World War II Nazi gets standing ovation in Canadian Parliament
Posted by Ed on September 25, 2023, 12:27 am
Jewish group demands apology after MPs honoured man who fought for Nazis
OTTAWA - Several Jewish advocacy organizations condemned members of Parliament on Sunday for giving a standing ovation to a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War. During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to Ottawa on Friday, MPs honoured 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, who fought for the First Ukrainian Division, in the House of Commons.
Hunka was invited by Speaker Anthony Rota, who introduced him.
"I am very proud to say that he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing--Timiskaming," the Ontario MP said.
"He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service."
MPs cheered and Zelenskyy raised his fist in acknowledgement as Hunka saluted from the gallery during two separate standing ovations.
The First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis...
Posted by Ed on September 25, 2023, 12:50 am, in reply to "See thread below. "
Thanks...I put the guy's name in the search facility and when it did not come up I thought I would make the post. Clearly you were on to it quicker than I.
Do these malevolent idiots have no knowledge of their own history? Around 10% of Canada's population served in the armed forces during WW2. The best part of 50,000 of them never made it home again leaving their bones in European theatres of war. A number of Canadians taken prisoner in the D-Day landings were murdered by the compatriots of the Nazi currently being honoured.
It's just shameful. I thought some years ago, when it became obvious that the history of WW2 was being rewritten to minimise the Soviet contribution to victory over Nazism, that within 20 or so years, the Nazis will come to be seen as the good guys who fought the real instigators of war, the Russians (sorry, the Soviet Union). We're nearly there already.
Re: An apology needs to be given to the whole country not just 'Jewish groups'
No parliamentarians (other than Justin Trudeau) had the opportunity to vet this individual’s past before he was introduced and honoured on the floor of the House of Commons. Without warning or context, it was impossible for any parliamentarian in the room (other than Mr. Trudeau) to know of this dark past.
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand "We had no warning or context!" 🤦♂️
The guy was literally introduced to you as "a 98 years old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the second world war".
Is your understanding of history so pathetically shallow that you don't know what that means? You had all the warning and context you needed right there.
The BBC/Guardian are carrying out a campaign of damage limitation, and, even more disturbing, attempting to effectively... 'rehabilitate' the Nazi to the ####ing core, Galician Waffen SS! A few years ago this shift, or should that be shit? would have been the stuff of a distopian nightmare.
"Canadian parliament accidentally honours Nazi - with Zelensky and Trudeau applauding"
An Independent headline...don't worry, it was just an "accident".
As Arnaud Bertrand says in Johnlilburne's post:
"The guy was literally introduced to you as "a 98 years old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the second world war". Is your understanding of history so pathetically shallow that you don't know what that means? You had all the warning and context you needed right there."
You point out their heroes in Ukraine are open Nazis and they tell you none of it is true: they just kinda like swastikas...and other Nazi symbols on their patches...you point out the actual head of the Ukraine armed forces wears a swastika on his wrist: oh no its just a "runic symbol"...and his portrait of Bandera on the wall...? well Bandera is "...complicated"... then they just do it and invite a Nazi to the Canadian parliament....a Nazi SS man: the very worst just like the ones that laid all those Canadians in their war graves...and they give this fecker: a representative of the enemy that their very own grandfathers fought and died to oppose, a standing ovation.
-They spit on us all.
Beautifully put, Ken (nm)
Posted by SueC on September 26, 2023, 1:59 pm, in reply to "" Nazi-linked""
Zelensky reveals how seriously he takes his 'Jewish' background (what a charlatan he is) by publically saluting a hero from the Nazi Waffen SS! Christ, you couldn't make this up. Unfortunately, it is, mostly, made up, the story around Ukraine and Zelensky. He's an opportunist and a fake. He's a renegrade Russian that self-identifies as a Ukrainian patriot, because it's a very well-paying role for an actor like him.
Thanks Sue & folks. Any improvement is purely down to anger. nm
'Obviously it's extremely upsetting that this happened. The speaker has acknowledged his mistake and has apologised but this is something that is deeply embarrassing to the parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians. I think particularly of Jewish MPs and all members of the Jewish Community across the country who are celebrating, or commemorating Yom Kippur today. I think it's going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine, as we did last week with announcing further measures to stand with Ukraine in Russia's illegal war against it.'
Riiiiight, so the solution to 'accidentally' praising a WW2 nazi, explicitly for fighting 'against the Russians', is to double down on 'unequivocal' support for modern day nazis, again fighting against Russia and the 'semite-led untermenschen', as the Azov commander so colourfully put it. But it's Putin's disinformation we've got to worry about and 'push back' against...
