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On Biden, Blinken, Etc. – Matt Taibbi On Tucker Carlson’s Show
This talk (video) with Matt Taibbi and Tucker Carlson is very interesting.
One question that's come up (chapter 4) is who was running the White House during the last year. Biden obviously didn't.
Tucker thinks it was Antony Blinken. Blinken is also said to be the one who pressed for a more aggressive war against Russia. The release of ATACMS missiles against Russian proper was on of the nonsensical measures.
Another one, Tucker says (44:12), was an attempt to kill Vladimir Putin.
I had not heard that one so far.
Recommended.
The rest of the Canada Nazi article here:
Journalist Taylor Noakes examined a list of private donations on Tribute to Liberty’s website in 2021 and found pledges made in honour of Nazi collaborators Shukhevych, Croatian Ustache leader Ante Pavelić and the Hungarian Knightly Order of Vitéz, providing a clue into the sorts of figures the monument was slated to honour.
Chrystia Freeland’s Revisionist Family History
The most powerful embodiment of Nazi apologia in Canadian elite circles is Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland, the person most likely to become Canada’s next prime minister following the deeply unpopular Trudeau’s Jan. 6 resignation.
Freeland, an accomplished author and journalist who’s occupied senior editorial roles at the Financial Times, Reuters and the Globe and Mail, has made Ukrainian identity a key part of the personal narrative she’s constructed around herself since Trudeau recruited her as a star candidate in 2013.
In so doing, she engaged in gross historical revisionism regarding her Ukrainian grandfather Mykhailo Chomiak’s activities in Nazi-occupied Krakow, where he served as a prominent Nazi propagandist.
In his recent book, Family Ties, which takes a critical look at Freeland’s revisionist family history, Montreal-based author Peter McFarlane details the extent to which Chomiak was ideologically aligned with his Nazi bosses.
Chomiak edited Krakivski Visti, or Krakow News, a virulently antisemitic rag, which described Poland as a “miserable land sown with a Jewish infection” and actively recruited for the Waffen-SS.
The paper was printed on a press seized from the editor of a Polish Jewish publication, and Chomiak was moved into an apartment formerly occupied by a Jewish family, which he described as “verminous and filthy” in a letter to Nazi authorities.
Originally, McFarlane explains, Chomiak was the deputy to inaugural editor Borys Levytski, a staunch anti-Communist who was nonetheless part of a more left-leaning Ukrainian nationalist faction. But within months, the Nazis sought “a more compliant editor” and Chomiak was promoted.
Levytski moved to Warsaw and later joined the anti-Nazi resistance, an option available to Chomiak had he not been a Nazi sympathizer.
None of this would be so concerning if Freeland hadn’t repeatedly cited him as a political inspiration.
A 2015 profile in the Liberal-friendly Toronto Star describes Chomiak as an “author and journalist” who fled Western Ukraine when the Soviets invaded without explaining why he might have done that.
“All my grandparents loved Canada but my Ukrainian grandfather was the most passionate,” Freeland told the Star, adding that her mother’s parents had “a very big effect on me.”
In a since-deleted tweet from the following year commemorating Black Ribbon Day, which perpetuates a false equivalence between Nazism and Communism, Freeland described her maternal grandparents as having “worked hard to bring freedom and democracy to Ukraine.”
In 2017, when Freeland served as global affairs minister, stories began to percolate on pro-Russian websites about Chomiak and Krakivski Visti.
Asked about Chomiak’s wartime activities by mainstream reporters, Freeland didn’t outright deny the story, but said it was part of “efforts on the Russian side to destabilize Western democracies.”
Canada’s media and political establishment, with a few honourable exceptions, lined up to defend Freeland, providing a revealing contrast with the way Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s centre-left New Democratic Party, was treated for his past associations with the Sikh separatist Khalistani movement.
Conservative MP Peter Kent, a former journalist himself, accused the Russians of “trying to smear [Freeland] with historical detail that has probably been misrepresented.”
The prevailing elite sentiment was aptly summarized in a Toronto Star headline for an article by seasoned political columnist Paul Wells: “War is hell and Chrystia Freeland has nothing to be ashamed of.”
Not only that was the story true but Freeland knew it was.
Her uncle, John-Paul Himka, an esteemed University of Alberta historian who is married to her mother’s sister, wrote a 1996 paper in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies on the antisemitic material Chomiak published, which thanks Chrystia Freeland for her editorial assistance
It’s not that Freeland was blissfully unaware that her beloved grandfather was a Nazi propagandist; she just didn’t care.
Chomiak wasn’t the only Ukrainian Nazi propagandist who was welcomed into Canada after the Second World War. Ulas Samchuk, who edited Krakivski Visti’s sister paper Volyn in Rivne, arrived in Canada in 1948, the same year as Chomiak.
