Leaders of the Ukrainian Canadian “establishment” evidently made the right call to ignore the “Nazigate” scandal(s) and wait for things to blow over. Lev Golinkin, a recent guest on the “Bandera Lobby Show,” broke the international news story about Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka: “Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-year-old veteran who fought with Nazis.” His latest article in The Forward, which received far less attention, might have capped off the media’s attention to “Nazigate”: “Canadian government has given $2 million to Ukrainian Canadian groups that celebrate Nazi collaborators.”
Those groups included the politically influential Ukrainian Canadian Congress and several historic front groups for the Banderite (OUN-B) and Melnykite (OUN-M) wings of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Both factions of OUN collaborated with Nazi Germany and perpetrated the Holocaust, still exist, and today collaborate with neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Lev Golinkin started with the Melnykites, who were the ones, historically, that supported the creation of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division. He also highlighted state funding for active OUN-B fronts like the Ukrainian Youth Association and Homin Ukrainy newspaper. But so far there have been no waves from this story.
I was briefly optimistic that Golinkin’s latest article could break open a new chapter in “Nazigate.” John Paul-Himka, a leading historian of Ukraine and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, apparently got the ball rolling during his appearance on the “Bandera Lobby Show.” On Twitter, several thousand people watched a clip of him saying that “the Canadian government and American government have been supporting OUN fronts for years in large amounts of money.” The Edmonton branch of the left-wing Association of United Ukrainian Canadians soon called on the Canadian government to “halt all state funding to all Ukrainian-Canadian organizations which honor any Ukrainian nazis or nazi-collaborators.”
“Nazigate” has largely migrated to the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), also in Edmonton. Per Rudling, another leading historian of Ukrainian nationalism and professor at Lund University in Sweden, brought attention to many problematic CIUS endowments and recently co-authored (with famous Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff) an article on “Canada’s long failure to hold resident Nazis accountable.” Rudling posted this update to Facebook on Saturday: (more...)
'Nazigate' & the 'Bandera Lobby'
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