As the fallout from the appearance of former Galician division member Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian parliament continues, the final nail appears to have been hammered into the coffin of western governments’ attempts to whitewash the presence and influence of neo-nazis in today’s Ukraine.
However, it now looks as if the falsification of history is to be the collective west’s latest tactic, as our ruling elites struggle to come to terms with the inevitable defeat of Nato’s Ukrainian proxies.
Before February 2022, the influence of neo-nazism on the Ukrainian body politic was widely reported in the mainstream western media. Moreover, militias incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces such as the Azov battalion, descendants of the Banderites and Ukrainian fascists that Hunka fought alongside during World War 2, were widely recognised as far-right, neo-nazi organisations. Indeed, their presence and influence was widely viewed as a dark force within the Ukraine.
But on 24 February 2022, all that changed. No longer were they fascist or neo-nazis. Instead, they were characterised as misunderstood patriots, albeit with a few ideological ‘quirks’.
Rebranding fascists, rewriting history
The BBC, playing its assigned role as dutiful propaganda arm of the British state, ran a nine-minute puff piece, arguing – almost pleading – that the Azov fighters were not fascists, but simply one battalion of the Ukrainian army.
Meanwhile, MSNBC interviewed Azov nazis who were teaching elderly women how to use weapons, and newspapers from the Financial Times to the New York Times began portraying the Azov as brave defenders of Ukraine.
But now, as the truth of President Vladimir Putin’s statements regarding nazi influence in Ukraine becomes increasingly clear, western officials and their media acolytes have ramped up the imperialists’ ongoing campaign of falsifying history to a new level, taking particular aim at the USSR’s heroic and decisive role during the second world war.
Indeed, it would appear that the collective west is now engaged in a coordinated effort to rehabilitate those who fought on the side of nazism, while portraying the Soviet Union as the villains in the conflict.
First we had a delusional Boris Johnson, claiming in an interview with Ukrainian propagandist Dmitry Gordon that the west, “with the help of the Ukraine”, won the second world war.
Not to be outdone, European Union president Ursula von der Leyen made a speech to the United Nations in which she recounted the horrors of the nuclear destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, linking it to her present fears of a repeat atrocity “at a time when Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again”. The implication was as bizarre as it was odious – that Russia had been responsible for unleashing nuclear devastation on Japan in 1945!
No mention was made of the fact that it was the United States that had been responsible for the barbarism meted out on the civilian populations of these two Japanese cities, nor of the fact that the USA is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons – not once, but twice.
These wilful misrepresentations were followed up by US secretary of state Antony Blinken, who matched his epigones with equally disgusting comments about the September 1941 massacre at Babyn Yar. At a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, 34,000 men, women, and children – jews, Soviet POWs, communists, Roma and patients from a local psychiatric hospital – were murdered by German Nazis with the assistance of Ukrainian fascists.
Blinken tweeted shamelessly (in total contravention of all historical truth): “The Soviets buried this history, which today Putin’s government manipulates to provide cover for Russia’s abuses in Ukraine.”
The comment was so fallacious that other Twitter users provided context under his post, explaining that Soviet prisoners had been among those murdered, that the Soviet Union had liberated Kiev and Babyn Yar in 1943, and that after the war, the USSR had tried 15 German policemen for their role in the atrocity.
Attempts at damage control
Next it was the turn of the BBC to re-enter the fray, keen to demonstrate that, when called upon to twist facts and engage in a bit of damage control, it’s more than capable of mixing it with the most mendacious.
Addressing the controversy surrounding Hunka’s appearance in the Canadian parliament, the BBC pointed out that while the Galician division had been accused of committing war crimes, none of its members had ever been found guilty in a court of law. The BBC also declared that “Russian disinformation” was targeting Ukrainian history, and quoted the leader of a Ukrainian organisation based in Canada who claimed there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Hunka; it was all Russian disinformation.
In the end, however, it was left to the Canadian parliament itself to take the ultimate, and most execrable step.
A week on from its shameful homage to a Nazi, the Canadian government decided to expunge the whole episode from history. A Kafkaesque proposal was put to the parliament to strike any reference to Yaroslav Hunka’s visit from the parliamentary record. If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.
The idea of erasing any references that could serve to remind us of past Nazi and Ukrainian fascist atrocities is itself a chilling one. But while the motion was defeated, the very idea that a government would seek to move such a resolution highlights the depths to which western governments will go to try to control the narrative about their barbaric war of aggression against Russia in Ukraine.
As a former history teacher here in Britain, it was striking for this author to see how the topic of Nazi Germany was always one that seemed to both fascinate and horrify students. As a result, the study of the jewish holocaust served as a warning and a reminder that we should never forget what took place.
Yet here was a self-proclaimed ‘democratic’ western government shamelessly seeking to excise uncomfortable references to the holocaust from memory.
Those same students would often ask how the Nazis managed to convince the populace to go along with their fascist agenda, allowing such barbaric and murderous policies to continue.
Today, across the collective west, the answer is right in front of them. Just follow the actions of our governments and mainstream media: watch and learn.
