Canada publishing Nazi list would ‘help Russia’ – Ukrainian activists
A list with some 900 names of alleged WWII war criminals has been secret since 1986

The Canadian archives have been advised against releasing the names of alleged Nazi war criminals residing in the country, for fear it might help “Russian propaganda” against Ukraine.

The Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has received multiple requests to declassify the list with around 900 names, compiled by a 1986 war crimes commission. After consulting with “multiple stakeholders,” it has decided to hold off on its publication.

A LAC report on these consultations said that many of the stakeholders were worried about the implications “of associating Ukrainian names with Nazis,” saying that this would validate Russia’s claims about its military operation in Ukraine, according to the Globe and Mail. The newspaper is one of the organizations that filed a request to have the names released. 

Russia could use the list to “further these allegations or conduct disinformation campaigns in Canada,”which might affect public support for Ukraine, the LAC was reportedly told.

“A few stakeholders were concerned that the release of the report would result in new legal action (criminal prosecution, citizen revocation, or otherwise) being brought against the individuals named in the report,” said a LAC memo published by the Ottawa Citizen on Wednesday.

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress appears to have been one of the otherwise unnamed stakeholders. The group’s CEO told the Globe and Mail that the list should “remain confidential” but anyone on it found to have committed war crimes ought to be prosecuted.

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies said that it had been excluded from the consultations.

It looks like the government is placing the wishes of war criminals over and above the rights of Canadians to know the truth about terrible crimes committed by those who have quietly lived among us for so many years,” said the center’s senior director, Jaime Kirzner-Roberts.

Releasing the names would be “the ethical thing to do,”siad Per Anders Rudling, a historian at Lund University in Sweden who has researched the Ukrainian SS veterans in Canada.

Among the alleged Nazi war criminals who immigrated to Canada after WWII were members of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division ‘Galizien,’ composed of ethnic Ukrainians. One of them was Yaroslav Hunka, who received two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament last year during the visit of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. The speaker of the parliament had to resign over the incident and PM Justin Trudeau issued an apology for the incident.

The list is included in Part 2 of the report by the 1986 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, chaired by retired Superior Court of Quebec judge Jules Deschenes.

LAC was supposed to publish the document later this month, but has put the process on hold pending “full review in accordance with the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act,” the Globe and Mail said.

Russia has long criticized Ukraine for allowing public processions and other ceremonies that honor the veterans of the SS Galizien. Moscow also protested against Kiev’s official policy of honoring nationalist organizations that collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of the Second World War. 

https://www.rt.com/news/603596-canada-nazi-list-release/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

   By Owen Schalk

In April 2024, the Canadian government released its updated military policy, Our North, Strong and Free: A Renewed Vision for Canada’s Defence. The document allocated an additional $8.1 billion to Canadian military spending, with a promise to increase the defense budget from the current $30 billion to $50 billion by 2029, bringing Canada closer to NATO’s two percent defense spending to GDP ratio. The update promises a spate of new purchases: tactical helicopters, early warning aircraft, long-range missiles, specialized maritime sensors, funds to improve the country’s naval fleet, new satellite communications systems, billions toward the creation of a “strategic reserve” of ammunition and production of made-in-Canada artillery rounds, and more.

The increase in military spending is aimed at Russia, another Arctic power and Canada’s geopolitical foe, and China, another bugbear of the Canadian military and political elite. As the document notes: “the service of our Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is more important than ever—from defending Canada and securing our sovereignty in the Arctic, to protecting our continent alongside the United States…to strengthening NATO’s collective defence and providing military assistance to help Ukraine defend itself, to increasing our presence in the Indo-Pacific.”1

Our North, Strong and Free came on the heels of several recent initiatives to expand Canadian military capabilities. In April 2023, Ottawa announced a new long-range radar system, based in southern Ontario, to detect military threats in the Arctic region. In February of this year, Canada spent $316 million on new air defense systems and anti-tank missiles for Canadian troops deployed in Latvia under Operation Reassurance.

