The House of Anti-Communists, and the Nazi Monster it Spawned
Ukrainian Nazi, Jaroslav Hunka, waiting in the Parliament Gallery before he was honoured by a joint parliament and senate sitting of Canada’s House of Commons, to hear Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech. Image credit: Hindustan Times
Written by: Aidan Jonah
It was a rare show of unity in Canada’s increasingly frayed parliament. 336 of 338 Members of Parliament, the Prime Minister, Senators and other guests of honour joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a standing ovation for “Canadian hero,” Yaroslav Hunka. The 98-year-old was heralded for fighting “for Ukrainian independence against the Russians in the Second World War.”
The touching moment was, however, short-lived. Unfortunately, for Canadian statesmen and their Ukrainian patrons, astute netizens had the presence of mind to question that if Hunka was fighting “the Russians,” then who was he fighting alongside?
The answer also wasn’t hard to find.
Hunka fought in the 14th division of the Waffen SS, having voluntarily joined in 1943, by his own admission. Suddenly, the beautiful show of solidarity and unity took a very dark turn. By Sunday afternoon, House Speaker Anthony Rota, who supposedly was behind Hunka’s invitation, and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre were claiming that lawmakers had no about the ex-Nazi’s past.
Rota and the Prime Minister’s Office are in charge of who gets to be in the Parliamentary gallery, and who gets recognition in Parliament. Interestingly, Liberal MP and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, who would know full well what it meant to fight “for Ukrainian independence against the Russians in the Second World War,” was seen smiling and joyful during Hunka’s recognition.
On Poilievre’s claim, people must realize that the opposition force against the USSR even after Nazi Germany was forced out of Soviet Ukraine, were Nazis who wanted an independent fascist Ukraine. These Nazis were outnumbered by the near seven million Ukrainians who fought in the USSR’s Red Army.
Claiming ignorance is farcical on their part as well, showcasing their anti-communism, which naturally leads to defence of fascists fighting socialist states such as the USSR. These same MPs support billions to Ukraine, support of the Azov battalion and the whitewashing of Nazis in Ukraine, and wouldn’t have condemned Hunka’s honouring if the Canadian people and international media didn’t catch onto what they did.
However, putting aside the Canadian regime’s dubious idiot defence, the episode sheds light on a larger issue. Hunka is hardly the first former Nazi with national name recognition (albeit the first to get a standing ovation in the House of Commons). For years Canada struggled to deport Helmut Oberlander, a former translator for the Einsatzkommando 10a unit, a Nazi death squad involved in numerous war crimes during WWII. In fact, Canada’s Nazi footprint goes right to the top, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s right-hand woman, Chrystia Freeland, being the granddaughter of a Nazi propagandist.
All of which begs the question, how exactly did Hunka and others like him enter Canada after World War II? While many scholars admit that the importation of Ukrainian and other fascists was done to crush burgeoning leftist diasporas, this is where analysis of fascists and reactionaries being imported to Canada usually ends.
Quite the opposite. The Nazi “underground railroad” was just the first salvo of the Canadian state’s 75-year drive to import fascists and anti-communists, in service of maintaining Canadian colonialism and bolstering support for Canadian imperialism. Hunka is just the everyday Nazi, one of many.
The Nazi “Underground Railroad”
As Adolf Hitler spent his final days hiding in his Berlin bunker, many Nazis were drawing up contingency plans. In the months and years, after the Hammer and Sickle flew over the Reichstag thousands of war criminals would fan out across the world in the hope of evading justice. Canada was one of the desired destinations.
While talk of screening processes would usually be relevant, as early as 1947, the Canadian government was actively seeking out European Nazis and on RCMP orders, Ukrainians with an SS tattoo, rejected by European screening agencies, were being brought to Canada. The Ukrainian Canadian, the English-language newspaper of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, reported that these people had already been targeting the Canadian left almost immediately upon coming to Canada.
