Historical revisionism finally goes mainstream

It was only a matter of time

On September 24, the standing ovation that the Canadian Parliament, with Volodomyr Zelensky present, gave to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, who was a volunteer member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier (1st Galician) Division of the SS during WW2 (or the Great Patriotic War, as the Eastern Front conflict is known in Russia), was a watershed moment.

Hunka was applauded for fighting “against the Russians during the Second World War”, and apparently none of the MPs or military personnel present in the chamber thought about on whose side that meant he was fighting at the time. I’m being facetious, of course; they knew, but they have to pretend that they didn’t, because apparently being stupid and ignorant is fine these days as long as you hate Russia.

Justin Trudeau came out with an utterly pathetic statement about how it had been an embarrassing moment for them all, and how at times like this we need to come together to “push back against Russian disinformation”. Sorry, what? Russia did absolutely nothing here - this was Canada using their entire team to score a spectacular own goal.

Speaker of the house Anthony Rota stepped down from his position because he had invited Hunka to Parliament, and we are to believe that that has drawn a line under the issue. In fact, it only raises further questions: does that mean that MPs just rapturously applaud anyone invited into the chamber, regardless of who they are and what they’ve done, and it’s the fault of whoever invited them in if it turns out that they probably shouldn’t have applauded?

No, I’m being facetious again: they were applauding because they hate Russia. In the West, we think of WW2 as being all about Germany occupying Poland, France, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, and how they were antisemitic and killed 6 million Jews. But as a result of their push east, approximately 27 million Soviet citizens died (including ~1 million Jews), of which fewer than 9 million were military deaths. That’s at least 3 times as many Soviet civilians killed as Jews, and the Waffen SS were enthusiastic contributors to that effort.

The watershed moment was the reaction to this debacle - if it can even be called that, because this was no accident. The reaction culminated in an October 2 Politico article with the title “Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi”, another preposterous statement, a preposterous and offensive article in fact, but one that smug Twitter liberals will no doubt be using to justify continuing to support Ukraine, because they have already invested too much of their dreadful personalities in it to back out now.

One could make a strong argument that a lot of ordinary Germans were conscripted into the army and were fighting for their country and not for the ideals of Nazism, and that had they refused, they and their families would have become victims. But members of the SS? Ukrainian members of the SS? These were ideologues prepared to torture and kill, and these are the people Politico is whitewashing. The masks are now truly coming off. It’s a sickening thought, but luckily someone had the wherewithal to put together a video bringing a little levity to the situation, as well as aptly summarising what actually happened:

The Hunka incident came at the end of a week of breathtaking historical revisions, that probably went unnoticed by many people.

Firstly, on September 21 at the Atlantic Council awards ceremony, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen was presenting an award to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. She first used the speech to praise Kishida for visiting Bucha, claiming that the Russians “executed dozens of civilians in cold blood – in one of the worst war crimes since the start of Russia's brutal war”, because now everything these people say has to be about repeating anti-Russian propaganda, regardless of the context.

Von der Leyen then went on to talk about Hiroshima, which is both Kishida’s hometown, and the location of the G7 meeting earlier this year. This is what she said (sorry for making you listen to her):

“The atomic bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground” - but no mention of who dropped that atomic bomb. And then “Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again”. Again? Are we all supposed to pretend that the USA didn’t nuke Japan? Russian diplomats noticed but it didn’t cause a major international outcry, so I guess that yes, we are all supposed to pretend that the USA didn’t nuke Japan.

Then, on September 22 former Prime Minister and now full-time bullshit spouter Boris Johnson said in an interview with Ukrainian journalist Dmitri Gordon that the West won WW2 “with Ukraine’s help”:

“What the heck” indeed. It’s a strange back-and-forth that Western politicians (and disgraced former politicians) are playing vis-a-vis Ukraine, Russia and WW2: the Banderites that we are supporting are proud of their country’s fight against the Soviet Union, and we have to show them that we continue to support them, but without mentioning that they were on the losing side, along with Nazi Germany. How to square that circle? Pretend that they were on our side. No one will notice, probably.

Whether it’s Ursula talking about Russia “threatening” (which they aren’t) to use nuclear weapons “once again” (although they’ve never used them), or Boris pretending that Ukraine was on our side in WW2, or the Canadian Parliament cheering a former Nazi, there is a common theme. If we are allies now, we’ve always been allies. The past is an illusion. History is just words on a page, and that page can be rewritten at any time. This is the era of Existentialist politics: the only moment that matters is right now, and you will think what you’re told to think. If anyone tries to tell you that you should trust your own mind and your own memory - that person is a traitor.