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Notes -
Did anyone of you had Waffen SS fighter getting standing ovation in Canadian parliament for their 2023 bingo card?
Congratulations - you will be rich.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66908958
Now I doubt that the svastika will be on the Canadian flag anytime soon. But the fact that the ideology blinded the people to make even a basic background check on the so called hero is troubling. And there seems to be some kind of full blown damage control operation going on.
Anyway a lot of Canadian politicians will have to figure out how to unsuck this dick. ADL seems to be silent as of now. Media try to bury the waffen ss part in the bottom of the articles, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more fanatical ex blue checkmarks try to write opinion piece explaining how this unit were somewhat different than the rest of the Waffen SS.
I caught the daughter's Facebook page before she deleted. She and her father were so incredibly proud and excited about this, and her father was over the moon at the chance to meet Zelensky. (there is a lot of boring stupidity around "but Zelensky's jewish!", but I think this is sufficient disproof of at least "currently a joins-the-SS-to-cleanse-Ukraine-of-jews-level nazi")
I think it's worth giving a hearing to his own account of his experience with the war (auto-translated). This obviously could be heavily sanitized in retrospect, but with the historical literacy to understand the circumstances of growing up in a village in eastern interwar-Poland through 1939, I don't think it necessarily has to be. This whole situation is just profoundly sad.
I imagine the daughter gave the staffers of Speaker Rota, who is also their personal MP in North Bay, the little lie-by-omission of "First Ukrainian Divsion" as part of trying to arrange for her father to be able to come see Zelensky speak (I didn't see any indication that the expectation was for him to be presented before parliament), and it snowballed all the way through all the staffers necessary for this to have happened without a second thought. It's fun to imagine those staffers, and the circumstances that lead the Liberal Party and Parliament to have nobody in the entire chain equipped to realize that "fought against the Russians in WWII" needs a second look. What an unbelievable unforced error.
I think there may be some meaningful distinction to be made between Eastern European and Baltic people who had first been conquered by the Soviets and who subsequently lived under NKVD terror and had friends and family disappeared forever in the middle of the night, and who were later under the direct physical threat of the Soviets' return, for whom these Waffen-SS units were the only organized option available for them to fight that with; and German SS who had other options and for whom joining the SS was something very particular. Indeed a Canadian government commission found something like this in the 1980s (pretty explicitly laid out in part 2), specifically regarding this division.
Of course there's no conceivable way you would expect the general public to have enough historical literacy to process this with any more finely-grained nuance than how they are. Boy did they ever fuck up.
Other things:
The SS Galician's specific accusation of atrocities was against not-specifically-jewish Poles. File this too under "there's no conceivable way you could expect, historical literacy, etc". (also I can't find any mention of this atrocity in the commission report ...)
The Daughter's facebook was absolutely plastered, multiple posts per day interspersed with their giddy anticipation of this event going back as far as I looked, with "Good People Don't Spend Their Time Harassing Marginalized Communities" (Progress Pride Flag), "No Space For Hate" (Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag-coloured map of Canada), Orange Shirt Day profile pics, etc. What an impossible nightmare this attempt to do a nice thing for her incredibly elderly father must have turned out to be.
This is a cheque the current regime [and the fragment of the public that supports them] is inherently unable to cash. If you want to pretend the evil Nazi menace is everywhere, fine, but that approach has inherent costs, one of which is that you now have to be unimpeachable about not bringing things literally called "Nazis" in.
The public is not going to care (their faction has in large part seen to that) that "he's one of the good ones", even though that's obviously true, and so that faction has no other option but to cancel a military ally from a country they're trying to help because to do otherwise is just writing your own attack ads. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
Personally, I'm rooting for the father; a Communist foreign empire trying to unjustly impose its will on territory that empire considered a western province is not entirely irrelevant to recent Canadian history. Sadly, I don't think there's a Canadian political party willing/representing a public that would be receptive enough to actually pointing that out, but it would be absolutely hilarious if there was.
How is it "obviously true"?
Also, Eastern European SS sympathizers just looked to act out ethnic revenge fantasies on civilian populations. This is what Hunka's group did, mostly focusing on killing Polish civilians. Same thing in Croatia and doubtless other places too, where it was an excuse for killing local Serbs and Jews and stealing their property. What about that makes them "the good ones"?
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