According to Howard Margolian, in Unauthorized Entry: The Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, Canada used an immigration organization fully aware of Estonia’s significant SS membership, many of whom had fled to Sweden. As Ukrainian Nazis were being imported to Canada in 1948, the Canadian government amended immigration regulations to “permit the admission of up to five thousand Estonians from Sweden. (pg. 129)”
Canadian government minister C.D. Howe dictated “Canadian immigration teams were not to disqualify Baltic veterans of the German Army from bulk-labour movements unless there was clear evidence they had been volunteers,” which was determined by checking records to see if Baltic citizens had joined the SS Forces before December 1, 1943 (pg. 93 & 94).”
Voluntary service in the Nazi SS was no longer grounds for automatic rejection by 1950 (pg. 94). The change simply codified existing government policy. The Jewish News of North California reported that the Canadian government admitted more than 2,000 Ukrainian members of the Nazi 14th SS Division in the 1950s.
Canadian political elites were just getting started, in reshaping Canadian society into an anti-communist monster. This societal reconstruction would require that European Nazis were just the first set of anti-communists imported into Canada.
Hungary: Anti-communist lynching of Jews? Import 37,500 anti-communists to Canada
Every failed anti-communist uprising now became an opportunity for Canada. The first chance to further their anti-communist reconstruction came in 1956. That year, the Hungarian Uprising occurred, a fascist coup attempt which was eventually put down by the USSR.
Some legitimate grievances were put forward by some elements of the uprising. However, that uprising was dominated by anti-Communist and outright Fascist groups and led by the right-wing, anti-communist Smallholder’s Party, supported by the Social Democratic Party. An individual who played an important role in leading the demonstrations was anti-communist Catholic priest József Mindszenty.
Daniel Xie explained the fascist nature of the uprising:
“Counter-revolutionaries destroyed memorials to the Red Army, lynched Jewish Hungarians and Communists, burned communist literature and removed communist iconography from buildings. Even the CIA would admit that fascist ideology drove the Hungarian counter-revolution. According to the CIA, participants in the uprising adhered to Hungarian ultranationalism, which is defined by anti-Semitism, Catholic Fundamentalism, and Slavophobia. These were also the ideological tenets of the Fascist Arrow Cross Party, which dominated Hungary in the last years of the Second World War before Hungary’s liberation by the Soviets. Under Arrow Cross rule, 565,000 Jews were murdered as the regime worked with Nazi Germany in perpetuating the Holocaust.”
While elements of the Hungarian Communist Party under Imre Nagy supposedly formed the face of the uprising, they sought to leave the Warsaw Pact. Under the threat of Hungary potentially falling into the NATO camp, the USSR chose to intervene militarily, crushing the uprising.
Canada took advantage of the situation, importing 37500 Hungarian ‘refugees’ in 1956 and 1957, with no review of their actions during the uprising before letting them in. Xie explained: “The majority of Hungarian anti-Communists, arriving via a streamlined immigration process, settled in urban areas such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal.”
The Toronto Star noted, “There were only two countries accepting Hungarian refugees without quotas: Canada and Venezuela.”
The line between importing European Nazis, and importing Hungarian counterrevolutionaries only years later is clear, bolstering Canadian anti-communism during the Cold War.
Tibetan feudalists’ failed counterrevolution of 1959
However, Canada’s embrace of anti-communist reactions goes beyond Europe.
In 1959, a CIA-backed feudalist uprising against the Communist Party of China in Tibet, was defeated, and the conspirators including the Dalai Lama himself, fled to India. Before the Chinese government took control of Tibet in 1950, Tibet had been a brutal theocracy (even declassified Canadian cables admitted this), where “The Tibetan people, as serfs, suffered extreme poverty. The Tibetan elites viewed servants as an inferior race, and Tibetans were only allowed to marry those of the same rank in the societal hierarchy.”
After 1950, “the CPC only engaged in moderate land reform, infrastructure projects such as schools, and provided financial supports to serfs, to allow their children to go to school, along with low-interest loans to improve their financial standing until 1955. That year, the government began to push through land reform, a move supported by the peasantry.”
The feudal leaders were not forced out of leadership by the CPC, and in 1959, the feudal theocrats sought to take advantage of this with counter-revolution, led by feudal monks and their paid militias. The CPC defeated this effort “with the firm support of the Tibetan people. Tibetan serfs voted for the first time ever in 1961. By 1965, Tibet had become an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China.”