Samchuk is buried in the same Oakville cemetery that has a Shukhevych memorial.
You can draw a direct line from Freeland’s veneration of her Nazi propagandist grandfather and the reception Waffen-SS veteran Hunka received in Canadian parliament.
Ukrainian-Canadian Influence on Post-Soviet Ukraine
Freeland represents an organized Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora that swept into the former Soviet Republic when it became independent in 1990 to re-shape the Ukrainian state in its own image, emboldening its most revanchist elements.
As a result of their interventions, Ukraine has become the land of contradiction it is today—a country that has a Russian-speaking Jewish president, dozens of street names and monuments glorifying Nazi collaborators and active neo-Nazi formations in its military.
Chrystia Freeland’s mother and Michael Chomiak’s daughter, Halyna Freeland, a prominent socialist and feminist activist in Edmonton who owned an independent bookstore and ran twice for the NDP, embodies these contradictions.
In 1992, Halyna Freeland moved to Kyiv, where she established the Ukrainian Legal Foundation with financial assistance from billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and helped write the newly independent country’s 1996 constitution.
While consisting largely of standard liberal democratic fare, the Ukrainian constitution pledges “to preserve the gene pool of the Ukrainian people.”
In Family Ties, McFarlene writes that Halyna Freeland eventually became disillusioned with the corruption of post-Soviet Ukraine.
But not Chrystia, whose activities agitating for Ukrainian independence as an exchange student at Taras Shevchenko Univeristy in Kyiv from 1988 to 1989 were monitored by the Soviet secret police.
In his 1993 book Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, journalist and academic Michael Ignatieff, who himself led Canada’s Liberal Party from 2008 to 2011, spoke to a young Freeland about the way Ukrainian-Canadian nationalists regard themselves as the authentic inheritors of Ukrainian identity:
It is common, she says, for Canadian Ukrainians to think of themselves as the true Ukrainians, the ones who kept the faith while among the actual Ukrainians the compulsion and fatalism of the Communist system was working its way into their bones. The Canadian Ukrainians return ‘home’ expecting a fervently nationalist and religious people, and instead find phlegmatic, ironic, sober, and fatalistic Soviet souls. Independence requires a new human type, but, she says, with an equal measure of affection and irritation, it will be a long time coming.
Around this time, Freeland was advocating for Ukraine to hold onto its nuclear weapons.
It wasn’t until the 2004 Orange Revolution that Ukraine began to take the nationalist, militaristic trajectory favoured by diaspora nationalists, for which it was rewarded with a pathway towards NATO membership at the 2008 Bucharest Summit, setting it on the path to war with Russia.
The Ukrainian state became even more fervently nationalist after the 2014 Maidan coup, resulting in the war in the Donbas between the central Ukrainian government and Russian-speaking separatists.
Freeland’s paternalistic attitude towards Ukraine was on full display in January 2022, when she pressured President Zelenskyy to drop corruption and treason charges against billionaire former president Petro Poroshenko, who had presided over an explicit program of “decommunisation,” by lecturing Zelenskyy about the need to maintain unity in the face of Russian threats.
Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine a month later, transforming Zelenskyy, who campaigned on a pledge of peace with Russia, into a war-time president, proved a godsend for diaspora nationalists.
In March 2022, Freeland tweeted a photo of herself at a pro-Ukraine rally in Toronto, in which she held up a black-and-red scarf associated with Shukhevych’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army, with its slogan Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes written on it in Ukrainian. After people pointed out the banner’s historical associations, she deleted the tweet.
When journalist Noakes, writing a story for the Canadian Press wire service, reached out to her office for comment, he received a response from UCC lobbyists, who argued that it was all a bunch of Russian propaganda, echoing Freeland’s response to questions about her grandfather’s Nazi collaboration.
As deputy prime minister and finance minister, Freeland presided over $19.5 billion CAD in aid to Ukraine, including $4.5 billion in arms so they could resist Russian occupation by any means necessary, at a time when economic inequality in Canada grew to its highest level on record.
Freeland is far from an isolated actor. She’s the product of a country that welcomed Nazi collaborators with open arms and gave them access to the highest orders of power, enabling them to whitewash their history and portray themselves as blameless victims of Communist tyranny, all while playing an outsized role in fuelling global military conflict.
If there’s any country in urgent need of de-Nazification, it’s Canada.
Jeremy Appel is an independent Edmonton-based journalist and author of the book, Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power (Dundurn Press). Follow him on Twitter @JeremyAppel1025
Sorry for the O/T, but since it’s paywalled I know that b wouldn’t be able to include it on the Week In Review. Sue me!
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jan 29 2025 4:40 utc | 112
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