A Closer Look at the Hunka Affair:

Inconvenient Truths Past and Present

The Parliament Buildings | © Sarah Baxter on Unsplash

Reading time: 7 minutes

punditman says…

My first thought on hearing the news that the Canadian parliament gave two standing ovations to a man who fought for the Nazis was "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

My most recent thought is that I take no joy whatsoever in documenting what follows, but as the expression goes "sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Was Yaroslav Hunka's ill-fated appearance in the Canadian parliament on September 22 just about lack of vetting and bad optics? 

During a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to Ottawa, the Speaker of the House, Anthony Rota, introduced 98-year-old Hunka as “a Ukrainian Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians.”

Anyone with even basic knowledge of World War Two would quickly realize that “against the Russians” meant Hunka was collaborating with the Nazi regime.

Apparently the whole episode originated with Rota who had been approached by Hunka’s son. And no one from the PMO’s office to the RCMP, to CSIS to the military brass so much as googled Hunka’s history?

It beggars belief that with Zelensky in town, there wouldn’t have been air tight security and background checks up the ying yang.

In any case, between 1941-1943, Hunka was a member of the Ukranian 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galicia" — a Nazi German military formation.

According to Jewish groups, the division "was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable.”

According to a statement by B'nai Brith Canada: 

"Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, Canada and the free world’s nemesis, and military opponent during World War II. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalist ideologues who volunteered to create the SS-Galician division in 1943 dreamed of an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state and endorsed the idea of ethnic cleansing.

"The 14th Waffen SS carried out numerous atrocities against civilians in the Ukraine and fought alongside regular Nazi German armed forces in the battle of Brody. The SS was declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Members of this unit swore fealty to the Fuhrer and the perverted racial ideology of the Nazis."

Some researchers insist that "Galicia" was not involved in war crimes at that time. And moreover, that it did not fight Western forces — to whom the division surrendered.

But the Galicia division was trained in Munich and swore fealty to the Fuehrer. So however one parses it, Hunka was on the wrong damn side.

The whole thing has renewed interest in the topic of the handling of suspected war criminals who immigrated to Canada. Meanwhile a Polish government minister said he had “taken steps” toward the possible extradition of Hunka.

On the one hand, it’s easy to condemn parliamentarians who stood in the “surprise” of the moment (who hasn’t been part of some herd who clapped in unison, only to later wonder, why exactly was I clapping?). But it’s one thing to stand on cue and applaud and quite another to not notice your blunderous mistake after the fact. Did any MP do a quick fact check? The story broke on social media and then the Associated Press named Hunka’s military unit.

War is complex. And common people often get caught between a rock and a hard place — a truism. In World War Two, Ukraine, as now, was tormented by its geography. At that time it was caught in a cauldron of two competing totalitarian ideologies. Stalin was indeed a monster, the Holodomor famine is widely considered to have been a deliberate policy, and Ukraine suffered immensely under his boot heel. Nonetheless some 4.5 million Ukrainians fought for the Soviet Red Army to expel Hitler's demonic Third Reich. At the same time other Ukrainians viewed the Germans as liberators and acted accordingly.

Hunka was one of them, and he thus fought against Canada's ally at the time — Soviet Russia. 

In the titanic struggle to rid the world of Nazism, the Soviets lost 27 million people in the Second World War. And before it was all over, Britain, the US and Canada would send the besieged Russians 12,000 airplanes, 10,000 tanks, 210,000 cars, and 427,000 trucks to stop the maniacal Hitler. I’m beginning to wonder how many of our 338 illustrious federal MPs actually get that. Do some actually think Russia was on the side of the Axis powers in World War II? In today’s clown world, I swear anything is possible. 

Since 2019, the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies has had a $30,000 endowment carrying Hunka and his wife's name. The university has since returned the funds to the Hunka family “after careful consideration of the complexities, experiences, and circumstances of those impacted by the situation.”

The idea that the institution agreed to the endowment in the first place is disturbing. Over at the Jacobin, Jeremy Appel argues that this is part of “a broader trend in the Ukrainian diasporic establishment of rehabilitating the image of Nazi sympathizers as anti-Communist freedom fighters, which is why monuments to the 14th Waffen exist in Oakville, Ontario, and Edmonton, Alberta, as well as in Detroit and Philadelphia."

The Unmentionable Subtext

There’s an undertone here that I think has gotten short shrift.

First — I feel compelled to affirm, as I always do with this topic, that I detest Putin and consider him a cruel authoritarian and guilty of the supreme international crime of aggression. I say this not for fear of censorship (a regular occurrence on other platforms for the sin of “wrong think”) — but because after decades of Russophobia, fueled in recent years by Russiagate delusions and supercharged by Putin's brutal Ukraine invasion — it seems in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, many have lost the ability to keep two ideas in their head at once: in this case to distinguish an entire people from a despotic leader.

With a villain like Putin around, it's an easy default for politicians who, by nature of their craft, are not exactly known for nuance.

And what is the current message? In Rota’s mind, it appears the point of honouring Hunka's "war time service" was because he fought against Russia for Ukrainian independence. And that was good enough.

But would this have happened if we weren’t living in a time in which anti-Russian sentiment dominates mainstream discourse to such a degree that when the ghosts of history haunt the present, the only recourse is to double down, deny or deflect?

Speaking of Nazis, as I wrote here, according to a report published by the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, far-right extremists in the Ukrainian military bragged about Canadian training as cited in this CTV news report. Such inconvenient truths about Ukraine’s complexities have been simply memory holed.

By extension, in the current conflict there is to be no talk of ceasefire or negotiations, or Ukrainian neutrality the likes of which Zelensky himself was once ready to discuss.  

And, whenever opportunity knocks, the fall back is to always invoke Russian mischief in ways that far exceeds Russia’s culpability. 

Sure enough, right on cue, in his initial quasi-apology Trudeau shamelessly shifted the channel to Russian disinformation. But as American writer Walter Kirn expressed on Matt Taibbi’s podcast, "The Russians didn't have to say ‘Word One’ for this whole thing to go down."

Meanwhile, no parliamentarian can dare suggest that this war can still easily and quickly spiral out of control into something apocalyptic.  

The Orwellian Response

To add insult to injury, the Liberal's solution to the whole debacle was to get House Leader Karina Gould to try to strike Hunka’s recognition from the official parliamentary record of the House of Commons. In other words, erase it from history.

How deeply unsettling is that? Ask a historian.

It did not succeed. On September 26, MPs adopted a motion by Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet to “condemn the invitation extended to a former Waffen-SS soldier on Friday, September 22, 2023, and withdraw any tribute paid to him.”

I'm sure the government would love a do-over. Turn back the clock and find a better stand-in than Hunka while keeping the narrative in place. Perhaps an Afghan Canadian who fought the Russians in their doomed attempt to impose their will on that country back in the 1980s? Oh wait, that could be awkward because that CIA-backed war helped fuel Islamic militancy, giving rise to Bin Laden's al Qaeda. And two decades later NATO tried to impose its will on Afghanistan...and that didn’t work out so well either. This war thing can get oh so murky.

That’s because war is complex. But we're not supposed to think that way about the current one.

We’re supposed to think war is simple when they say so. And complex when they don't. And simple again when they steer us back on track...

Got it?

And now for some levity…

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