In 1970, Canada’s immigration department allowed 200 Tibet ‘refugees’ to enter Canada, after an appeal from ex-theocratic leader Dalai Lama. The news clipping specifically notes that the refugees had been living in refugee camps in India since the early 1950s, meaning that these were firm anti-communists, who were gone even before the failed 1959 CIA-backed feudalist uprising. The number went higher, to 228, by the end of 1971, and by 2010, there were 5000 Tibet dissidents in Canada. In 2011, the Canadian government created a special immigration policy to bring in a thousand more ‘displaced Tibetan[s]”.
These Tibet dissidents have organized to win significant influence in Canadian politics, even having their own political representative in Ontario’s parliament, NDP MPP Bhutila Karpoche. They constitute a reliable anti-China force in Canadian politics.
Vietnam’s re-unification as an opportunity to import anti-communists
The Vietnamese people had to spend 30 years, from 1945 to 1975, fighting off two different invaders, first the French and then the United States.
The US created a puppet ‘South Vietnam’ government which massacred communists and those even suspected of supporting them, and had US troops brought in to prop up this government. Despite the extensive support offered by the US government, the ‘South Vietnam’ government fell on April 30, 1975, and anti-communist collaborators rushed to flee along with general anti-communists.
Canada saw opportunity yet again.
Only days later, the Canadian government confirmed that it would initially bring in 3000 ‘South Vietnamese’ refugees to Canada.
As NDP MP Don Davies said, Canada would welcome “some 150,000 Vietnamese refugees who have contributed so much to our nation.” Davies inadvertently showcased the use of these ‘refugees’ by saying “We stand with them and all fighting for liberty, democracy and human rights.” More Vietnamese immigrants have come over the last few decades, but the ‘refugees’ are a noticeably large, reliable, mostly anti-communist contingent which Canada can count on.
Confirmation of Britain returning Hong Kong to Canada, sees mass anti-communist immigration
As China was just beginning to assert itself on the world stage, it was able to obtain the return of its stolen territory.
In 1984, the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, setting the terms and timing of Britain’s handover to China, with Hong Kong to become a Special Administrative Region governed under the ‘One-Country, Two-Systems’ framework beginning on July 1, 1997. While China had to make concessions to Britain, to return its territory stolen after the Opium War, the special framework was only set to last 50 years after 1997, and anti-communists feared the influence of China’s socialist government.
More than 335,000 Hong Kong residents came to Canada specifically between 1984 to 1997, and as of 2019, there were 300,000 Canadian citizens hailing from Hong Kong. The ‘HongKongers’ constituted a very reliable anti-communist force especially during the 2019 NATO coup attempt in Hong Kong, supporting the riots and helping the Canadian elite ramp up demonization of China. They continue to be reliably anti-China, claiming Chinese government intimidation without proof for years (which has never resulted in a case being filed), and being active supporters of CSIS’ Chinagate campaign.
China cracks down on Falun Gong cult, Canada imports members for anti-communist use
While Canada-China trade relations were Canada’s priority, its anti-communist project meant all opportunities for importation should be taken.
This opportunity came after the anti-science Falun Gong cult was cracked down upon in China beginning in July 1999. Daniel Xie explains: Falun Going is in “opposition to the use of medicine to treat diseases, claiming that diseases can simply be gotten rid of if one expels bad karma from their body. The deaths associated with this school of thought were the Chinese government’s reason for moving against Falun Gong.”
China’s embassy in Thailand notes that in 1998, there were multiple instances of Falun Gong members organizing to besiege news agencies who reported on deaths caused by the cult, and the embassy claims that before it was banned, “Falun Gong had organized over 300 such besieging actions.” The Chinese Consulate in Auckland said that between 1992 to April 12, 2000, “1,559 of them [Falun Gong members] died of suicide or rejecting medical treatment”.
The various reactionary beliefs of Falun Gong include “racist beliefs demonizing interracial relationships as the prelude to societal moral decay, with mixed-race children seen as intellectually and physically deformed compared to non mixed-race children. Belief that science and technology are anti-human concepts introduced by space aliens into human society in order to ferment war and chaos.”
