The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
Beyond the political scandal that it constitutes, the Yaro affairSlav Hunkaor the loud applause with which this Ukrainian veteran of the SS was greeted in the Canadian parliament, is indicative of the abysmal ignorance of history that characterizes our political personnel.
This 98-year-old man was in fact presented by the Speaker of the House as “a Ukrainian-Canadian, veteran of the Second World War, who fought for the independence of Ukraine against the Russians”. These few words alone revealed what was going on.
As everyone knows, during the Second World War, the Soviets (and not the Russians) were part of the Allies, that is to say those who, alongside the English, Canadians, Americans, etc., fought the Nazism. If Yaroslav Hunka fought “against the Russians”, even if it was “for the independence of Ukraine”, this meant beyond any doubt that he was fighting in Hitler’s ranks. We know today that he served in the 14e SS “Galicia” division, recruited by the Nazis in western Ukraine. Celebrating him as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero” who should be thanked “for his service” then appears more than embarrassing.
I also wonder if history teachers should not make this scandal a textbook case intended to demonstrate to their pupils or students the importance of knowing, and therefore studying, the events of the past. This would be a way of showing them that there are cases where their ignorance risks leading to a lot of stupidity.
They would thus be given the opportunity to return to the events of the Second World War in class. However, such a return should not have the sole aim of throwing stones at these lost soldiers of the “Galicia” division. Knowledge of history rather allows us to meditate on the only two, or at least the two main lessons that can be drawn from it: first of all, that it is never repeated identically; and on the other hand, that it is always more complex than we believe.
Ukrainians today are fighting a Russian invasion, but from 1941 to 1945 the overwhelming majority of them fought as Soviets against the Germans. In this war, they paid a high price: millions of dead, military and civilians, most of their cities razed, their prisoners of war reduced to dying of hunger, cold, and mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis. , their Jewish compatriots murdered by the hundreds of thousands, etc.
And if some of them, who had suffered Stalinist repression, Russification, dekulakization, the collectivization of agriculture and the famines that this had caused, were nevertheless able to think that it was legitimate to serve Hitler to to fight Stalin, that can be understood. Judging, in any case, with 80 years of hindsight is a bit easy.
Don’t give in to propaganda
These two lessons from history would also allow us not to give in to the sirens of propaganda. That it is Russian, and claims to reenact the Great Patriotic War by transforming the invasion of Ukraine into an episode of the eternal struggle of the valiant Red Army against the Nazi hydra; or Western, with the same propensity to present this conflict as a repeat of the annexation or invasion of its neighbors by Hitler’s Reich. Putin is not Hitler; Russia is not Nazi Germany in search of its “living space”. Ukraine is not neo-Nazi either, obviously. History never slavishly repeats itself.
It’s never simple either. We must break with the naive idea according to which history is nothing but a ceaseless struggle between Good and Evil, a Manichean conception which is at the basis of these propagandist discourses and which nourishes in most people the feeling reassuring that they are still on the right side, that is, on the right side of history.
How can we explain to them in this case that after the Second World War, when the guns had barely fallen silent and the Canadian soldiers who had fought Germany and its allies on European soil were returning home, the Mackenzie King government rushed to welcome several hundred former soldiers (including Yaroslav Hunka) from the SS “Galicia” division who were currently prisoners of the Allies? Since last Friday, there has been little mention of this historical fact in the media. This immigration took place while the SS as a whole had just been recognized by the Nuremberg tribunal as a “criminal organization” and while persistent suspicions of atrocities weighed on this division.
In the meantime, the situation had changed. Those who, just the day before, had been enemies were seen in a different light as the Cold War was rearing its head and the USSR was taking shape, replacing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, as the new irreducible adversary of the West. In these circumstances, these Ukrainian ultranationalists who had taken up arms against Stalin became friendly again, and could even prove useful.
Keeping such facts in mind would be more beneficial than apologizing or tearing one’s shirt over that very embarrassing standing ovation given to an ex-SS.