34 Comments
Sep 27, 2023·edited Sep 27, 2023

Thanks for an excellent piece. In the rush to to righteous moral high ground, the complexity and nuance of history have been trampled. We need more thoughtful analyses like this one.

I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like to be Ukrainian during the war. You get to choose between Hitler and Stalin. Given that Stalin has already murdered or enslaved millions of your countrymen, it is not completely incomprehensible to me that you might decide to roll the dice on Hitler.

To some, that makes me a Nazi sympathizer. I'm not a Nazi sympathizer. I'm just grateful to have lived in a time and place that would never put my principles to so cruel a test.

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The Ukrainians however were not held hearted allies of the Nazi's. They enjoyed murdering the Jews with gusto.

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author

Some did, yes. As did some members of many other ethnicities. But that absolutely does not justify tarring an entire nation.

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Just some slight pushback. I think it would be apropriate to say that the Germans perpetrated the Holocaust, even though I am sure millions of Germans would not have agreed with it. I was using Ukranian in the same sense as that.

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author

Hi Yaacov, I thought some more about your comments and concluded I had not been sufficiently explicit about your crucial point. So I added an addendum to the piece. See above. Thanks for your comments. Dan

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Thanks so much, I actually really appreciate this.

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Absolutely not my intent to tar the entire Ukranian nation, just as I am sure many Germans were good people. But as offenders of the Holocaust Ukranians were up there with the worst. My point is that the choice the collaborators made was very very often NOT a half hearted deal.

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Right you are. Some of the worst atrocities in the East were committed by local, non-German ethnic groups. Very much including Ukrainians.

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Sorry if I implied that, it was not my intent.

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You are speaking of "The Ukrainians" as if they were one person. That is exactly the kind of oversimplification against which this article is pushing back.

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Sorry if I implied that, it was not my intent. My point was that the Jewish experience of the Ukrainian collaboration (of which I'm sure many were not part of) was not some sort of half hearted Nazi partners. The Ukrainians (once again not all of them, just like not all Germans were Nazis ect) were some of the worst perpetrators of the Holocaust bar the Lithuanians.

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I take your point - by "The Ukrainians" you mean "The Ukrainians who collaborated". And of course, even "collaboration" has a lot of moral shades of grey.

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And it can be difficult for us to put ourselves back in the shoes of those making such a choice as aligning or joining with Germany in WWII given all we know about the players now. If sent back in time from even 1950 to 1943 and faced with the same decision, our knowledge base would at least make the decision to join entirely different.

Also, thinking about the decision to invite and honour Hunka in Parliament, I struggle with deciding how important it is in a longer time perspective. Right now it feels like a monumental error for a myriad of reasons. I am not certain how important it will feel in 10 days, 10 months or 10 years. Some will continue to be legitimately angry that it happened while others will simply seek to mine it to provoke outrage for their own ends, both in Canada and abroad. Our ability to try and put issues into perspective feels as if it has been severely degraded.

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Here is what I still don't get: why would Yaroslav Hunka volunteer to be there? Surely he knew his own past, or is there evidence that he is not mentally stable and cannot remember being a Waffen-SS soldier? It still does not excuse the pathetic vetting process.

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author

Apparently Hunka has always been quite open about it. He wrote about it at length on the Internet a decade ago, for example. He sees himself as a Ukrainian patriot.

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Then he too is complicit is this fiasco since he should have known the embarrassment it would bring. But to reiterate: the vetting process was non-existent.

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There is no vetting process, and that's intentional. There is a security screening process but that doesn't look in to deep personal history, which is rather the point of Gardner's story...."fought the Soviets" in that era should have raised a number of alarm bells.

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They were de facto officially rehabilitated in 1947, which is also why he's still a Canadian citizen

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My understanding is that he wanted to be there because he believes in the independence of Ukraine from Russia and Supports Zelensky. On the last comment, visitors to Parliament go through security screening, but not vetting. That's risky ground in the people's house as it could lead to excluding people for partisan political reasons..

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author

Exactly. The gallery must be open to all. The fault lies in what the Speaker did.

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But why didn't Hunka or his family shed some light on a pretty crucial detail? Being a Waffen-SS soldier is not something that just slips your mind.

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Well written. I’m a bit of a WWII buff and believe I would have picked up on “fought the Russians” as a red flag. I am appalled that not one member of the Speaker’s staff understood what that meant. A former protocol officer explained the Speaker’s unquestioned authority as an explanation. I wrote speeches for Ministers in the provincial government and can assure you, a faux pas like that would not have gotten through the approval process. Hard to believe that scrutiny doesn’t apply with the federal government.

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🇨🇦 not the only place drawing a curtain at May 1945!! Werner V B comes to mind. But the Finnish reference re Continuation War was perhaps more misleading than truncated.

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Small quibble....Finland spoke of not going deeper into USSR than the 1938 border, but did in fact breach that promise and on the Continuation War sent its army a fair bit into 1938 USSR.

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author

Certainly. One could reasonably say about almost everything I wrote, "It's more complicated than that." Which is the larger point I was getting at. My favourite tidbit on the Wikipedia entry for the Continuation War: "In a 2008 poll of 28 Finnish historians carried out by Helsingin Sanomat, 16 said that Finland had been an ally of Nazi Germany, six said it had not been and six did not take a position." That about sums it up.

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I like your comparison with US - Iraq. fortunate to have lived in EU in 1956, when my father pointed out to me that Hungarians were waiting for help (that was not far away) and holding up the RU tanks. Yet no one came ! That is what I pointed out when asked by US Military attaché about my disapproving US action in Iraq : Hungarians called -> no one came, Iraq did not call -> you came.

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Excellent article.

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You did as much butchering of history as resurrect it as a guide. Unfortunately, an elementary school rendition of history tattooed with bias and ignorance only deceives and obscures further.

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author

Feel free to lay out my mistakes here, in detail, my anonymous friend. I'll be sure to correct and amend accordingly.

Until then, I'll take this as an empty insult.

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Extremely well written and incredibly eye opening to history novices.

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Minor, pedantic point—this is not the Chamber Churchill stood in. That Chamber is undergoing renovations for the next decade (probably).

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Sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is just the enemy of my enemy... While Churchill said "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons."

Finland also made the Devil's bargain in WW2

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Guilt by association?

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