Author and political activist Yves Engler joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program on Thursday to discuss an unflattering aspect of Canada’s history that’s come to light amidst the Western-backed proxy war against Russia in the Donbass.
“Obviously this became a big issue a few months ago when the former SS member Yaroslav Hunka was given two standing ovations at the House of Commons when [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky was there,” said Engler, recalling last year’s embarrassing incident in Canada’s Parliament. “He was a former SS soldier, which was obviously a very bad look.”
“What came out of that was a sort of retrospective on Canada's role in bringing in large numbers of – particularly Ukrainian, Eastern European – Nazi-allied individuals, or who fought with the Nazis during World War Two after the war,” he explained. “Canada has been the hub of what I call nationalistic fascist Nazi expatriate communities, particularly [from] Ukraine.”
Engler explained how the incident with Hunka was not the first time Canada’s status as a safe haven for former Nazis has received scrutiny. The country convened a commission in the 1980s to study the issue, but its findings were suppressed when it was discovered that former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the father of Canada’s current leader Justin Trudeau, had himself tried to discourage investigation into the matter in the late 1960s.
The discovery was revealed last month in a report backed by Canadian Jewish institutions who pressed to shed light on the subject.
“The Canadian government saw these right-wing, particularly the Ukrainians, as part of a battle against the Soviet Union,” Engler noted. “And then once the Soviet Union disintegrated they have really sort of viewed right-wing Ukrainians and nationalist Ukrainians as a geopolitical tool to weaken Russia and, of course, that's still [going on] in the context of this NATO proxy war today.”
In the book Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, author Guido Giacomo Preparata examines the many connections between Western political and financial leaders and the Nazi regime.
“Even during the war, there were American banks financing the Nazis,” noted host Garland Nixon. “It only stands to reason that this reality is, I think, starting to come to [light]: in the same way that a Nazi-fied Ukraine is a project of the West to take out Russia, the Nazi-fied Germany was a project of the West to take out Russia.”
“And when that project turned on them and collapsed, they tried to take as much of it as they could that was left and get started over again.”