Those Who Forget The Past

...are doomed to screw up royally.

History matters. That’s true everywhere, always. But when it comes to nations and wars, this truism rises to the status of holy writ: You cannot understand what is happening now, much less decide what to do about it, without first understanding the past.

It shouldn’t be necessary to say that. But it is. As Canada’s Parliament recently demonstrated in the most humiliating way possible.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky flew to Ottawa to give an historic speech thanking Canada for its considerable military and financial aid. Members of Parliament from all parties responded to Zelensky’s speech with fierce applause. On Twitter, Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, aptly compared the moment to that in 1941 when Winston Churchill stood in the same chamber and gave his famous “some chicken, some neck” speech. (Correction: A reader reminds me the House of Commons has temporarily moved for renovations. So Zelensky’s speech wasn’t in the same physical space as Churchill’s. I’ll leave this here to remind myself to step more carefully.)

It was a moment for Canadians to be proud of. What followed was its opposite.

Volodymyr Zelensky in Canada’s House of Commons, September 22, 2023

Winston Churchill in Canada’s House of Commons, 30 December, 1941

From The Globe and Mail:

When Mr. Zelensky finished his speech last Friday, [Member of Parliament and Speaker of the House of Commons] Anthony Rota drew attention to a 98-year-old man from North Bay, Ont., named Yaroslav Hunka, who was seated in the chamber as an invited guest, and lauded him for “fighting for Ukraine independence against the Russians” during the Second World War.

“He is a Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Mr. Rota said. His comments led to cheers and two standing ovations, which included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mr. Zelensky.

As Speaker, Rota sits on a prominent dais and directs what happens in the chamber. It is entirely understandable that in a moment of high emotion and ceremony, no one caught the implications of Rota saying that this man fought against Russians in the Second World War. They simply accepted that, as the Speaker told them, this man was a Ukrainian hero. Everyone stood and applauded.

Which was a horrible mistake.

Hunka was a soldier in the “First Ukrainian Division,” which sounds suitably patriotic at a time when Ukrainians are fighting a just war against brutal Russian aggression. But the “First Ukrainian Division” was a name taken by the unit only in the last days of the war. Before that, it was informally known as the “Galician Division.” Its formal designation was “14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.”

Hunka was a Waffen-SS soldier.

The Waffen-SS was the military branch of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Other branches of the SS included the Gestapo (secret state police), the Einsatzgruppen (“special groups” which roamed Eastern Europe committing mass slaughters), and the death camps, including Auschwitz. Although it mostly engaged in ordinary military operations, many units of the Waffen-SS were infamous for massacring prisoners of war and punishing partisan attacks by murdering civilians en masse.

And everyone present in Canada’s Parliament last Friday gave a standing ovation to a former Waffen-SS soldier — in the same chamber where Winston Churchill delivered one of the great speeches of the Second World War.

On Sunday, Rota issued a statement saying that it had been his decision alone to draw attention to Hunka’s presence in the visitor’s galley and call him a hero. He added that “I have subsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision to do so.”

That’s understatement of mammoth proportions. But I’m not here to pile on. It was a deeply shameful moment that handed Russian propagandists a golden gift — more on that later — but what interests me is how it happened.

Anthony Rota has an MBA and a BA in political science. He has highly educated staff members. All these people work in national politics and the visit of Volodymyr Zelensky was a dramatic moment in a story of great importance for Canada and the world.

And Rota’s comments weren’t extemporaneous. He read from a prepared speech.

I don’t blame anyone for not knowing what the “First Ukrainian Division” was. But apparently, no one even thought that, hey, history is important in this conflict, and this is history, so maybe someone should … Google it?

More incredibly, the description of Hunka as someone who, in the Second World War, fought against Russians did not set off anyone’s alarm bells. Not even a twinge strong enough to send someone to the Google machine. Amazing.

How could this happen? I suppose it’s possible Rota is a Russian mole, but that strikes me as — let’s use some of the man’s understatement — unlikely.

That leaves only one possible explanation: Rota and the people around him are stunningly ignorant of history and see no present value in learning about the past.

That would be appalling for someone in a position like Rota’s under any circumstances. But it’s particularly shocking given the nature of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

If you know even a little about that conflict, you know that identity lies at its core: Vladimir Putin claims Ukrainians are simply Russians with accents; Ukrainians insist they are a separate people with their own language and culture. And when identity is at issue, so is history. Always.

In discussing Ukraine, Putin constantly cites the past, even reaching all the way back to the ninth century — when the people known as the “Rus,” whose capital was Kyiv, built a small empire that grow and evolve over many centuries into Russia. (Russian nationalists love to talk about the Rus as proto-Russians but they seldom mention that the Rus were Vikings from Sweden and I’ve never seen one explain why, if this ancient history supports Russia’s claim to Ukraine today, it doesn’t also support a Swedish claim on Russia.)

But the history that features more than any other in this conflict — in both Russian and Ukrainian statements and claims — is that of the First and Second World Wars.

The History Behind The War

I’m going to summarize it here now. Because it matters. Because the news media seldom or never lay it out for those unfamiliar with it. And because, almost a decade into the Russia-Ukraine conflict, too few of us know even this simple outline — as Anthony Rota so appallingly demonstrated.

