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)

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 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!

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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 6
Historical Denial among Canada's ultranationalist Ukrainians

Unfortunately, the process of truth and reconciliation within Canada's postwar Ukrainian émigré community ‑ concerning their links to WWII war crimes, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, the Holocaust, and the mass murder Soviet citizens ‑ has yet to begin in earnest.  


As John Paul Himka, Chrystia Freeland's uncle and the son-in-law of Michael Chomiak, told fellow members of Ukrainian-nationalist diaspora community:

"Let us face an uncomfortable fact. During the Second World War there were undeniable instances of cooperation in one form or another of Ukrainians with the Nazis' systematic murder of the Jews. The Ukrainian auxiliary police, for which there were numerous volunteers in Galicia, was routinely used to round up Jews for deportations and mass executions; sometimes they were the shooters. The initial core of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was also made up of Ukrainian police who had been employed in the extermination of the Volhynian Jews. Thousands of Jews were murdered in pogroms in Western Ukrainian towns and cities in July 1941. Many Ukrainians who later became influential in the diaspora published anti-Jewish articles during the Holocaust.... This legacy has never been confronted by the Ukrainian diaspora. France has had its soul-searching over Vichy, Poland over Jedwabne, but we have not even begun the process of self-examination."
[i]

While the progressive Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora, which strongly opposed the Liberal government's efforts to bring thousands of Waffen SS Galicia veterans to Canada after WWII, certainly have "confronted" Ukrainian complicity in the mass murder, Himka is right to point out that there still exists an acute case of historical amnesia among ultranationalist Ukrainians. 

Although this blind spot for Ukrainian complicity in horrors such as the Holocaust has been the subject of much research and discussion within the academic community,[ii] it is almost completely unknown to the Canadian public and to the mainstream media which supposedly keeps us informed. 

Meanwhile, politicians ‑ from all of our parliamentary parties ‑ regularly bend over backwards in their efforts to court votes from Canada's now sizable ultranationalist Ukrainian community.

Because Chrystia Freeland is such a prominent symbol of this sector of the Ukrainian-Canadian "Third Wave" community, with her own special family connections to Nazi-Ukrainian collaboration, and because of her prominent position within cabinet, she might just be the "star candidate" which Justin Trudeau needs to lead the important task of acknowledging this truth and finally reconciling with the past. Although painful, this process would certainly be useful to the well-being of our society which supposedly epitomises such highly-puffed "Canadian values" as multiculturalism, human rights, justice and peace.

But we should not be naive. The last thing Chrystia Freeland and the Liberal government want is any discussion of their close links to Nazi collaborationists. A shemozzle like that would be harmful to their ambitions; it might even help to deflate Canada's economic sanctions regime against Russia, its avid support for NATO's ongoing, provocatively bellicose military efforts to surround, contain and continually provoke the Russian bear, and our military assistance to the controversial, Bandera-revering regime in Ukraine.[iii]

They are therefore not going to come clean and divulge the details about Chrystia Freeland's maternal grandfather or, more importantly, the Liberal government's instrumental role in bringing him and many thousands of other Nazi coolaborators to Canada.


Sources and Notes

[i] John-Paul Himka, Letter, "The Kuropas Affair: Further Discussion," Brama, March 23, 2005.
http://www.brama.com/news/press/2005/03/050323himka-kuropas.html

[ii] See for instance the many academic writings of John Paul Himka, Per Anders Rudling, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and Marco Carynnyk.

https://ualberta.academia.edu/JohnPaulHimka

https://lu.academia.edu/PerAndersRudling

https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/GrzegorzRossolinskiLiebe

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233467822_Foes_of_our_rebirth_Ukrainian_nationalist_discussions_about_Jews_1929-1947

[iii] As Michael Jabara Carley, history professor at the University of Montreal, explains:

"Why should Canadians care one way or another whether their government supports the Ukraine and sends arms and advisors there to strengthen Ukrainian military forces? Well, the most important reason is that the present government in Kiev is illegitimate in spite of democratic appearances. It is the spawn of a violent coup d’état in February 2014, brokered and supported by the United States and the European Union, which overthrew the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovich. The vanguard of the Kiev coup d’état are neo-Nazi, fascist or ultra nationalist political and paramilitary organisations, notably the political party Svoboda, the paramilitary Pravyi sektor and various other paramilitary forces such as the so-called Azov and Aidar battalions. These paramilitary units were and are used to crush opposition in those parts of the Ukraine controlled by Kiev."

Michael Jabara Carley, Will Chrystia Freeland Finally Ruin Canadian-Russian Relations?" Strategic Culture, March 16, 2017.
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/03/16/will-chrystya-freeland-finally-ruin-canadian-russian-relations.html