The shots taken in Canada’s parliament showing how the assembly gives a standing ovation to one Yaroslav Hunko, a former member of the SS-Galizien, who was touted by the speaker and the journalists as a fighter for Ukraine’s liberation from the Russian yoke has been doing the rounds around the globe. It was only now that some Jewish organizations have raised their eyebrows. What a surprise! As if Yaroslav Hunko was the only and exceptional case of celebrating a neo-nazi or antisemite! Yaroslav Hunko is a Ukrainian naturalized in Canada, and during World War Two he was active in ethnic cleansing in the territories that Ukrainians regarded and continue to regard as their own. The same ideology has not died out: it re-emerged in present-day Ukraine and it is only now that an uproar has been raised. Up till that event Jews around the world did not seem to care about neo-Nazis in Ukraine and have generally sided with Ukrainians in their conflict with Russia. how did this all come about?
Yaroslav Hunko celebrated in Canadian parliament
A short historical aside. As in any nation, so in Poland, among patriotic political movements, it has always been possible to identify broadly two attitudes of action: one guided by emotion and the other guided by reason. More than a century ago, when Poland was occupied by Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia, the greatest animosity of Poles was directed against the Russians. This animosity very often obscured the real good of the people and the country. The more enlightened national activists, who proposed to pursue a sensible policy that would maximize profits and minimize losses, appealed in vain not to take steps that would worsen the plight of the nation. The main point here was not to spark armed uprisings, since the previous ones had not only been suppressed, but also resulted in some citizens being killed, some going to prison and some leaving the country, generally forever, while the occupier restricted or eliminated those political freedoms that had existed before the uprising. These sensible activists pointed to the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was also under the rule of the Russian Empire, (since the Congress of Vienna), and whose inhabitants did not revolt, which allowed them to enjoy wide autonomy. Unfortunately, most Polish patriots preferred to explode in anger like a meteorite and die out just as quickly, succumbing to the overwhelming force of the Russians. Such conspirators, insurgents or revolutionaries found satisfaction in the fact that they could give vent to their anger and their rage, that they could kill a few Cossacks, rob a state-owned Russian bank or make an assassination attempt on one or another representative of the occupying power. They cared little for the fact that harsh repressions were visited on their compatriots for such actions and life in Poland became even more unpleasant. The most important thing was to harm the “Russkies”! In such circumstances, sensible activists of the Polish national movement coined an apt saying that among Poles there are very many who hate Russia more than they love Poland.
Such an attitude toward Russia still persists in Poland. Surprisingly, this attitude seems to be shared by other European countries (except Hungary) as well as the United States and Canada. Could it be that they have all become infected from Poland? They all want to harm Russia regardless of the costs sustained: economic, financial, political, or those of prestige. We can observe this self-defeating attitude by looking at Germany and its deteriorating economic statistics; we can see this attitude by looking at the rest of the European Union as well. All of this could be understood to some extent: man does not happen to be a rational being. Man also acts emotionally and follows blindly his beliefs: religion or ideology. Be it as it may, there is a nation in which such an attitude towards Russia is particularly astonishing, incomprehensible and – dare we say it – bizarre. What nation?
It is the Jews: those living in the state of Israel, those living in Ukraine, and finally those scattered throughout the Western world, especially in the United States. Almost all of them – starting with Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoyskyi (and his ilk), through Victoria Nuland or Antony Blinken (people partly responsible for creating American foreign policy), and ending with the Israeli authorities – support Ukraine in the latter’s war against Russia. they don’t seem to have noticed that for years Ukraine has been reviving and paying homage to the memory of Stepan Bandera, that Ukraine has been identifying with the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which both yesterday and today was and remains strongly anti-Semitic. To an ordinary person who knows how sensitive Jews are to the memory of the countless Jewish victims who had been deprived of their lives during World War II not only at the hands of the Germans, but also at the hands of Ukrainians, such an attitude is simply beyond belief! Jewish-Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoyskyi even financed the infamous Azov Battalion, whose members had swastikas tattooed on their bodies; President Zelensky, an ethnic Jew, is completely unperturbed by the cult of Stepan Bandera nurtured in Ukraine; nor are his American sponsors of Jewish origin bothered by this cult. How is this possible? In many Western countries, Jewish communities have led to the enactment of laws that prosecute and mete out punishment for so-called historical revisionism: in this case, statements or publications that claim that Jewish victims during World War II were fewer or that they died in a different way as reported. Lo and behold, mysteriously Jews turn a blind eye to the overt and militant anti-Semitism that currently exists in Ukraine, and they support Ukraine regardless of its Nazi ideology, as long as it does harm to Russia. Could it also be that also Jews (like Poles) dislike Russia more than they like themselves?
Another historical digression. In the 1990s about a million Jews left the crumbling Soviet Union. Was it because they were persecuted there (and now have an aversion to Russia)? No. They emigrated because of the worsening economic conditions. Where did the Jews come from in the Soviet Union in the first place? Jews found themselves in the Soviet Union because they had previously been residents of tsarist Russia. And how did they become residents of tsarist Russia? For the most part, they came from the eastern territories of Poland, which Russia, in cahoots with Prussia and Austria (see above), had conquered and incorporated into their states. The sudden appearance of several million Jews in the Russian state became a sociological problem to be solved. The tsarist authorities feared the domination of the mostly educated Jews, who were primarily engaged in trade and who as a rule ran village inns, over the Russian illiterate peasants. In order to prevent this domination, Jews were restricted to live in the area of the so-called Pale of Settlement (roughly, the lands of the Polish state that had been incorporated into Russia). A ghetto, as it were, was created, with this huge difference to other ghettos that this one had an area larger than any state in Europe, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Such a restriction (from which there were various exceptions) plus a numerus clausus in universities could have made Jews hostile to the Russian state. This hostility found expression in the fact that they fed the Russian revolutionary movement in disproportionate numbers compared to ethnic Russians. This revolutionary movement eventually led to a change in the political system, the creation of Soviet Russia, in which Jews were no longer restricted. Rather, they occupied important positions in government, industry and the arts. Why then the anger at Russia?
On the contrary, anti-Semitism was revived in Ukraine when it was occupied by Third Reich troops. Ukrainian soldiers or policemen from the Ukrainian national movement (created by Stepan Bandera) proceeded to crack down on Jews (and Poles, and Russians, and Belorussians), committing mass murder. Ukrainians formed a separate division, SS-Galizien, which ruthlessly fought the resistance movement in Ukraine and beyond. From Ukrainians were recruited guards in many a concentration camp, whose inmates were precisely Jews. And today, when three generations have passed since those events, today, when Stepan Bandera and his (anti-Semitic) political thoughts are being honoured as openly and officially as possible in Ukraine, leading representatives of the Jewish community throughout the Western world are supporting Ukraine against Russia! It even came to the point that – as mentioned above – in the Canadian parliament, on the day of the biggest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, tribute was paid to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunko, a former member of the SS-Galizien. Although a weak outcry was raised immediately after the event by Jewish organizations (and even by the Polish ambassador and authorities who support Kiev in its fight against Moscow unconditionally), this does not mean that Jews, both those in the state of Israel and those in the United States or Canada, will stop supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Here we have two issues that are difficult to understand. Why such hatred of Russia and why such a willingness to turn a blind eye to the historical revisionism practised in Ukraine? Could it be – to repeat it a third time – that the Jews dislike Russia more than they like themselves?
