Canada extends Ukraine military mission against alarming backdrop of rising fascism and neo-Nazism

Bandera banner at Ukrainian torchlight nationalist march

Greatly overshadowed by other news out of Ottawa the Trudeau government today announced its decision to extend the Canadian military mission to Ukraine until at least 2022. Chrystia Freeland -- who notoriously celebrated her Ukrainian grandfather's nationalist past despite the fact that he was a Nazi collaborator -- stated that the mission "allows us to meet Ukraine's needs and to offer new forms of support as Ukraine needs them." 

Last August The Left Chapter reported on how Canada had also allowed the sale of highly advanced sniper rifles to Ukraine.

This all comes despite and against an increasingly alarming backdrop of rising fascism and neo-Nazism in the country. As Lev Golinkin wrote of Ukraine in The Nation in February: 

There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march.

Swastika in a Kiev mall just prior to nationalist marches
in February

He further noted that Ukraine's military, with which Canadian forces will be working, "is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine."

One would have thought that that alone would have given Canadian leaders pause. But there is much more.

Last year the Ukrainian army adopted the slogan "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!", which originated with nationalist groups who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII.

Pogroms initiated by paramilitary groups against the country's Roma have been met with indifference on the part of the police and authorities generally. The situation is so bad that the European Roma Rights Centre launched a suit in 2018 against Ukrainian police for failing to act.

As Newsweek reported in December "Ukraine’s parliament has officially designated the birthday of a prominent Nazi collaborator as a national holiday, while also banning a book that criticized another anti-Semitic national leader." That collaborator was Stepan Bandera who the post-Maidan regime has celebrated by naming streets after him and erecting a variety of statues in his honour, all while tearing down those dedicated to people who died fighting Hitler. 

New Bandera statue in Lviv

 In January Michael Colborne wrote in the Socialist Project Bullet that:

Ukraine really does have a far-right problem, and it’s not a fiction of Kremlin propaganda. And it’s well past time to talk about it.
Ukraine’s far-right is like a hydra, with ugly heads that pop-up far too frequently. Just within the last few weeks, an American-born cabinet minister thanked a group of violent neo-Nazi “activists” for their services, a soldier was photographed wearing a Nazi death’s head patch right behind President Petro Poroshenko and almost 1,500 neo-Nazis and friends threw a two-day Hitler-salute-fest.

Perhaps it is time for Canadians to ask why, in spite of all this, our government continues to arm and train the military of a regime with such dangerous and extremist far-right links and ties.

 Further Readings:

Canada green lights arms sales to Ukraine as fascist militias attack Roma

Secrets and Lies -- Chrystia Freeland's grandfather and collaborating with the Nazis

Why Does No One Care That Neo-Nazis Are Gaining Power In Ukraine?

Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine

"Never to Be Forgotten..." Nazi and Nationalist Collaborator WWII Crimes in the Ukraine, Ukraina Society 1986- Olexander M.Butsko (Part II)

Vintage Leftist Leaflet Project

See the end of this post for details on the project.

Leaflet: "Never to Be Forgotten..." Nazi and Nationalist Collaborator WWII Crimes in the Ukraine, Ukraina Society 1986- Olexander M.Butsko (Part II)

Second of two parts. The first half of the leaflet can be found here.

"Never to be forgotten..." is, unfortunately, likely more important as a document than it was when it was published by the Ukraina Society in Kiev in 1986.

The new regime in the Ukraine is not just deeply reactionary on economic policy, but it is also dedicated to a grotesquely revisionist vision of modern Ukrainian history that seeks to erase the sickening crimes committed by the Nazis and the Ukrainian nationalist forces and organizations that collaborated with them after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It has gotten to the point where Lvov University, while ultimately rejecting a proposal to name itself after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, felt the need to couch this rejection in these terms:

During the discussion of the issue, the participants of the meeting stressed the special role of Stepan Bandera in the Ukrainian national liberation movement, noted that the memory of him is respected at the university. The street where the main building of the Lviv Polytechnic is located is named after him. The bas-reliefs of Stepan Bandera and another outstanding head of (far-right – Ed.) organizations OUN-UPA Roman Shukhevych (who served in Nazi-led Nachtigall battalion – Ed.), are installed in the lobby of the university. Students have been subjected to a systematic nation-building educational program.