Between 1999 to 2006, Xun Li of the Falun Dafa Association, said 75 Falun Gong practitioners had been given refugee status in Canada. They joined up with Falun Gong practitioners in Canada, who had begun working to restrict the ability of Chinese Canadian media to oppose Falun Gong, as early as 2001. Falun Gong followers helped provide the long-term basis for whipping up paranoia about China, by ‘coming forward’ in 2005, to claim China was spying on Falun Gong practitioners in Canada.
Falun Gong front groups have spread smears against China, while its newspaper, the Epoch Times, and TV station, New Tang Dynasty Television, have spent two plus decades whipping up anti-China fears in both Canada and the USA. Xie explained “New Tang Dynasty expanded to Canada on September 30, 2008 starting with it’s broadcast debut on Rogers cable, this was followed by the creation of NTD Canada on March 28, 2012.” In 2013, a Falun Gong member, Sonia Zhao, got a Confucius Institute at McMaster University shuttered.
Canada’s government has shown favouritism to Epoch Times, rejecting a request “last May [2020] from a Toronto postal workers’ union to cease circulation of the Epoch Times via Canada Post.” A “Flying Cloud Productions” movie sympathetic to Falun Gong was financially supported by the Canadian government.
Predictably, Falun Gong members imported into Canada have been consistently anti-communist, and have firmly backed CSIS’ Chinagate campaign.
Uygur ‘genocide’ lies and demonization of Tibet boarding schools, part of effort to bring in more anti-communists
Despite Obama’s Pivot to Asia, Uygur dissidents in Canada had a low profile during the 2010s. But as that pivot was fully realized under former US president Donald Trump, they came to the public eye the Western media started pushing claims of a Uygur genocide in 2018. The lie of a ‘Uygur genocide’ is debunked by “extensive reporting by the Grayzone, exposing how CIA cut-outs and NED funded organizations were the main drivers of these allegations. They further showcased how the allegations of genocide against the Uighur population are totally false, and motivated by the American desire to smear China.”
The Canada Files showcased how an NED (CIA-front) funded organization, Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, drove a subcommittee report which was the basis for a 2021 Canadian parliament non-binding vote that saw parliament claim there was a ‘Uygur genocide’ occurring in Xinjiang, China saw.
Then, a February 2023 Canadian parliament non-binding vote passed unanimously for the resettlement of 10000 Uygur ‘refugees’, in 2024 and 2025. These Uygur ‘refugees’, if the Canadian government approves them, will be a flat 10000-person block of anti-communists in Canada, fervently against China.
Meanwhile this year, the very same Canadian parliament subcommittee falsely equated boarding schools in Tibet, needed because of the vast nature of the Chinese province, with genocidal Canadian residential schools. The subcommittee report recommended, among other things, “That Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada create a new temporary resident stream that enables human rights defenders to seek immediate and non-permanent safe haven in Canada.”
In both cases, the ‘refugees’ that would be imported into Canada, if the Uyghur and Tibetan dissidents get their way, would be fervently anti-communist, and seek the secession of Chinese provinces.
Hunka as the everyday Nazi
Canada has multiple statues honouring Ukrainian Nazis. A statue in Oakville, Ontario, honours Ukrainians who served in the 14th division of the Nazi SS. A statue in Edmonton, Alberta, honours Roman Shukyevch, Ukrainian fascist genocidal mass murderer and World War II Nazi collaborator. As well, this author explained that:
“In 2010, the Canadian government authorized a memorial to the “victims of communism” after an aggressive campaign from Tribute to Liberty. This group minimizes Nazi war crimes, in favour of targeting the Soviet Union, which lost 25 million citizens in the fight against fascism, during World War II. The Liberals have continued to support it, even after public outcry forced the monument to be downsized and moved out of its spot near the Supreme Court of Canada.”
The statues come as a direct result of Canadian government policy.
Richard Sanders explained that the Ukrainian Canadian Congress “was created by Mackenzie King's infamously antisemitic Liberal government in 1940. Its purpose was to unify anti-Communist Ukrainian groups in support of government policies, and to help them crush the anti-fascist Ukrainian organizations which—although thoroughly despised and long persecuted by Canada's government— then dominated the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada.”