Warning of "Russian disinformation" after a clear political own goal, Canada's Prime Minister solidifies his status as the world's most nauseating pseudo-intellectual
MATT TAIBBI SEP 25, 2023
Let me get this straight:
A year and a half ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced a Jewish member of parliament named Melissa Lantsman for standing with “people who wave swastikas.” Lantsman had criticized Trudeau for fanning “the flames of an unjustified national emergency” in response to the “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests. The “swastikas” Trudeau referenced were, as even Snopes conceded, virtually all “pictured on signs as a way of mocking and protesting government restrictions,” comme ça:
By saying Lantsman stood with “people who wave swastikas,” in other words, Trudeau really meant she was standing with “people who called me a Nazi.” He declined to apologize, which of course is his prerogative.
This week, both Trudeau and House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota are under fire after Rota invited, and Trudeau applauded, a 98-year-old former soldier from the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division named Yaroslav Hunka to attend an address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Rota praised Hunka as a “Canadian hero” from his time fighting the Soviets in World War II when, not that it matters, they were allies to the United States and Canada. Leaving the elderly Hunka out of this for the moment, these politicians could easily have turned up the man’s blogs about joining Hitler’s army, making the applause scene at least approach the max on the cringe scale:
Amid the subsequent outcry, Trudeau squeaked out a handful of sentences that collectively gave off least a faint aroma of apology, though he personally didn’t apologize for anything, and invoked “mistakes were made” phrasing:
It’s extremely upsetting that this happened. The Speaker has acknowledged his mistake and has apologized… This is something that is deeply embarrassing to the Parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians… I think particularly of Jewish MPs and all members of the Jewish community, celebrating, um, commemorating Yom Kippur today.
If he’d stopped there, it would have been a merely gross performance. He didn’t, jumping straight from “Yom Kippur today” to:
I think it’s going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation, and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine, as we did last week with announcing further measures to stand with Ukraine in Russia’s illegal war against it.
To recap: Trudeau in a clear act of official disinformation smeared thousands of Canadian protesters as Nazis last year with context-twisting descriptions of a few decidedly un-representative photos. Now, after the Speaker of the House of Commons invited an ex-Nazi to parliament in a planned political act that had to be somewhat representative of the thinking of Trudeau’s Liberal government, the Prime Minister is complaining about “Russian disinformation,” as if that were to blame for this optics Hindenburg. As the CBC put it:
Trudeau warned that this event may fuel Russian propaganda. Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed the Ukraine conflict is about rooting out Nazis.
Dude, Vladimir Putin didn’t invite a Nazi to parliament, your government did. Do Davosketeers like Trudeau have anything inside, like shame or their own thoughts, or are they just manicured readers of talking points? Sheesh. It’s almost funny, how repugnant these people are.
So, the Russian actor pretending to be a Jew, pretending to be a Ukrainian, sex to the Canadian male model pretending to be a statesman;
'Fancy a line of coke, when this is over, bro?' 'I'd like to, but I've gotta smooze with thos Nazi again.' 'Tell me about it. I've even had to take my own one with me!' 'You mean that old guy up there?' 'Yeah.' 'But he's mine. I brought him along as a mark of rspect for Baba Yar.' 'Baba... what?'
via the Taibbi article, the only reference to atrocities committed by the OUN, an oblique 'There are rotten apples in a bag of healthy apples.' Some mention of Hitler's crimes, but the overall attitude is positive towards Germans, negative towards Poles and totally rage-filled towards the 'beasts in human form with a red star on their foreheads'. Unclear from this the extent to which he personally collaborated with the nazi military, but if the division was the same one that received honorary SS status, then he must have done.
My generation was united by two great forces: faith in God and love for Ukraine. We grew up on the glorious, proud land of Berezhany. We trampled this land with our bare feet and breathed its magical aromas into our souls and hearts, and our eyes recorded the beauty of the cities, villages, and landscapes of our native land on memory tapes for centuries.
My generation has become the heir to the glorious sons of this land, our predecessors. Its glorious sons and guests sowed the Berezhany land with their powerful words: Fr.
Who among us hasn't sung the rifleman songs of Roman Kupchynsky, Lev and Bohdan Lepkyi since kindergarten? The song "How to go from Berezhany to the front line" was probably sung by our mothers over our cradles. The battlefields of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army near the villages of Koniukhy, Kuropatnyky, Possukhiv, Vilkhovets, and Potutory captured our young imaginations about the heroes of our nation. Mount Lysonia was a holy place for us teenagers-a place of pilgrimage. We not only walked to it "barefoot," but stepped on it with bare feet out of a sense of holiness and boundless pride. The spirit of this mountain, like some strange radiation, permeated my soul and all my senses. I also had a native hero whom I was very proud of - my father's older brother, Hryhorii Hunka, who fought in the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
My native village of Urman, it seemed to me at the time, was the most nationally conscious village in the area. The flame of national revival, in the years between the two wars, shone brightly over the village. The church and the Prosvita reading room became the central engine of the village's national life under the fatherly leadership of the priests, Fathers Omelian Havryshko and Stepan Horodetsky. The village had a consumer store, a "cooperative", a library, a choir, a youth association "Luh", a kindergarten, and a drama club. The latter was my favorite. This group performed 4-5 plays a year in the reading room.
