Thread by @DrKuba2

But enough about showbiz, let’s talk politics #ShowbizForUglyPeople. Yesterday I tweeted about the Western ultra-hawks that salivate over the prospect of a Ukrainian insurgency. I want to pick up that thought:

https://twitter.com/DrKuba2/status/1504588262681112589

Let’s start with @cafreeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada. She’s has a @PeteButtigieg-style elite trajectory, with media instead of consulting as her pre-political stepping stone. thestar.com/amp/politics/f…

In government, she’s been relentlessly supporting post-Maidan Ukraine and isolating Russia. She has cast arms shipments, sanctions and increased oil production as a defense of “rules-based international order.” cbc.ca/amp/1.6368866

Under her influence, Canada jailed the CFO of Huawei, sent military advisers to Ukraine (including meetings with the Azov Battalion), imposed harsh sanctions on Russia, all in the name of an ideological death-struggle. ctvnews.ca/mobile/politic…

She’s penned a cri de cœur on the question, explaining how her personal history as the child of Ukrainian refugees taught her the importance of standing against aggression, with Putin the chief architect of the conflicts in the region: qz.com/402855/chrysti…

The policy position is standard trans-Atlantic moralized warmongering, and her account of events the typical whitewash (no mention of the election Yanukovych won, Western backing of Maidan, etc). But her personal story is where she is most disingenuous:

A lawyer must have helped compose this, since it manages to be technically true and utterly misleading. Note the time jump - her grandparents flee “Western Ukraine” (actually eastern Poland at the time) in 1939, then her mother is born in a refugee camp after the war.

What were they doing from 1939-1945? Well, her grandfather - Mikhaïl Chomiak - was “keep[ing] the dream of an independent Ukraine alive” in occupied Kraków, where the Nazis gave him a newspaper (seized from Jewish owners) to incite Ukrainians to violence against Poles and Jews.

Her grandfather, circled, is pictured here at a party with Kreisleiter Emil Gassner, the Nazi official in charge of press/propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. The Ukrainian-language paper, Krakivski Visti, celebrated Nazi victories and encouraged the formation of Ukrainian SS units.

He was, in short, a Nazi collaborator, possibly a war criminal. He was in Germany at war’s end to get away from the Red Army, which might have some… questions for him. Polish intelligence kept looking for him after the war, but he was far away, a “refugee” in Canada.

None of this is disputable. Of course one can’t be blamed for Nazi parents/grandparents, and Schwarzenegger’s video deftly shows how to address the painful matter of family complicity. Freeland’s family history is only an issue because she refuses to face it.

Freeland, with an assist from major Canadian outlets, has consistently denied her grandfather’s collaboration and painted him as a “Ukrainian patriot,” accusing those presenting the facts of propagating Russian disinformation: washingtonpost.com/news/worldview…

Here’s a whitewash of Freeland’s grandfather’s history from an anti-disinformation site, denying everything without addressing the evidence, even going so far as to imply that he worked with the anti-Nazi resistance: euvsdisinfo.eu/report/canadas…

Here’s the CBC presenting the whole matter as a Russian disinformation campaign: cbc.ca/amp/1.4020024

Here’s a piece from the Ottawa citizen claiming the authors of pieces on Freeland’s past are either trivial (“a couple of Polish magazines”) or malign (“[alleged] KGB asset”): ottawacitizen.com/opinion/column…

Freeland’s could put the issue to rest with some Arnold-type candor, but instead we get this:

https://twitter.com/cafreeland/status/768200606695776256

This matters. She is a public figure in a powerful role, crafting national policy on Ukraine and Russia. As a Canadian, I need some reassurance that her decisions stem from the interests of Canada and not an affinity to Ukrainian ethno-nationalism.

As a Polish-Canadian - and 100,000 Polish civilians were slaughtered by the armed wing of Chomiak’s Ukrainian movement, along with their complicity in the Jewish genocide - I want to know that public resources aren’t going to a new generation of killers.

As a refugee resettled to Canada, I need to know that our system distinguishes between the victims of war crimes and their perpetrators. These are legitimate concerns, and Freeland’s behavior has not inspired confidence in her values or her candor.

She has been a strident partisan of the Ukrainian cause, but until she comes to terms with both her family’s past and that of Ukrainian nationalism in general, she will taint Western support and legitimate Russian narratives. Ukraine, honestly, deserves better. FIN

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