin.  This Nazi bogeyman was a conflation of the two common enemies (Jews and communists) shared by both the Third Reich and its close Ukrainian allies. Their antiSemitic Russophobia was ably disseminated through the Nazi's fearmongering propaganda machine, that mighty news Wurlitzer, in which Freeland's maternal grandfather deftly operated.

In keeping with the painful process of Truth and Reconciliation, which our government claims to support, this online report offers Canadians a window into many unpleasant parts of our history.  While some Ukrainian-Canadians directly aided and abetted the genocides of WWII, others continue to turn a blind eye to this history by using myths, fake news and other false narratives to deny, obfuscate, rationalise and cover up the shameful heritage of their forebears, and the ultranationalist organisations they empowered in Canada.

Canadians have a right to know about these long-hidden skeletons that continue to be redacted from our mainstream national memory.  This report uses the Freeland-Chomiak affair as an opportunity to uncover many facts about much broader social scandals that have effectively been whitewashed from Canada's official history.

After initially denying so-called "allegations" about her maternal grandfather, the next tactic used by Freeland and her supporters (from government, the media and her Ukrainian community) was to blame the Russians. Their reaction, that revelations about Michael Chomiak's role as a Nazi collaborator were a case of Moscow's insidious meddling in Canadian politics, is the height of irony. This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Freeland herself has been very actively meddling in Ukrainian political affairs since at least 1989.  That year, at age 21, when she was an exchange student in Ukraine, Freeland was so involved in trying to influence their internal politics that a Ukrainian newspaper openly denounced her as an "enemy of the Soviet state." The Soviet government even lodged an official complaint against Freeland with the Canadian embassy in Moscow, saying: "Your national is a well-known troublemaker and you should keep better control over your citizens."

Freeland was one of only two foreigners who gave speeches at the first convention of Rukh, the Ukrainian independence movement that soon succeeded in separating Ukraine from the Soviet Union. The Canadian government, the mainstream media, ultranationalist Ukrainians and her family all rallied around to support Freeland's meddling in Ukrainian politics. That was almost 30 years ago, and they have all been at it ever since.

Freeland's interference in Ukrainian politics was in sync with the Cold War policies of Canada, the US and NATO. Soon after WWII, the CIA identified the "nationalities issue" as a key wedge for splitting apart our wartime ally and Cold War enemy, the USSR. The corporate media, NATO governments, ultranationalist Ukrainian émigrés all happily joined this Cold War struggle.

Michael Chomiak would have been extremely proud of his granddaughter's meddling not only because she helped build an independent Ukraine, but also because its independence helped destroy the USSR. This, of course, had been the Nazi's main goal in WWII. Although Germany's massive invasion of the USSR did lead to the annihilation of 25 to 30 million Soviet citizens, the Nazis were eventually turned back by the Red Army and were defeated.

Chomiak would have been just as proud of Freeland's journalistic and political career, as she is of his lifelong commitment to the Ukrainian cause which remains her central driving force.

From an early age, Freeland's strident way with words and the impassioned chutzpah of her Russophobia, helped make her a precocious darling not only of ultranationalist Ukrainians and the Canadian government, but also the mainstream business-oriented media. The extreme confidence which she exudes -- especially when voicing her vehement opposition to Kremlin leaders, whether pre- or post-communist -- has made Freeland a great asset to these three powerful social forces. However, Canadians must ask whether she deserves their confidence to make objective policy decisions that are not biased by her particular cultural programming.

The Role of Propagandists in Institutionalised Confidence Schemes

This investigation of the propaganda careers of Michael Chomiak and Chrystia Freeland has yielded some theoretical insights which follow from previous work on "Captive Canada." Victims of the Stockholm Syndrome are hostages who begin to identify with their captors and believe their narratives. Far more insidious is the fact that members of huge social groups are subjected to a bombardment of ubiquitous cultural programming from birth, not only by their families, but by all manner of organisations, institutions and the media. Therefore, on a mass level, millions of people may be held hostage by culturally-imposed identities and belief systems that are all but impossible to escape. But these hostages do not even realise that they are being held captive. What's worse, they may be so convinced of their supposed freedom, that they try to convert others to the very beliefs which have captivated them.

If held captive by ethnocentric and xenophobic programming, social hostages inevitably become entranced by a narcissism for their group -- whether ethnic, national, political, economic, religious, racial or some combination thereof. Once enslaved by such supremacist identities, ordinary well-meaning people easily turn a blind eye to the rights and truths of others. Some may even take part in genocide, thinking they are on the side of the angels. Others may spend their lives crafting justifications and cover-ups for past and future crimes, all in the name of what they perceive to be the struggle of good over evil.

This latter group, the propagandists, are characterised not only by their communication skills, but by their absolute confidence in the myths and narratives that bind their social group together. The institutionalisation of confidence schemes has evolved over millennia to perpetuate the survival of cultural bodies. But while beneficial to the longevity of a specific culture, the fanatical overconfidence of propagandists in their own particular social group is detrimental to others within a diverse multicultural environment.  For example, the social narcissism perpetuated by ultranationalist propagandists can be as destructive as the spread of an invasive biological species and can cause the genocide or extinction of other cultural species. 

But unlike traditional confidence artists who know that they are part of a petty criminal enterprise, cultural propagandists may be unwitting hostages who are unable to see the shackles that compartmentalise them within a huge institutionalised racket that thrives on war and corporate exploitation. This blindness makes propagandists more convincing and better able to beguile and entrap others in the criminality of an imperialist culture that has become normalised.

Canadians need to be more wary of fearmongering narratives spread by government and media propagandists captivated by the hubris of their own myths. We need to become more aware of blindspots in our history so that we are not led to repeat the tragic errors of our past.