This is likely because these Nazi collaborators are now being re-framed as heroes with statues of them being erected in Ukrainian cities:

and an awful campaign is underway to attempt to glorify these Nazis and war criminals. As noted in an article in Foreign Policy magazine:

The revisionism focuses on two Ukrainian nationalist groups: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought to establish an independent Ukraine. During the war, these groups killed tens of thousands of Jews and carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed as many as 100,000 Poles. Created in 1929 to free Ukraine from Soviet control, the OUN embraced the notion of an ethnically pure Ukrainian nation. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the OUN and its charismatic leader, Stepan Bandera, welcomed the invasion as a step toward Ukrainian independence. Its members carried out a pogrom in Lviv that killed 5,000 Jews, and OUN militias played a major role in violence against the Jewish population in western Ukraine that claimed the lives of up to 35,000 Jews.

It stated further that while this:

...may seem academic, this is far from true. Last June, Kvit’s Ministry of Education issued a directive to teachers regarding the “necessity to accentuate the patriotism and morality of the activists of the liberation movement,” including depicting the UPA as a “symbol of patriotism and sacrificial spirit in the struggle for an independent Ukraine” and Bandera as an “outstanding representative” of the Ukrainian people.” More recently, Viatrovych’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory proposed that the city of Kiev rename two streets after Bandera and the former supreme commander of both the UPA and the Nazi-supervised Schutzmannschaft Roman Shukhevych."

This is also important in light of the controversy (which should have been much greater) around Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland's seeming celebration of her grandfather's past as a Nazi collaborator and the sickening defenses of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in the wake of this by a variety of clueless folks in the Canadian media.

This booklet very effectively exposes how vile this revisionism is. Written by a Ukrainian who was the son of a Second World War veteran of the Red Army it notes that it is deeply disrespectful to the millions of Ukrainians who fought the Nazi invaders and who died because of them to attempt to rewrite history in this way.

After an introduction it starts with a section showing exactly what the Nazis actually thought and said about Ukrainians (and other peoples they regarded as inferior) and then outlines examples of horrific Nazi crimes (taken from sources such as the Nuremberg Trials) juxtaposed with the words of so-called Ukrainian nationalists celebrating Nazism and Hitler. 

It is pretty damning:

The emerging Ukrainian State will closely collaborate with the National-Socialist Great Germany which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world.
-From the Act of Proclamation of the Ukrainian State of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists headed by Bandera.

Never forget.

(Click on scans to enlarge)

When The Left Chapter began part of what I wanted to do on the blog was to show and highlight vintage public leftist election/political leaflets and booklets. While many of these have been offered with commentary to date, a very large collection of hundreds of them from several different sources remains and to preserve these often quite rare documents we will be posting them on a regular (almost daily) basis now often without or with minimal commentary so that people may have access to them as quickly as possible as an historical resource. 

While these will all be leaflets from a variety of different leftist viewpoints and countries, they are being posted as an historical/study resource and the views or opinions expressed in them do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog or blogger.

All of these posts (as well as posts made to date) will be listed on the page: Vintage Communist/Socialist Leaflets  (which is still being updated with past posts).

If you have any public, vintage leaflets or booklets you would like to contribute to this project please contact us via theleftchapter@outlook.com

"Never to Be Forgotten..." Nazi and Nationalist Collaborator WWII Crimes in the Ukraine, Ukraina Society 1986

Vintage Leftist Leaflet Project

See the end of this post for details on the project.


Leaflet: "Never to Be Forgotten..." Nazi and Nationalist Collaborator WWII Crimes in the Ukraine, Ukraina Society 1986- Olexander M.Butsko

First of two parts. The second half of the leaflet will be in the next post.

"Never to be forgotten..." is, unfortunately, likely more important as a document than it was when it was published by the Ukraina Society in Kiev in 1986.

