Freeland has nothing to be ashamed of

Moscow is happy to spout the big lie against any critic, Lubomyr Luciuk says.

I’ve heard it all before. It was fake news then and still is. Allegations about “Nazis in Canada” — the most recent regurgitation targeting Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland — have circulated for decades.

Understandably, just after the war’s end, Jewish Canadians were alarmed at the prospect of “Ukrainian Nazis” escaping justice by posing as Displaced Persons. In response, the Liberal government initiated high-level inquiries, ensuring no such villains resettled here. Yet claims about “thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada” resurfaced in the early 1980s, resulting in a Conservative government establishing the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes. Tellingly, its 1987 report rebuked those who had spread “increasingly large and grossly exaggerated” figures about “Nazi war criminals.”

I drafted the Ukrainian Canadian community’s response to this hysteria. We recommended anyone accused of war crimes, regardless of ethnic, religious or racial origins, be brought to trial in a criminal court, knowing the stringent rules of evidence followed in such a venue would ensure justice. Ottawa adopted that “made in Canada” position. Not a single person was ever convicted of being a “Nazi” in a Canadian criminal court.

Unfortunately, no effort was made to investigate whether Soviet war criminals got into Canada pretending to be refugees. The commission’s report may explain this partiality. Listed on page 857 is the name of a man who published an English-language book in 1981 admitting he served in the Judenrat under Nazi rule and was later an officer in the NKVD, the notoriously murderous Soviet political police. That record made him legally inadmissible. Yet he got in and was possessed of the chutzpah to offer a self-serving spin on history, although I doubt he gifted Justice Deschênes with a copy of his book. When the Deschênes Commission’s history is finally written, its peculiar bias should be addressed.

Today, Minister Freeland is being pilloried over the unproven wartime misconduct of her grandfather, an editor at Krakivski Visti (Krakow News). Years ago, another journalist told me the paper’s editors had no affinity for Nazi aims but used their positions to sustain the Ukrainian resistance. Of course, from the Kremlin’s point of view, Ukrainian nationalism represented a threat, one they expended considerable resources on eradicating, well into the 1950s. There followed a concerted Soviet defamation campaign, portraying the nationalists as “war criminals” and “agents of Western imperialism.” Moscow’s men still spout the same disinformation, apparently sharing Hitler’s view that if you keep repeating the big lie, people will believe it.

What is shocking about this recent effort, however, is the “blood libel” argument the Russians have deployed. Certainly, Ms. Freeland made herself a target of their yellow journalism by taking a principled position supporting Ukraine against Russian imperialism. But should she be judged because of the supposed sins of her grandfather?

Thankfully, her political opponents in Parliament recognize Moscow’s muckraking for what it is. That said, let’s not forget that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Stalin’s loyal servant, his father an NKVD man, and that he carried on the family tradition as a KGB officer, even if he did better than all previous Putins, becoming a billionaire on his secret policeman’s pension while securing the sinecure of president-in-perpetuity of the so-called Russian Federation. Now, there’s a family tree demanding scrutiny.

By way of full disclosure, my paternal grandfather was a veteran of the Austro-Hungarian army during the Great War, then a PoW in Siberia, returning years after the war’s end a traumatized man.

And my maternal grandfather, a forester and Ukrainian nationalist, joined the struggle for Ukraine’s independence against the Polish, Nazi and Soviet occupations before he was betrayed, imprisoned and murdered by the Communists. I never met either man but am proud of both because they fought for Ukraine’s freedom, just as Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather did.

So she has nothing to be ashamed of and is the right person to be minister of foreign affairs as Justin Trudeau’s government condemns Russia’s subversion of Europe’s peace, just as did Stephen Harper’s government did before it.