It brought together Ukrainian groups, such as the Ukrainian National Front (UNF), with activists were outspoken supporters of National Socialism (Nazism) long before the outbreak of World War II. As early as 1933, when Hitler's National Socialists came to power in Germany, the official newspaper of the UNF «Novy Schlach» gleefully wrote: «We cheerfully welcome the triumph of the new German world over the old world.” Other organizations brought together included the Ukrainian Catholic Brotherhood (UCB) and the monarchist United Hetman Organization (UHO), which was controlled by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
Sanders continued: “The UCC also brought together the OUN-B with its rival faction within the OUN. That faction, the OUN-M, led by Andriy Melnyk, was more trustworthy to the Nazis. As such it was instrumental in coordinating overall collaboration and establishing the Waffen SS Division, whose volunteers pledged to fight to the death for Hitler's anti Bolshevik cause. The OUN-M is represented within the UCC by the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada.”
In 1939, UСС president Vasil Kushnir, who had held office for two decades stated the following at a meeting in Winnipeg:
"Let our (Ukrainian) culture be national and not serve 'international Jewry.' Ukrainian forces must join with Nazi Germany because ‘Germany has inscribed on its banner the destruction of Bolshevism’.”
Michael Chomiak, Nazi propagandist and grandfather of Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland would be just one of the thousands of Ukrainian Nazis brought to Canada post-WWII.
Canada’s allowed Nazi Ukrainians to roam free, and gain influence in Canadian politics, while grooming a next generation of right-wing Ukrainian Canadians who’d carry on their political aims.
Imported fascist diaspora groups in Canada began pushing for the creation of a Black Ribbon Day in the mid-1980s, which equated the USSR (socialism) with Nazi Germany (fascism), with the Toronto chapter of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress being an important initial booster. In 2009, Canada’s parliament adopted Black Ribbon Day. All the while, Canadian government funded youth centers have been honouring fascist genocidal mass-murders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukyevch.
Right-wing Ukrainian Canadians provided justification for and played their part in Canadian interference which they’d have done anyways to Ukraine, both during the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ and the 2014 Maidan coup, by vocally condemning Ukrainian politicians they opposed and supporting the opposition. The latter interference has given Canada the chance to get its share of looting Ukraine post-Maidan, while publicly training the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion from 2014 to 2022. The Canadian governments of both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have repeatedly refused to vote in favour of UN resolutions opposing the glorification of Nazism, since 2014.
Meanwhile, the UCC now holds significant influence on the Canadian government. A UCC friend (who has the UCC answer critical emails from journalists) and Nazi-collaborator apologist who honoured her Nazi propagandist grandfather, MP Chrystia Freeland, is Deputy Prime Minister.
Hunka is only unique because the Canadian Parliamentarians and Senators honoured him in Canada’s House of Commons. Hunka is one of the 2000 plus Ukrainian Nazis and 10000 plus European Nazis Canada imported after World War II.
The claim of MPs, that they didn’t grasp that the 98-year old Nazi veteran was a Nazi, seeks to obscure their outright anti-communism, exposed for the world to see by the Hunka incident. Fighting “for Ukrainian independence against the Russians in the Second World War” means only one thing, you were a Nazi. That MPs would applaud an obvious Nazi veteran, speaks to their support for Nazis against socialist states and states harming Western imperialism. The only reason opposition condemnations, and Liberal MP claims that they didn’t know about Hunka’s past, is that condemnation came en masse from Canadians and international media.
Over 75 plus years, to maintain support for Canadian colonialism and imperialism, the Canadian state imported anti-communists at almost every opportunity. This importation has shaped Canadian society post-World War II.
It’s clear that Canada’s parliament is the House of Anti-Communists.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah has broken numerous stories, including how the Canadian Armed Forces trained neo-Nazi "journalist" Roman Protasevich while he was with the Azov Battalion, and how a CIA front group (the NED) funded the group (URAP) which drove the "Uyghur genocide" vote in parliament to pass in February 2021. Jonah recently wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.
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