Before The Craziness Becomes Inoperable. . .

The "Nazis in the House!" backstory from the far side of my last newsletter's paywall. Here for everyone today.

All of today’s newsletter, for all subscribers.

I’ve decided bring out the dezinformatsiya backstory from the paywalled portion of The Real Story on Sunday The Crippling Cost of Unseriousness because things are going sideways, fast.

I’m encouraged to do so because Keir Giles is in the house now, and people need to pay attention to what he has to say about the big thing that every Canadian politician and every prominent personality in the punditocracy has been howling about. For the sake of brevity I’ve decided to call it the Yom Kippur Eve Incident.

Giles is the author of NATO’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare. He heads up the Conflict Studies Research Centre, which focuses on Eurasian security, and he’s a senior consultant with the Russia and Eurasia Programme of Chatham House in the United Kingdom.

He’s just come out with this, in Politico: Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi: Canada’s Hunka scandal is a demonstration of how when history is complicated, it can be a gift to propagandists who exploit the appeal of simplicity.

It's excellent.

We're going to be relitigating the 1980s’ Deschênes Commission at the rate we’re going. While there are clear public-interest arguments for opening most of the redacted files, I’m not interested in litigating that proposition here. But it's really sad that it's come to this. And dangerous.

“The result of all this is that otherwise intelligent people are now trying to outdo each other in a chorus of evidence-free condemnation,” Giles writes.

Russian war criminals are turning Ukraine into a giant crimes-against-humanity crime scene, right now, and there’s a move afoot to reopen Judge Jules Deschênes’ Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, from the time of Second World War.

“It’s true that [Jaroslav] Hunka should never have been invited into Canada’s House of Commons. But that’s not because he himself might be guilty of any crime. Rightly or wrongly, on an issue so toxic, it was inevitable the invitation would provide a golden opportunity for Russian propaganda.”

And it has done just that.

Where we left off. . .

Without inviting subscribers to get their hate on with Canada’s “MSM,” I have to say something out loud: The Parliamentary press gallery should share some of the profoundly shy-making discomfort that MPs from every party have been made to endure by becoming objects of worldwide ridicule owing to the Yom Kippur Eve incident.

’ll have some sensitive stuff on the other side of the paywall about all that. We’ve been lurched right back into the “Chrystia Freeland Lied About Her Nazi Past” fiction that was mainlined into the Canadian news media directly from Russia’s embassy in Ottawa on January 11, 2017. And yes, it was and remains a propaganda fiction.

. . . Worse, and even more crazy, Canada is being dragged even further back, to a Soviet-era dezinformatsiya operation aimed at pitting Jews and diaspora Ukrainians against one another. It was called Operation Payback. I’ll be on about its implications, and the sensitivities attending to it, for paying subscribers below.

Today it’s all here for all subscribers.

If something seems dropped into what follows out of nowhere you might want to pop back to Sunday’s newsletter to get yourself up to speed, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.

Now, where was I. . .

Dezinformatsiya, by mistake & on purpose

The “monumental, unprecedented” embarrassment [Lev] Golinkin’s story caused would have been a brilliant Larry David script for Curb Your Enthusiasm: What! Their entire government gave a standing ovation to a Nazi?! I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice! Except it’s not funny, because the joke played out in the real world, in headlines right around the planet.

And while it was happening, in real time, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in the Parliamentary press gallery to just stop for a second and think: ‘Hey, wait. House Speaker Anthony Rota just singled out a Ukrainian “hero” in the visitors’ gallery who was fighting the Russians sometime between 1941 and 1945. But. . . wasn’t Russia on our side against the Nazis back then?’

Not to get too nitpicky about historical context and nuance and all that, but we were on the same side as the Russians back then, and the Allies expended enormous propaganda effort during those days to convince everyone that Josef Stalin was one of the good guys. That’s whose side we were on.

Even so, if you know anything about the Holocaust, you’ll know why we don’t adversely judge our “allyship” with Stalin between 1941 and 1945. But now you’ll want to think about the suddenly infamous old man Yaroslav Hunka, who was a child when the genocidal Russians were killing between 3.5 million and 10 million of his people in Ukraine.

If you know anything about the Holdomor, you might not want to get too judgy about the moral choice the teenaged Hunka made to enlist with German forces he himself called “the new enemy,” in order to keep the old Russian enemy at bay.

There is no evidence that Hunka was some kind of bloodthirsty Jew killer, by the way, and because he was a Slav he would never have been permitted to join the pure “Aryan” Nazi Party anyway.

But this much is unambiguous: the First Ukrainian Division that Hunka volunteered to serve was commanded directly by the Nazis. The division was otherwise known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, also the SS 14th Waffen Division, because that’s what it was - a division of the Nazi Party’ savage military wing.

And that particular SS division [reportedly] committed unspeakable atrocities in its service of the Third Reich in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and elsewhere. In Ukraine, President Zelenskyy himself has gone out of his way to oppose commemorations of that same Galician Waffen SS division.

There are deep wounds that this whole thing has opened. Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister who is my lodestar at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, pointed out that back in the late 1940s Galician SS veterans had an easier time of it getting into Canada than Jews did.

But there are also deep propaganda currents at work here, and you don’t make a lot of friends when you try to drill down into them. So I’ll start with some low-hanging fruit.

“False Flag” stupidity, and a problem in the newsroom

A couple of days after the House of Commons’ Mistake From Hell story broke, I was alerted to a vaguely familiar name showing up in respectable news media as an authority on Ukraine. Over the past week alone, University of Ottawa professor Ivan Katchanovski has appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, the Canadian Press and the Globe and Mail. Oh, that guy, it suddenly occurred to me.

