BELGRADE, THURSDAY

THE STANDING OVATION received by former Ukrainian SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian Parliament came 80 years too late for Adolf Hitler, but it’s symptomatic of a noticeable softening of attitudes to National Socialism in recent years in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, says a veteran historian.

Professor Herod Thucydides of the University of Retro-causality says only the Fuhrer’s timing was wrong. “The current war in Ukraine has seen at least a toleration of formations whose leaders have the Nazi leader as their computer screen savers. The extraordinary applause for a Ukrainian SS soldier – remember the Ukrainians provided guards for the Death Camps – in the Canadian Parliament suggests that the old My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend maxim is not only closing eyes to the presence of Nazis in the Ukrainian military and body politic, but is now permitting their open celebration. If Canada can give an ovation to a member of the SS – the SS massacred scores of unarmed Canadian soldiers in Normandy in 1944 – one wonders how long before Adolf Hitler is rehabilitated as an anti-Russian martyr. One hopes not. He will be laughing in Hell, telling everyone ‘I was right, I was right’.

“In the latter stages of WW2, both Hitler and Goebbels were hopeful that the alliance between the West and Russia would inevitably break down, and that the Western Allies would join Germany in pushing the Russians back. It didn’t happen before the defeat of Germany, but the Cold War did permit the secret harboring and use of former Nazis, and now we’ve reached a stage where they are allowed out in the open. General George Patton wanted to march against the Russians in 1945. The decision was taken not to, and a Cold War followed, which the West won. And for a while it was believed Russia would become a kind of ally, until, in response to the creeping east of NATO, it began to flex its muscles again. And so here we are.

“Not since the Irish Government proposed celebrating the Black and Tans who burned their towns and murdered their civilians, has there been such a tremendous gaffe. I think it’s the general victim culture that pervades – everyone is a victim, no one is responsible. And ignorance. Don’t underestimate the role ignorance plays in all this. We live in profoundly ignorant times. Ironic, given the amount of media there is.

“Yes, it’s the ignorance that really offends me. Hunka is only in Canada because he and his colleagues were designated as Poles by the British at the end of WW2, because his part of Ukraine belonged to Poland until 1939, when the Russians took it. More irony given the number of Poles they were alleged to have massacred. Anyway, the Russians kept what is now western Ukraine in 1945 and gave some of Germany to Poland as supposed compensation. By that stage what had been an SS unit was renamed the Ukrainian National Army. And there was the Cold War, of course.

“The Russians were pretty much the West’s enemies in 1939; until they became our allies in 1941; and then reverted to being our enemies again in about 1946. That lasted till 1991 when we became chums again. Then in 2014 they were the enemy again. School yards have more adult arrangements, I think. You have to have some sympathy for Ukraine, caught in the middle of all this. And they weren’t the only ones committing war crimes. Eastern Europe is a bloody place. Marauding armies tramping up and down the place. Why do you think so many Ukrainians took the opportunity to leave the country when Putin invaded?

“Still, Canadians should ask themselves how these morons in their parliament came to be in charge of their country. I suppose, at least they didn’t shout ‘Sieg Heil!’ “