Over the past year, Ottawa has announced $30 billion in new equipment purchases, “including the acquisition of the Lockheed Martin F-35 and the Boeing P8-8A Poseidon,” plus “a fleet of General Atomics MQ-9B Reapers as well as trucks.” The Royal Canadian Navy is in the process of acquiring a submarine fleet.2 The federal government is also spending $300 billion over sixty-five years to build and maintain a new fleet of warships.3

Why is Canada preparing for war? The answer, according to Ottawa, is that Russian and Chinese malevolence is undermining the “rules-based international order,” and as such, Canada must be ready to defend its democratic freedoms with force. Our North, Strong and Free claims: “We need a robust military that can defend Canada and protect Canadians at home, including in our North, while defending North America and our national interests abroad with Allies and partners.… This is about preserving our values of democracy, freedom, peace, and fairness for the next generation of Canadians.”4

General Wayne Eyre, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, has claimed that Canada’s Arctic territories are under threat from Russian and Chinese expansionism.5 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned against rising authoritarianism (that is, Russia and China) and called on “like-minded democracies” (that is, Canada, the United States, and Europe) to band together and oppose Moscow and Beijing. His government has allocated billions to sourcing critical minerals for a Western supply chain of high-tech input materials, while claiming that “Antagonistic states around the world are using our economic interdependence for their own geopolitical advantage.”6 Furthermore, in the name of protecting “democratic” states from “authoritarian” ones, Ottawa has committed billions of dollars in arms and training to Ukraine in its fight against Russia and sailed Canadian warships off the coast of China in support of Taiwan.7

These policies—the hostile moves toward geopolitical opponents, efforts to decrease economic ties to China through critical minerals exploration, and hundreds of billions of dollars in projected military spending over the next decades—do not make Canadians safer. They increase global tensions while benefitting a codependent stratum of economic and political elites. Of course, this is the purpose of such policies. War is a racket, as Smedley Butler said in 1935, and Cold Wars are rackets too. As long as the Canadian government makes the public fear the international agendas of Moscow and Beijing, then public outcry over wealth transfer to the elite owners of arms manufacturers, defense contractors, and mining companies will remain muted.

From a broader perspective, Canada’s moves toward greater militarization are part of a decades-long historical trend that intensified after 1991: A drift away from UN-mandated peacekeeping initiatives toward U.S.-led military engagements, all with the aim of disciplining the Global South on behalf of capital. These engagements occurred during the unipolar moment of U.S. power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the rise of Russia and China, when Washington sought to remake the world according to its interests. To this end, Canada supported U.S. interventions while mouthing platitudes about “humanitarianism,” “antiterrorism,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” During this period, the number of Canadian peacekeepers on UN missions plummeted (by January 2022, they made up less than 1 percent of the organization’s total) and arms sales rose until Canada became the seventeenth-largest arms exporter in the world.8 Meanwhile, Canadian foreign policy took on an increasingly militarized and belligerent posture.

Canada has never been averse to using underhanded means to destroy Western enemies. In 1961, Canadian peacekeepers participated in the coup against Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, and in 1966, Canadian-trained officers overthrow Ghana’s socialist president Kwame Nkrumah. Both leaders were identified by the United States, and the broader Western alliance, as threats to Western interests. In fact, since 1953, the Canadian government has actively or passively supported the overthrow of over twenty governments, most of them left-wing nationalists, and almost all of them elected.9

With the end of the Cold War, Canada began to embrace a more militaristic foreign policy. Previously the Canadian state had adopted a strategy of what Paul Kellogg calls “military parasitism,” meaning that “Canadian capitalism invested in, and profited from, spheres of influence ‘kept safe for capitalism’ by Canada’s closest ally—the highly militarized United States.”10 While Canada participated in subversive activities against Western opponents, including elected governments in Latin America and Africa, Ottawa did not have to maintain a war machine to protect its globe-spanning corporate interests. “This military parasitism not only benefitted Canada’s corporations,” writes Kellogg, “it also meant that in Canada greater portions of government spending could go towards the welfare state rather than the warfare state.”11 Additionally, Canada’s reliance on U.S. power to generate profit opportunities around the world meant that Canada could cultivate its own global image, separate from the United States, as a peacekeeping, multilateralist nation, while Canadian companies supped on the spoils of imperialism.