It starts in 1914.

In the First World War, the vast Russian Empire allied with France and Britain against Germany and Austria-Hungary. An initially successful Russian offensive into East Prussia was checked by a German victory at the Battle of Tannenberg (one of the most consequential battles of the 20th century, yet little-remembered today) and the Eastern Front became a grinding stalemate similar to the trench warfare in Belgium and France. Years passed. Domestic unrest grew. In February, 1917, the Czar stepped down. A government led by the Duma (parliament) took charge but continued to fight the war, which went badly for Russia.

In November, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks stormed to power, igniting the Russian Civil War. Desperate to get out of the war with Germany, Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. Under the terms of that treaty, large swathes of the Russia Empire populated mostly by non-Russian peoples became independent countries. They included the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania— along with Finland, Poland, and Ukraine.

With the war in Germany’s east concluded, Germany launched a major offensive in the west. Initial success sputtered and the offensive failed. In the autumn, a joint British, French, and American offensive finally broke Germany’s back. The First World War ended in November, 1918.

But the Russian civil war continued. Lenin renounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and attempted to restore the Russian Empire’s lost lands by force: Poland and the Baltic countries successfully fought off the Red Army and kept their independence. Ukraine fought, too, but suffered a devastating loss. In 1922, Ukraine became a Soviet republic.

The Red Army in Kyiv, 1919

In 1932 and 1933, Stalin used starvation as a weapon to bring Ukraine firmly to heel. The “Holodomor” killed as many as five million people living on some of Europe’s most fertile lands.

In June, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and many of the subjugated peoples — including the Baltic countries, which had recently been re-occupied by the Soviet Union — were initially hopeful that their liberation was at hand. But the Nazis had no interest in anything beyond conquest and slave labor and rather than cultivating aggrieved peoples as allies they exploited them mercilessly. Only when the war turned against Germany, and the need for manpower grew, did the Nazis seek to enlist the enemies of their enemies.

Many such units were created. Along with a “Galician Division” of mostly Ukrainian volunteers, there were Georgian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian Waffen-SS legions. There was a “Russian Liberation Army” headed by a captured Red Army general. There was even a “Free Indian Legion” composed of Indians — mostly British prisoners of war — opposed to British rule in India.

There were also anti-Soviet partisan groups that operated with little German direction. When Germany finally surrendered, some kept fighting.

The partisans of the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” were not finally beaten into submission by Soviet forces until almost 1960.

This is the barest political outline of those years, omitting countless coups and treaties and border changes. All the new nations had a majority ethnic group but also substantial minorities, and where there was no longer an imperial power in control — all these lands had been part of the Russian, German, and Austrian Empires — and no established modus vivendi, ethnic conflict was rife. Neighbours turned on neighbours. There were lootings, murders, pogroms. Where the Soviets ruled, arrests, political crimes, and “re-education” were part of daily life, while orders to pack a suitcase immediately and leave for Kazakhstan or Siberia could come at any time.

And this, please note, all preceded the horrors of the Second World War.

For ordinary people, this was an era of uncertainty and fear inconceivable to those of us lucky to live in a modern country with security, democracy, tolerance, and the rule of law. A country like Canada, for one.

The Past Isn’t Dead

To understand what’s happening in Ukraine, we must know this history. Because Russians and Ukrainians most certainly do.

Consider Putin’s constant references to “Nazis” running the Ukrainian government. If you don’t know this history, it’s incomprehensible, almost a strange verbal tic.

But it’s much more than that.

In Russia, the Second World War is called the “Great Patriotic War.” Given the titanic cost of the war, it would have loomed large in Russian collective memory under any circumstances but for many years the Putin government has aggressively portrayed the war as the ultimate expression of Russian pride — nothing less than a sacred crusade.

It’s hard to square that with the facts. What about the Hitler-Stalin pact that allowed Nazi Germany to launch the war? The Soviet seizure of eastern Poland after the Nazis had invaded the west? What about the Soviet Union’s invasions of Finland and the Baltic countries? The mass atrocities of the Red Army? Stalin’s abandonment of the Poles when they rose up in Warsaw? Such complications spoil the story, so in 2021 Putin passed a law that effectively outlawed most such heresies.

In this context, Putin’s constant references to Ukrainian officials and soldiers as “Nazis” makes a twisted sort of sense: In the Great Patriotic War, anyone who sought national independence by opposing Russia supported Nazi Germany, whether they wore a German uniform or not. Which made them Nazis.

So what are people who, today, seek national independence and oppose Russia? Nazis. It’s perfectly “logical.”

This is what makes the fiasco in Canada’s Parliament such a gift for Putin and his propagandists: Look at the “Nazi” President of Ukraine applauding a Waffen SS soldier! What a Nazi!

Of course this is absurd. But let’s be equally blunt in the other direction: Some Ukrainian nationalists today revere Ukrainians who fought alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union even as the Germans were committing unspeakable crimes in Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe. Worse, some of those now held up as national heroes personally committed terrible crimes, including massacres of Jews, Poles, and others. There’s a whole Wikipedia page devoted to controversial statues and busts of anti-Soviet nationalists, Ukrainian and others, in Canada alone.

