The American Library Association (ALA) recently honored two authors with a track record of whitewashing Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, journalist Lev Golovkin has written in an article for the US news outlet The Nation.
The world’s largest non-profit library organization did not think twice before drawing attention to the books edited by Volodymyr Viatrovych – now a Ukrainian MP – and Lubomyr Luciuk, who is currently a professor in Canada’s elite military college.
Golovkin recalled that the ALA earlier published a list of Best Historical Materials for 2023, which included Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement—Selections from the Secret Police Archives.
“In honoring a book depicting Ukrainian volunteers in the Waffen SS as heroes and patriots, the group [ALA] reveals historical ignorance—or indifference to anti-Semitism,” the author stressed in the article titled “Why is the American Library Association whitewashing the history of Ukrainian Nazis?”
He recounted in this regard that Viatrovych is notoriously known for calling soldiers from an SS division “war victims,” while Luciuk once demanded that the Canadian parliament apologize for calling a former member of SS a Nazi.
What’s more, it was Luciuk who added significantly to glorifying the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its offshoot, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which were to blame for exterminating tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
Actually, Golovkin claimed, the laws institutionalizing the OUN/UPA “cult” across Ukraine were the brainchild of Viatrovych, who was at the helm of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), a department in the government, in 2015.
At the time, the Kiev regime greenlighted laws declaring the OUN and the UPA to be Ukrainian national heroes and making it illegal to deny their “heroism”, a move that provoked international uproar.
In 2018, Viatrovych went further by berating then-Israeli President Reuven Rivlin for “spreading the Soviet myth about the OUN’s participation in the Holocaust,” something that is an established historical fact. A year later, Viatrovych was fired as UINM head before quietly becoming a member of the Ukrainian parliament.
Singing the same tune was Luciuk, who published an edited excerpt from the Enemy Archives book in Canada’s National Post newspaper, in which he described the OUN as having been maligned by the USSR. Luciuk alleged that the Soviet Union “routinely portrayed OUN members as war criminals, Nazi collaborators, fascists and so on, a trope regurgitated regularly by the Russian Federation.”
“The piece made it sound as if the OUN’s collaboration with the Third Reich was Soviet propaganda, instead of established historical fact. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) denounced the National Post for providing ‘space to Lubomyr Luciuk who continues to spread Holocaust distortion and disinformation,’” Golovkin underscored. The SWC is a Jewish global human rights organization researching the Holocaust.
As for Luciuk, he also vehemently stood for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, commonly known as SS Galizien, notorious for its war crimes, such as the burning of up to 1,000 Polish villagers alive during World War II. Luciuk, however, claimed that SS Galizien members “weren’t pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic and they didn’t engage in war crimes.”
Meanwhile, glorifying Nazi collaborators remains an essential part of the Kiev regime’s policy, and opening monuments to the war criminals in Ukraine becoming a common event. Russian President Vladimir Putin noted in this vein that “the glorification of Nazi criminals, and direct propaganda of Nazism in Ukraine become the norm, as if there was no Nuremberg [Trials].”