We all (growing up) knew that there was also an underground nationalist organization in the village, the OUN, but we did not know who belonged to it, but we imagined that all the older boys and some girls must have been members, because they often whispered to each other
The OUN had a great influence on people's behavior and the general life of the village. When the OUN issued a directive not to buy either alcoholic beverages or tobacco, because it was a monopoly of the Polish state, none of the young people smoked or drank alcoholic beverages (would a Ukrainian citizen today achieve such a dedication?). Even my grandfather, who smoked all his life, stopped smoking.
I have never seen alcoholic beverages in our house or in the house of my mother's relatives (the Yakyms), and I have never seen a drunk person in the village.
September, 1939 - I am fourteen years old.
Polish troops and civilians are fleeing in a continuous stream along the road towards Berezhany, with German planes occasionally catching up with them. Every day we looked impatiently toward the Pomeranians, hoping that those mystical German knights who were so kicking the hated Poles in the ass would appear any minute. Instead, one day a column of horsemen with red stars on their hats arrived from Berezhany.
Science at the school in Berezhany became free, and my father sent me to school in Berezhany. I lived in a Polish bursa and started going to the fifth grade. The vast majority of young people in the school were like me, from the villages of the district. Ukrainian was the language of instruction at school. A Pole taught Russian language lectures. He was an elderly man, tall, of noble character, and carried himself proudly. He treated us like a kindly old man, and we soon fell in love with him. He did not stay with us long. One very winter day in January of 1940, he, one boy and one girl from the class were summoned and two NKVEDists took them "under escort" directly to the railway station, where their families, who had been brought from the villages at night, were already packed into the cars. I didn't know that my favorite aunt and uncle Kobryn from Koniukh and their children Stefa and Volodymyr were also on that train (Stefa, my age, died that winter near Irkutsk).
It was the first demonstration of "Father" Stalin's care for us-the first echelons of "enemies of the people" to Siberia. Those were followed by more and more.
The next school year, I moved to the Ukrainian bursa on Raiska Street, where Professor Mykhailo Rebryk was the headmaster. In my sixth grade class, out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jews-children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they fled before such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.
Arrests continued in the city and villages, and people were deported to Siberia as "enemies of the people." Schools and bursas were not spared. One Saturday, school principal Tkachuk called three tenth-grade students out of the bursa and no one saw them again.Berezhany
Fear of the unknown enveloped us and the whole nation. The terror of Moscow communism was reigning over the land of Berezhany. The NKVD had eyes and ears everywhere. Friend to friend and brother to brother could not speak sincerely for fear of betrayal. What was worse was that the scum who terrorized us spoke our native language. Each time, a larger part of the population became "enemies of the people". At school, we had to sing songs of praise to our executioners, and the monthly wall newspapers that each class had to publish praised Father Stalin and the Communist Party to the skies.
In July 1941, the German army occupied Berezhany. We welcomed the German soldiers with joy. The people felt a thaw, knowing that there would no longer be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night and that they could sleep peacefully.
Upon entering Berezhany, the Germans occupied the new gymnasium as an administrative building, and our classes were moved to the old traditional place, the second floor of the town hall.The new "liberator" of the Ukrainian people, Fuhrer Hitler, reigned over the land of Berezhany.Portraits of Hitler in a long overcoat with a cowl that was raised upwards, wrapping a formidable face with small, artificially attached mustaches under a sharp nose, and the inscription "Hitler the Liberator" hung in every classroom.The Führer immediately showed his intentions for Ukraine by liquidating the provisional Ukrainian government in Lviv and sending Ukrainian leaders to concentration camps.
A new wave of arrests followed.It was easier to resist the new enemy because: a) he was easy to recognize, b) he spoke a language foreign to us, and c) he did not permeate our society with sex as the Muscovite did.
At the gymnasium, science was taught in the national spirit with religious lectures.We could talk freely among ourselves on various topics, including politics, without any fear. Now Professor Mykhailo Rebryk became the strictest, and he decided to educate us all on the perfection of gentlemen, which was impossible to fulfill!
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) organized its cells in the gymnasium and embraced many young people.