However, let’s also be clear that for Ukraine the war was vastly more complex and fraught than how it is portrayed in American war movies — with Tom Hanks and the good guys on one side and the bloodthirsty Hun on the other. Ukrainians had every reason to hate the Soviet government, to long for national independence, and to rise up when the opportunity presented itself. I can understand why a Ukrainian today might be tempted to praise those who did. But Ukrainians and other nationalities under the Soviet boot were cursed: When their chance came, it was delivered by the only people on earth whose evil rivalled that of the Soviets. That is the stuff of tragedy.

Ukraine is far from the only country faced with historical complexities and moral ambiguities.

In November, 1939, Finland suffered an unprovoked invasion by the Soviet Union in what became known as the “Winter War.” The Finns bloodied the Red Army but were ground down by sheer numbers. As the price of peace, Stalin took Finnish lands. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, the Finns joined the attack, but they explicitly said they would only fight to regain their stolen lands and would go no further. To underscore the point, they called this the “Continuation War.” Some Finns joined German units. The most famous was Lauri Törni, a highly decorated veteran of the Winter War who became a captain in a Waffen-SS unit. After the war, Törni emigrated to the United States, joined the Green Berets, was decorated and rose to the rank of captain before before killed in Vietnam. He is the only former member of the Waffen-SS buried in Arlington National Cemetery. To this day, Finns are conflicted about the wars, and find no easy judgements about any of this.

India has gone in another direction.

Subhas Chandra Bose was a wealthy nationalist who sought Indian independence from Britain but unlike most of his contemporaries, Bose rejected non-violence. In 1941, he travelled from India to Nazi Germany, shook hands with Hitler, and formed the “Free Indian Legion.” Bose later went to Japan and raised another force of anti-British Indians. Today, Hindu nationalists treat Bose as a unblemished hero. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently unveiled a giant statue of Bose atop a plinth that once held a statue of King George V.

Turning a man like Bose into an unalloyed hero requires a refusal to see complexities. Bose was a nationalist, this thinking goes, therefore he was a hero — provided we ignore what the Nazis were up to when he was their honoured guest.

But it would also be wrong to condemn and dismiss Bose as a “Nazi.” I’d like to think thoughtful people can do better, and reject simplification in either direction.

The men who sought freedom for their peoples by siding with the Axis powers were all guilty of assisting monstrous regimes. They are not heroes. They don’t deserve standing ovations and statues. But it’s also too pat to condemn them all as “Nazis” and criminals. Their motivations and deeds varied widely. Judged individually, some rank among the worst criminals of the war. Others are less culpable. None is innocent.

Moral judgement is a human instinct and we prefer not to have it muddied by such ambiguities, however. That’s a big reason why the Second World War looms large in our imagination: It was the rare war when one side was unequivocally right and the other was wrong.

But beneath that grand and clarifying truth, there lay countless realities that were far murkier.

They still are.

It’s Not Even Past

But those are just my thoughts about moral judgement. Let’s set them aside and conclude with what is inarguably true.

History matters.

On that, Russians and Ukrainians agree. Their interpretations of history may be radically different, but both know and value history. It informs their perceptions and judgments. It shapes what they do.

If we are to have any hope of understanding what’s happening, we need to know that history.

But all too often, people simply don’t bother to learn.

Think about the United States in 2006. It was five years after the 9/11 attacks and the start of what the government called the “global war on terror.” It was three years after the invasion of Iraq, which, by then, had turned into a bloody mess. Reporters had started to realize that even by that late date important American officials were remarkably clueless about basic realities in the Middle East. Jeff Stein, a reporter with Congressional Quarterly, made it standard practice to end his interviews by asking a simple but important question: “Is Al Qaeda Sunni or Shiite?”

Even with a 50% chance of getting it right by guessing, Congressman Silvestre Reyes got it wrong. At the time, Reyes was the Democratic nominee to head the House Intelligence Committee. Overseeing the global war on terror.

And Reyes was no aberration. “So far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue,” Stein wrote. “That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?”

The answer, as history now records, is that they could indeed do their jobs. But badly. With consequences others would suffer.

That’s the thing about ignorance. It can inflict one hell of a price.

The United States amply demonstrated that in Iraq.

And last Friday, Canada did the same at home.

ADDENDUM 28/09: Comments by reader Yaacov Lyons, below, got me thinking and I concluded that I omitted a crucial point which I thought was common knowledge but perhaps isn’t. So let me make it explicit: Some of the Eastern Europeans who made common cause with the Nazis did so to a considerable extent because of ideological affinity, particularly in their anti-Semitism. They did not murder Jews reluctantly because they were ordered to. They did it enthusiastically, and even on their own initiative. They certainly earned the label “Nazi” and all that goes with it.

The dark irony is that most of these sorts of collaborators were Slavs, whom the Nazis saw as an inferior race that would, in the future Reich, be evicted from Hitler’s lebensraum in the East, reduced to slave labour, or murdered. So in addition to being evil bastards, they were fools.