In the 1990s, Canada participated in numerous U.S.-led military interventions, chipping away at its benevolent image. When the Iraqi military invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the Brian Mulroney government sent three naval vessels and twenty-four aircraft to support the U.S.-led response, marking the Canadian military’s first shooting war since Korea. All in all, Canada’s military contribution to the war against Iraq totalled $700 million. Mulroney also lobbied Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan to support the U.S. effort.

In Yugoslavia, the Canadian Armed Forces flew bombing runs over Serbia. Shortly thereafter, Canadian troops were dispatched to Somalia for an ostensibly humanitarian mission that ended up looking more like a military occupation, complete with violent acts of racism by Canadian forces, including the documented torture and murder of an innocent Somali teenager, Shidane Arone.

The war in Afghanistan pushed Canada toward greater militarization. Operation Apollo, the Canadian military’s expansive contribution to the George W. Bush administration’s Operation Enduring Freedom, began in October 2001 and ran until October 2003, by which point a more formal structure of occupation had been built. Canada ran the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team from 2005 to 2011, engaging in aggressive special forces operations, large-scale ground combat, psyops, and more. Canada made extensive development promises to Afghans during this period—the Dahla Dam, a polio eradication campaign, the construction of schools—but none of these aid projects fulfilled Canadian leaders’ promises, largely because of the hypermilitarized nature of the occupation itself. Furthermore, Canadians helped draft the Afghan National Development Strategy, which endorsed widespread privatization as a pillar of the new economy. Canadian companies then poured into Afghanistan to take advantage of these policies, as well as lucrative government contracts, making substantial profits from a system imposed on the country from the outside.

Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan, especially from 2003 to 2011, marked a new stage in Canadian militarism. Alongside the militarization of Canadian foreign policy during this period went the internationalization of Canadian capital—a strategy of increasing investment opportunities in the Global South through a “disciplinary militarism.”12 It makes sense that this approach to the Global South developed during the unipolar moment, the so-called “end of history,” when Washington bounded the world in a frenzied excitement, bombing open new markets and toppling governments that stood in the way of U.S. capital’s expansion. In Afghanistan, Canada joined the frenzy. As Jerome Klassen and Greg Albo write:

the war was an opening for the Canadian state to develop a set of military and security doctrines that would match and support the internationalization of Canadian corporate investment. On a regional scale the war helped fortify the “special relationship” with Washington as well as the continental system of trade through which Canada has earned a balance-of-payments surplus. Finally, at a national level, the war served as a catalyst for ramping up defence spending and for reorganizing the foreign policy apparatus around a strategy of global neoliberalism, continental integration, and counterinsurgency warfare.13

Since Afghanistan, Canadian military adventurism has only become more flagrant and costly, in both economic and human terms. For example, Canada was an eager participant in NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011. The NATO force was commanded by a Canadian lieutenant-general named Charles Bouchard, who later became chief executive of Lockheed Martin Canada, while Canadian warplanes flew 10 percent of all NATO bombing missions over the North African country. As Maximilien Forte explains in Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (2012), the destruction of Libya and the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi was a decision made by NATO leaders, particularly the United States, to prevent the economic and security integration of Africa under Libyan auspices—and to ensure that Washington remained the shot caller on the continent.