This is the same Ivan Katchanovski who shows up on Moscow’s RT News, and Tehran’s Press TV and “Truthout” and other such swamps of disinformation. He’s best known for his concoction of the popular Putinist conspiracy theory that the Euromaidan protesters massacred by Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 were killed by far-right elements among the protesters themselves.

It was a “false flag” operation designed to kick off the “Revolution of Dignity” that led to the overthrow of Yanukovich, the thing that had so enraged Putin. My friend Cathy Young has done tremendous work unraveling this nonsense, in this exploration published in The Bulwark back in March.

This brings us to the Ottawa Citizen’s own David Pugliese, so this is really, really touchy, because the Citizen takes up half of my weekly Postmedia effort.

First off, David is a fine reporter on Canadian military issues, the go-to guy for a lot of Armed Forces stories. It’s a beat that isn’t exactly crawling with journalists, so there we are. The thing is, David can also be a bit of a handful, shall we say. He’s been one of the loudest voices in the Look! Ukrainian Nazis! chorus that puts such a spring in the step of Vladimir Putin’s warmongering apologists.

Back in April, David was the subject of a story in the Kyiv Post that ran under this headline: Canadian Journalist Branded ‘Undesirable Person’ in Ukraine. The story also cites an unnamed former senior Canadian official: “Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and others have been identified by media watchers – but Pugliese has not received the scrutinized attention that he should, as he is a potential risk, since it does appear that he is carrying water for the Kremlin.”

I offer no opinion. Real Story subscribers should read Kyiv Post story themselves if they want.

Who are you calling a Nazi?

I also highly, highly recommend freelancer Justin Ling’s substack newsletter from Tuesday: About the SS Officer in the Gallery: History is messy, horrible, complicated. All we can do is face it.

Apart from saving me a lot of effort and Real Story worldlength, Justin has done an amazing job of digging into Russian disinformation efforts in Canada. Takeaway line: “While there are occasions where crying ‘Nazi!’ should be the beginning and ending of the conversation, this isn’t one of them. So, rather than just weaponizing history, let’s try to unravel the past from the present.”

Lots of great spy-versus-spy stuff in there, too.

The SS Officer in the gallery story should not be expected to go away, anytime soon. There’s much about the past and the present that might soon unravel altogether.

On Friday, I heard from the Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith. They’ve now joined forces with an impressive array of civil-society and diaspora groups in calling for action on a proposal they put to the Standing Committee on Access to Information back in February. They want full public disclosure of federal records on Nazi war criminals who found their way to Canada, and they want the establishment of a public archive of Canada’s Holocaust records, too.

Here’s who’s backing the move.

This is serious business. Separately, Shimon Koffer Fogel of the Centre for Jewish and Israel Affairs says that the Hunka incident in the House suggests that Canada’s War Crimes Program should “review and consider any new evidence that has come to light from the release of archival material that further implicates those who committed wartime atrocities who are living in Canada.”

There’s a measured, wise standpoint. But if the B’nai Brith coalition succeeds - and fair play to them - the effort could threaten to upset the bonds that bind Jewish Canadians and Ukrainian Canadians. If Canada weren’t such an unserious country nowadays, that might not be something to worry about happening.

But what’s on the table now is effectively a relitigation of the Deschênes Commission of the 1980s, which was supposed to settle questions about Nazis in our midst. One shudders to think how much hay Russia would successfully make of that.

Operation Payback

To get deep down into the unsettling questions at hand, subscribers would want to read Herbert Romerstein’s expansive analysis, Divide and Conquer: The KGB disinformation campaign against Ukrainians and Jews.

It would be far too simplistic to suggest that the anxieties and agitiations that led to the Deschênes Commission were a function of Soviet-era “active measures” pitting Jews and Ukrainians against one another. But Moscow did expend an astonishing degree of resources to inflame those tensions and feed those anxieties, and the KGB was happy with the payoff.

Just pointing this out can be like stepping into a minefield. The National Post was drawn into the arguments earlier this year for publishing an excerpt of a book by the Royal Canadian Military College professor Lubomyr Luciuk, co-authored by Volodymyr Viatrovych, titled Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement: Selections from the Secret Police Archives.

The KGB’s main target in Canada: The Galician SS division that Yaroslav Hunka joined as a teenager.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre was not happy with the National Post. FSWC Director of Allyship and Community Engagement Daniel Panneton: “Democracies of the world have stood with Ukraine in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin's unprovoked and aggressive war, but solidarity cannot tolerate Holocaust distortion and the glorification of Nazi collaborators.”

My friend Sean Maloney, also a history professor at the RCMC, wrote an extensive review of Enemy Archives, and here’s a couple of his conclusions. The KGB’s Operation Payback was strangely successful. And it’s especially threatening now, in light of Moscow’s insistence that its war crimes in Ukraine are all in aid of a “de-Nazification” of the country. “This is exactly what the Russia of Vladimir Putin is doing today vis-à-vis Ukraine. Indeed, resurrecting this Cold War-era controversy and attacking scholars that examine it even serves Russian objectives today.”

The Deschênes Commission, and the RCMP, spent a good deal of effort looking into the role the Galician SS played in the war. Both investigations found that its members had been properly screened before their admission to Canada, and that there was no evidence implicating them in war crimes.

That doesn’t mean that Canada’s Jewish advocacy organizations don’t have a point about releasing all the commission’s redacted files and establishing a publicly-accessible repository of Holocaust archives.

But like I said, in one of the first newsletters in the Real Story archive: Solidarity, unity and morale are important. Hearts and minds matter.

Ukraine matters.