Canada’s shameful refusal to acknowledge its support of the far right yesterday and today.
Graham Platner’s problem is that he lives just a tad too far south. If the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine wanted to make all the hubbub about his Nazi tattoo go away, all he’d have to do is move to Canada.
The furor over Platner’s Totenkopf, or Death’s Head, tattoo stands in striking contrast to Canada, where both Nazi symbols and a shameful history of aiding Nazis is hushed over or, quite simply, blurred out.
The footage shows a burly Ukrainian military trainer discussing his country’s “shadow war” against Moscow. The interviewer is a veteran Western journalist. The video quality is excellent. The only problem is the giant red swastika tattoos emblazoned across the trainer’s arm.
After social media users began circulating stills with the swastikas, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation—the country’s government-owned media outlet—responded by blurring out the tattoos, sparing the readers the inconvenient truth that the man being presented as a hero fighting for a Canadian-backed military is a neo-Nazi. (In addition to the swastikas, he also has a winged odal rune popular with white supremacists.)
When reached for comment, a CBC spokesperson said, “The military trainer was provided to the reporter to speak generally about Russian tactics in Ukraine; we did not platform him, nor did we present him as a hero,” and pointed out that the network added a disclaimer that “a tattoo of an offensive symbol has been blurred.”
The CBC didn’t appear to be concerned that interviewing a man tattooed with neo-Nazi iconography is being legitimized—only that the “offensive” material is kept from the public.
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This literally Orwellian action by Canada’s government media is indicative of the country’s relationship to both neo-Nazis and their World War II predecessors. The dark reality lurking beneath the placid demeanor of America’s northern neighbor is that Canada’s institutions have spent decades protecting fascists and sweeping evidence under the rug. Canada’s elites guard this bloodstained legacy to this day.
The CBC’s whitewashing a neo-Nazi isn’t an accident. The soldier being interviewed is in what the program describes as the “elite” 3rd Separate Assault Brigade. What the narrator omits is that the formation is led by Andriy Biletsky, Ukraine’s preeminent neo-Nazi who now has tens of thousands of men under his command. These men are trained, armed, and funded by the West. The CBC’s fawning profile says nothing about the unit’s neo-Nazi ties.
These omissions would be shameful in any country. But the situation is far more dire than this. Canada’s antisemitism is so ingrained, the nation is incapable of something as straightforward as condemning Nazis.
To examine Canada’s track record with the Third Reich is to enter a twisted world where following orders is a legitimate legal defense for participating in the Holocaust and SS fighters are portrayed as war victims. It’s a land where a street named for a German slaver isn’t considered problematic by the authorities and whose history of declassifying documents about harboring Nazis is worse than Argentina’s.
Canada’s history of going to bat for Holocaust perpetrators stretches back half a century. In 1967, Pierre Trudeau—a future prime minister as well as father of the recent prime minster Justin Trudeau—successfully opposed stripping the citizenship of a death squad leader responsible for murdering over 5,000 Jews. Three decades later, a Canadian court acquitted Hungarian collaborator Imre Finta, who had deported over 8,000 Jews to their deaths. The court deemed Finta’s plea of following orders an acceptable defense; it’s the only known such case in a Western nation.
Two years ago, Canada’s House of Commons shocked the world by giving a standing ovation to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party and one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Hunka fought in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (SS Galizien), a Ukrainian formation whose record of war crimes includes a 1943 massacre in which its subunits burned 500–1,000 Polish villagers alive.
Hunka was one of 2,000 SS Galizien soldiers welcomed to Canada after the war. Unlike other collaborators who kept a low profile in the New World, SS Galizien veterans felt comfortable enough to celebrate themselves by erecting monuments with Third Reich insignia and establishing scholarships in their honor. The University of Alberta, one of Canada’s largest institutes, had nearly a dozen endowments memorializing Hunka and his fellow SS men.
Images of Parliament enthusiastically applauding a Nazi soldier triggered international headlines and outraged the Canadian public. There were demands for UAlberta to eliminate its Nazi endowments. Then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered an inquiry into declassifying names of SS Galizien veterans admitted into Canada. For a moment, it seemed the country would face its dark past.
But within weeks, a fierce backlash to the Hunka affair revealed the astonishing extent of the bonds between Canada’s institutions and the Nazi collaborators they had so long protected.
Newspapers and even parliamentary testimony saw calls defending Hunka. The SS fighters were “in the wrong time at the wrong place,” averred a quote in one major outlet. All but one of UAlberta’s Nazi endowments remain. And after review, Ottawa refused to release the names of SS veterans welcomed into Canada, perversely citing privacy concerns: The same rationale used to protect children and sexual assault victims was invoked to hide names of Nazi collaborators. (By now, even Argentina has declassified its archives on sheltering Third Reich criminals.)
Canada’s elites have protected the original Nazis for the same reason Canadian media whitewashes their modern iteration in Ukraine: geopolitics. During the Cold War, Nazi collaborators were seen as a bulwark against Communism; as an additional benefit, the collaborators, eager for work and primed to hate anything that whiffed of socialism, were used to break the power of left-leaning unions.
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The latest example of Canada’s callous indifference to Holocaust victims took place this summer, when I broke the news of a London, Ontario, street named for German industrialist Max Brose, who had been awarded the title Wehrwirtschaftsführer, or industry leader, by the Third Reich. Brose’s company, a fixture of Hitler’s military apparatus, used slaves, including prisoners of war.
London’s Max Brose Drive is the only known eponym to a Nazi Party member in the entire British Commonwealth, which includes Canada, Australia, and the UK, among other nations. Despite this and despite calls by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Canadian branch, a city representative confirmed that Brose’s street isn’t being considered for renaming.
Whether it’s bloodstained fascists of last century or their modern iteration, Canada’s response is inaction, denial, and the occasional well-placed blur. It’s an insult to the over 45,000 Canadians who gave their lives to prevent Nazi tributes erected on Canadian soil and the latest indication of erosion of basic standards in Western media.
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