Following Canada’s wars against Afghanistan and Libya—both efforts to expand Western power while opening space for Canadian corporate investment—Ottawa turned its attention toward the Russian and Chinese borders. Since 2014, Canada has stationed hundreds of troops in Latvia under Operation Reassurance, with plans to increase that number to 2,200 by 2026.14 In 2014, Canada began shipping military aid to Ukraine after the Maidan coup and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Since 2015, the Canadian military has deployed hundreds of personnel to Ukraine under Operation Unifier, which included the training of tens of thousands of members of the Security Forces of Ukraine including fighters in the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.15

At present, the Canadian government is increasing its military footprint around China while deepening collaboration with regional allies. In addition to sailing warships through the Taiwan Strait, Canada participates in the biennial U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercises around the Hawaiian Islands. While RIMPAC claims not to be directed against any particular nations, the 2022 exercises saw U.S. troops raiding a simulated North Korean town and firing shots into a building containing portraits of former Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leader Kim Jong-Il and current DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.16 Furthermore, the U.S. Congress regularly insists that the Taiwanese military should be invited to RIMPAC, which would be an obvious show of force directed at China.

In June 2022, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly announced the creation of Canada’s Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee (IPAC). While the news release announcing the committee’s establishment did not mention China once, it did state that the goal of IPAC is to “drive expanded and deepened regional partnerships” and “enhance…regional security” in order to combat “increasing threats to global stability”—by which Ottawa obviously means China. The news release ends: “For the benefit of both the people of the region and Canadians, Canada is actively investing in the Indo-Pacific region to support a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific that contributes to a rules-based international order.”17

IPAC’s cochairs and members were culled mainly from former government officials and large international companies. They included Pierre Pettigrew (member of the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin governments in various positions), Rona Ambrose (member of the Stephen Harper government in various positions), Frank McKenna (deputy chairman of TD Bank and former premier of New Brunswick), Dominic Barton (chairman of global mining giant Rio Tinto and former Canadian ambassador to China), Jonathan Hausman (head of global investment strategy at the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and former executive director of Goldman Sachs), and others.

The Indo-Pacific strategy document that these individuals produced, released in February 2024, is a polemic against China. While claiming that “the Indo-Pacific is [Canada’s] neighbourhood,” the document describes China as “an increasingly disruptive global power” with “interests and values that increasingly depart from ours.” The document accuses China of disregarding UN rulings, coercive diplomacy, forced labor, lending practices that “create risks for developing economies,” and “arbitrary application of Chinese laws” to Canadians—the lattermost point presumably a reference to Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, two Canadians who were detained in China in 2018 shortly after Ottawa arrested Huawei CEO Meng Wanzhou on Washington’s request. After his release, Spavor sued the Canadian federal government, alleging that Kovrig has used him for intelligence gathering activities in China, leading to their arrests by Chinese authorities.18

As many geopolitical analysts have written, we are in an era of multipolarity characterized by the increased assertiveness of Washington’s geopolitical foes, mainly Russia and China, whose economic and military moves are undermining U.S. global hegemony in profound ways. Former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis described this era as one of “great-power competition.” In the multipolar world, Canada is firmly on the side of the United States, as demonstrated by Ottawa’s hostility toward Moscow and Beijing, as well as the Canadian military’s provocative actions near the Russian and Chinese borders.

From the “peacekeeping moment” of the Cold War to the unipolar moment and so-called War on Terror, and now into the multipolar world and great power competition, Canada has always stood beside Washington, joining the U.S. government’s efforts to discipline the world on Western capital’s behalf. Since 1991, however, Ottawa’s approach to the world has changed, becoming more militarized and more closely wedded to U.S. unilateralism. With the end of military parasitism and the dawning of multipolarity, Canada has undertaken higher defense spending, a more bellicose attitude toward targeted states, and an expansion of military activities in Eastern Europe and East Asia, all with the futile aim of helping Washington shore up its waning hegemony. When applied to regional players like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Canada’s aggressive U.S.-aligned foreign policy has produced utterly horrific results. When applied to global powers like Russia and China, it may endanger the world.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/06/canadas-militarization-and-the-end-of-u-s-hegemony/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.