The new regime in the Ukraine is not just deeply reactionary on economic policy, but it is also dedicated to a grotesquely revisionist vision of modern Ukrainian history that seeks to erase the sickening crimes committed by the Nazis and the Ukrainian nationalist forces and organizations that collaborated with them after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It has gotten to the point where Lvov University, while ultimately rejecting a proposal to name itself after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, felt the need to couch this rejection in these terms:

During the discussion of the issue, the participants of the meeting stressed the special role of Stepan Bandera in the Ukrainian national liberation movement, noted that the memory of him is respected at the university. The street where the main building of the Lviv Polytechnic is located is named after him. The bas-reliefs of Stepan Bandera and another outstanding head of (far-right – Ed.) organizations OUN-UPA Roman Shukhevych (who served in Nazi-led Nachtigall battalion – Ed.), are installed in the lobby of the university. Students have been subjected to a systematic nation-building educational program.

This is likely because these Nazi collaborators are now being re-framed as heroes with statues of them being erected in Ukrainian cities:

and an awful campaign is underway to attempt to glorify these Nazis and war criminals. As noted in an article in Foreign Policy magazine:

The revisionism focuses on two Ukrainian nationalist groups: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought to establish an independent Ukraine. During the war, these groups killed tens of thousands of Jews and carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed as many as 100,000 Poles. Created in 1929 to free Ukraine from Soviet control, the OUN embraced the notion of an ethnically pure Ukrainian nation. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the OUN and its charismatic leader, Stepan Bandera, welcomed the invasion as a step toward Ukrainian independence. Its members carried out a pogrom in Lviv that killed 5,000 Jews, and OUN militias played a major role in violence against the Jewish population in western Ukraine that claimed the lives of up to 35,000 Jews.

It stated further that while this:

...may seem academic, this is far from true. Last June, Kvit’s Ministry of Education issued a directive to teachers regarding the “necessity to accentuate the patriotism and morality of the activists of the liberation movement,” including depicting the UPA as a “symbol of patriotism and sacrificial spirit in the struggle for an independent Ukraine” and Bandera as an “outstanding representative” of the Ukrainian people.” More recently, Viatrovych’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory proposed that the city of Kiev rename two streets after Bandera and the former supreme commander of both the UPA and the Nazi-supervised Schutzmannschaft Roman Shukhevych."

This is also important in light of the controversy (which should have been much greater) around Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland's seeming celebration of her grandfather's past as a Nazi collaborator and the sickening defenses of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in the wake of this by a variety of clueless folks in the Canadian media.

This booklet very effectively exposes how vile this revisionism is. Written by a Ukrainian who was the son of a Second World War veteran of the Red Army it notes that it is deeply disrespectful to the millions of Ukrainians who fought the Nazi invaders and who died because of them to attempt to rewrite history in this way.

After an introduction it starts with a section showing exactly what the Nazis actually thought and said about Ukrainians (and other peoples they regarded as inferior) and then outlines examples of horrific Nazi crimes (taken from sources such as the Nuremberg Trials) juxtaposed with the words of so-called Ukrainian nationalists celebrating Nazism and Hitler. 

It is pretty damning:

The emerging Ukrainian State will closely collaborate with the National-Socialist Great Germany which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world.
-From the Act of Proclamation of the Ukrainian State of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists headed by Bandera.

Never forget.

(Click on scans to enlarge)

When The Left Chapter began part of what I wanted to do on the blog was to show and highlight vintage public leftist election/political leaflets and booklets. While many of these have been offered with commentary to date, a very large collection of hundreds of them from several different sources remains and to preserve these often quite rare documents we will be posting them on a regular (almost daily) basis now often without or with minimal commentary so that people may have access to them as quickly as possible as an historical resource. 


While these will all be leaflets from a variety of different leftist viewpoints and countries, they are being posted as an historical/study resource and the views or opinions expressed in them do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog or blogger.

All of these posts (as well as posts made to date) will be listed on the page: Vintage Communist/Socialist Leaflets  (which is still being updated with past posts).

If you have any public, vintage leaflets or booklets you would like to contribute to this project please contact us via theleftchapter@outlook.com