I had just turned 16, and the next two years were the happiest years of my life.I did not imagine that what I experienced in those two years would fill me with love for my hometown so much that it would last me for the rest of my life.I didn't know then that dreams of those two years, of the company of charming girls, of cheerful friends, of fragrant evenings in the magnificent castle park and walks through the city would help me get through the troubled times of the following years.That the memories of the Berezhany Gymnasium in the old town hall, with its professors and its ever cheerful and loud students, would sustain my heart and soul in a foreign land in the decades to come.The year forty-three came. The German armies were retreating westward in a "patchy" fashion.The thought of the return of those beasts in human form with a red star on their foreheads became real.Time and events told me that it was my generation's turn to follow in the footsteps of my predecessors. And it did so for the sake of the idea of a united Ukraine. Our paths were different because that was the fate of our stateless people. At the call of the OUN, many joined the UPA.Others, at the call of the Ukrainian Central Committee, volunteered for the Galicia Division.In two weeks, eighty thousand volunteers joined the division, including many students of the Berezhany gymnasium. None of us asked what our reward would be, what our support would be, or even what our tomorrow would be.We felt our duty to our native land, and we went!
Many students of the Berezhany gymnasium died a heroic death in the ranks of the UPA, in the Galicia Division.I don't want the reader to understand that my entire generation was ideologically motivated and spiritually conscious."There are rotten apples in a bag of healthy apples."It will depend on the relationship between these two qualities of apples during a given generation.
On the last day of the war, the Galicia Division, having broken contact with the Black Army in Styria (Austria), surrendered to the British Army.
In a prisoner of war camp in Italy, I met many guys from different villages of the Berezhany region.I recall that Yaroslav Babuniak, Stepan Kukurudza, Yaroslav Lototskyi, Lev Bahlay, Volodymyr Bilyk, Ostap Sokolskyi, Lev Babii, and Yaroslav Ivakhiv were there from the Berezhany gymnasium.
I think that it was God's will that we traveled around the world like the tribe of Israel, told the world about Ukraine, and forty-five years later came to help it. Our mission was difficult, because the world knew very little about us, and what it did know was falsely presented by our neighbors.For a person from the West, everything east of Warsaw up to Japan was a lonely "Russia". Slowly, through hard work, personal contacts, and cultural behavior, we attracted the general support of Western nations to "our side."
I think that it was God's will that we traveled around the world like the tribe of Israel, told the world about Ukraine, and forty-five years later came to help it. Our mission was difficult, because the world knew very little about us, and what it did know was falsely presented by our neighbors. For a person from the West, everything east of Warsaw up to Japan was a lonely "Russia". Slowly, through hard work, personal contacts, and cultural behavior, we attracted the general support of Western nations to "our side."
Being separated from your native land by an iron barrier for almost half a century is a very long time in a person's life.A foreign land, especially if it is friendly, rich, and humane, has a great attraction. One could even be forgiven for losing one's identity in such circumstances and becoming "lost."The Ukrainian emigration, the emigration of a stateless people, managed to preserve its identity: not only to preserve but also to develop its culture and history. It went through Western Europe, England and Canada.My first trip to Ukraine was in September 1989.Nothing and no one can prepare a person for the emotionally overwhelming experiences that one has to endure when coming face to face with one's native land after such a long time of separation. I would not recommend this pilgrimage to people of weak heart and old age."Berezhany - You are the best city in the world!"-for many who spent their youth there.- "For years you were their dream in distant foreign lands.Who brought you to such decline and ruin? Who destroyed our dreams?"
The paths of our childhood have been overgrown with weeds and habuzia - the roads have become impassable.The castle, which was the pride of the city for many generations and a lure for lovers, lies in ruins.The glorious Berezhany Pond is now a large, stinking mess.My favorite Urmansky pond met the same fate.I wanted to go out in despair to Mount Storozhysko and sob at the top of my lungs over the dreams of many years and the ruins of Lepko's "Best City in the World."What evil spirits have been walking around here for the last half century?
This obvious environmental ruin, however, pales in comparison to the spiritual decline of the people.The commanding, godless communist system had driven man into a hopeless situation, and it was evident in his sad eyes.The "Soviet" man succumbed to his fate, believing that he was powerless to have any influence on the course of his life.In such a helpless situation, this person indulged in extreme indifference. This indifference was evident at every step of life.The person became indifferent to his environment, to the needs and pains of his neighbor, "his neighbor."
Both on my first visit to my native land in 1989 with my eldest son Martin and daughter-in-law Teresa, and on my second visit with my youngest son Petro in 1991, it was not easy for me to leave Ukraine.The profitable and prosperous life in Canada was not very attractive. My soul was drawn to my native nest, albeit impoverished, to my land.
"I love you, my native land, I hug you like a mother, You cry and I cry, You laugh and I laugh."