There are reasons why there are Nazis in Ukraine.
Back in November 2003, when I was editor of the Winnipeg Sun and wrote occasional columns, I was contacted by members of the Ukrainian-Canadian community and summoned to the big Orthodox cathedral on Burrows Avenue. In the basement I met three survivors of the Holodomor. It was the 70th anniversary of Ukraine’s version of the Holocaust and they wanted me to get the word out. Like most Canadians, I had no idea.
Holodomor means genocidal famine or extermination by hunger. What I learned was that up to seven million Ukrainians had been starved to death in the early 1930s under Stalin.
It was one of the toughest interviews I ever did. I remember chewing gum furiously as I took notes.
One of the elderly women, who had been a young girl at the time, told me how Soviet soldiers entered their farmhouse and, using a long file, searched for food hidden away between the slats in the walls. They found her father’s stash of grain, confiscated it and took away her father. She never saw him again.
A very old man who had been a teenaged soldier described the human devastation he witnessed when he returned to his home village. Bodies of the dead and dying everywhere.
All three broke down as they told their stories. It was grim.
Apart from the theft of property that was really what the Bolshevik Revolution was all about, the Holodomor was also believed to be revenge for the pogroms that followed the revolution, in which Ukrainians killed tens of thousands of Jews.
A decade after the Holodomor, when the German tanks rolled into Ukraine, there were more than a few Ukrainians willing and even anxious to carry the Nazi flag and exact vengeance against their exterminators. Jews and Poles were the main victims.
To this day, “ultranationalist” Ukrainians identify with the Nazis. It’s just a sad fact of history.
What’s sadder for us as Canadians is that our prime minister has aligned us with the Neo-Nazis who are now part of Ukraine’s unelected interim government.
Stephen Harper has made Canada a conspicuous ass in the Ukraine crisis.
His blustering at Russian President Vladimir Putin — more strident than any country’s leaders apart from the laughably hypocritical U.S. — is not only pathetic, because we have nothing to back it up with, but utterly without foundation.
Harper’s position conveniently ignores these facts:
• The U.S. bankrolled the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government to the tune of $5 billion and hand-picked the puppet prime minister, who will now strip down the country Greek-style as per western banking dictates.
• The coup succeeded when violent Neo-Nazis took over the Maidan protest, allegedly shooting police and their own protesters from rooftops to provoke the final takeover. (“Gosh,” said senior EU official Catherine Ashton when the Estonian foreign minister told her of this claim by an attending doctor who said the headshots were identical. Yeah, gosh.)
• Neo-Nazis now hold key positions in the unelected coup government, controlling the military and the police.
• Fearing the consequences of this development, Crimean citizens, the majority who are ethnic Russians, voted overwhelmingly to reintegrate with Russia.
• Russia agreed to Crimean popular will and used its troops — already stationed there — to secure the region. Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea were given a choice, and 89 per cent opted to become Russian soldiers.
Russia has been measured and cool-headed in its response to this dangerous provocation by the U.S. and its NATO friends.
Canada has been nothing but the opposite.
We are barking on wrong side of history, again.
