@BenjaminNorton The influx of fascists from Ukraine into Canada involved the OUN(B) creating far more lasting structures than you may be aware of and displacing non-fascist Ukrainians who had come earlier, sometimes resulting in physical battles.
From "Multiculturalism...
... memory, and ritualization: Ukrainian nationalist monuments in Edmonton, Alberta," Per A. Rudling. Nationalities Papers, Vol. 39, No. 5, September 2011, 733–768. (Citations omitted.)
"Canadians of Ukrainian descent constitute a significant part of the population of the...
... Albertan capital. Among other things, their presence is felt in the public space as Ukrainian monuments constitute a part of the landscape.
[This] article studies three key monuments, physical manifestations of the ideology of local Ukrainian nationalist elites in...
... Edmonton: a 1973 monument to nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych, a 1976 memorial constructed by the Ukrainian Waffen-SS in Edmonton, and a 1983 memorial to the 1932–1933 famine in the Ukrainian SSR.
Representing a narrative of suffering, resistance, and redemption, all...
... three monuments were organized by the same activists and are representative for the selective memory of an “ethnic” elite, which presents nationalist ideology as authentic Ukrainian cultural heritage.
The narrative is based partly upon an uncritical cult of...
... totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and terroristic political figures, whose war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and collaboration with Nazi Germany the nationalists deny and obfuscate...
At the end of the war hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had to flee the advancing Soviet Army...
... About 26,000 Ukrainian Displaced Persons, DPs, arrived in Canada from 1947 through 1952... 1200 to 2000 of them were former soldiers of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS... Among these DPs, the nationalist ideology dominated. Many continued their political activities in emigration...
The OUN, which had the advantage of clandestine networks on the territory of the now defeated Reich, heavily dominated the political life of the emigres... Previous waves of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada had a different Ukrainian identity than the post-war emigres...
The...
... post-war wave of nationalist Ukrainians constituted much of the political and social elite of Western Ukraine. Over the next decades, they came to redefine the Ukrainian community in Canada (Lalande 184–90).
In the immediate postwar period...
...the OUN(b) carried out a “planned settlement” of “revolutionary nationalists” throughout Canada. In 1949, the OUN(b) organized itself as a clandestine network by the name the League for the Liberation of Ukraine (Liga vyzvolennia Ukrainy, LVU), which, as the...
... League of Ukrainian Canadians, is still active.
Parts of the established Ukrainian Canadian community had mixed emotions about this. The arrival of the “revolutionary nationalists” was followed by violent clashes, even instances of open warfare between them and the...
... Ukrainian Canadian pro-Soviet left, culminating in the bombing of the Ukrainian Labor Temple in Toronto on 8 October 1950.
Whereas the Canadian authorities were suspicious of the OUN(b), they welcomed the result: the weakening of the Ukrainian Canadian left.
The...
... authorities also included some of them in the West’s military planning in case of an armed conflict with the Soviets...
By the 1950s, a considerable part of the Ukrainian emigre elite in Edmonton consisted of people whohad collaborated militarily, intellectually,...
... or politically with Nazi Germany...
In exile, the nationalists produced a self-serving historical mythology. Topics like collaboration, war criminality, and antiSemitism were avoided, the OUN portrayed itself as an anti-Nazi resistance movement, blaming their war crimes...
... on Germans, Poles, and Soviets...
Even the Ukrainian Waffen-SS veterans’ investment in a fascist Europe was denied, and they remain respected and venerated as heroes and pillars of the community...
“Membership in the Division [Waffen-SS Galizien] has never been...
... regarded by its veterans as a cause for shame,” Lubomyr Luciuk and Myroslav Yurkevych observed in the OUN(b) organ Homin Ukrainy."
As you can see, it wasn't just a matter of numbers, or their history, of their political orientation, it was also a long-term strategic matter of establishing within Canada something like the fascist Ukrainian state they failed to win in Ukraine itself.
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