Canada in Troubled Waters – The Bigger Geopolitical Picture
30.09.2023
Canada has hit geopolitical “world news”. Two serious incidents have occurred. They reflect the world situation and will, in turn, affect the world situation.
So, since Canada, new home to many Mauritians, is rarely in world news, let us seize this opportunity to look at these two incidents, themselves, and then to widen our lens. This way we can explore geopolitics in these times of all dangers.
Canada-India Conflict Flares
The first incident was a few weeks ago on 18 September. Prime Minister Trudeau announced he’s got evidence India conducted an assassination on Canadian soil of an Indian-born Canadian. The Canadian state is furious. Trudeau says India has to respect the rule of law, and can’t just come kill people in Canada. The Indian state is, in turn, furious. Narendra Modi calls for proof to be made public, and halts issuing visas for Canadians to visit India. Each country expels diplomats of the other. India accuses Canada of harbouring terrorists, in particular Sikh separatists, and no doubt suspects the Five-Eyes Anglo-Saxon spy ring (USA-UK-Canada-Australia-New Zealand) of spying on them. The conflict also destabilizes the USA’s plan to lock in all its allies, including long-time ally Canada and new ally India, to the USA’s own more aggressive foreign policy to maintain full-spectrum dominance, as the USA, since 2001, calls it. The conflict between India and Canada is not easily resolved. It can only be papered over.
The second incident in Canada was four days later on 22 September. It is also going to be papered over. Mr Trudeau got up in a crowded public session of the Canadian Parliament and was beamed world-wide on TV standing alongside his guest of honour Ukrainian President Zelensky, to whom Canada has paid some $10 billion dollars’ war support, and them both joining in gaily to a long, collective, and repeated, standing ovation to a Ukrainian war hero. Only it turns out the next day that the veteran is a Ukrainian fascist soldier. He, one Yaroslav Hunka, fought in the Nazi German Waffen-SS unit called the Galicia Division in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The slaughter carried out by the Nazis in Ukraine was notoriously horrific, even by Nazi standards. Over 1.5 million Ukrainian Jewish people and Polish people were killed by units like this. In Kiev 34,000 people were assassinated in just two days. So, the entire Canadian Parliament and its guest Zelensky plunged into shame. Nothing can wipe out what they have done. The apologies and the resignation of the Canadian speaker might help. But the harm is done.
What is important about this second incident is that it reminds the USA and its allies like Canada that, however much they deny the presence of Nazis in the Ukrainian state and military that they prop up today and, however much they have called the “de-Nazification” that Putin uses as a pretext for his invasion, “mere Putin narrative”, there is nevertheless a grave problem in Ukraine of extreme-right nationalists and Nazis. For a start, there are whole fascists battalions like, inter alia, the Azov Battalion that are part of the Ukrainian army. All US war propaganda denies this so totally that the denial, in turn, becomes the cause of the diplomatic blunder that Canada has gone and committed: applauding a fascist in Parliament. Why else would there not be even a cursory background check before making all MPs stand up with the Prime Minister and with Zelensky, already tasked with harbouring Nazis next to him, and cheer a Nazi? It is simply that the war causes those supplying weapons to believe their own propaganda. When Putin talks about “De-Nazification”, it is just lies, the USA says. But, no. There is a serious problem in the Ukraine. And it is not new.
The History of USA’s and all the Allies’ “De-Nazification” Programs
The USA, like Britain, France and the USSR, all put into action what they all called “the Allies’ de-Nazification program”, each in their respective “zones” of the waste-land of what was Germany and its occupied neighbours, carved up into these four Allied occupation zones, immediately after WW2. This lasted from 1945 to about 1948. All four occupiers agreed on what they called the “de-Nazification” of former Nazi occupied land. It meant excluding Nazis from the new state apparatuses being set up in the midst of the ruins. The USA directive to its officers was to remove or bar all “more than nominal” Nazis from public office, and then there was a “questionnaire” to guide officers doing the post-Nazi purge. It was very difficult to implement because of the Nazi’s extreme penetration into society, whereby such a large proportion of society was “more than nominal” Nazi. In any case, all the allies, in particular, the USA wanted to recruit, for example, all the rocket scientists they could get their hands on – Nazi or not. And they did. And they wanted any anti-communist allies they could get their hands on, fascist or not. So, they allowed Nazis in, too – not just rocket scientists, but anyone. As a footnote (1), we are including excerpts from a CNN article from a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an article that, once the CNN became the mouthpiece for Biden’s war posture, would never have been published. In addition, the USA has worked closely with Ukrainian fascists because they were anti-Soviet, ever since the end of WW2. In 2017, the USA declassified documents showing the extent of this co-operation with Nazi elements in Ukraine. In fact, Canada let in thousands of Nazis as immigrants, and has even for decades and decades notoriously tolerated monuments set up to these Ukrainian Nazi “war heroes”.
As well as knowing who have supported the persistence of fascist organizations in the Ukraine, it is also worthwhile looking at another background issue in order to understand Canada’s geo-political crises.
Shift to the extreme right in US Foreign Policy
In case anyone missed it, the USA foreign policy has gone into full neo-con, or extreme-right, mode – even when under the Democrat Administration. Being inhumane, against diplomacy as a way of dealing with conflict, and resorting to constant war-mongering is their currency now. The USA is not subject to the normal rules of civilized behavior, it believes – and it calls this: “exceptionalism”.
So, can you imagine the political leaders of all the USA’s allies, Germany and the UK for example, facing the spectre of a second Donald Trump Presidency, once Biden has tied them, as countries, so closely to the USA’s war machinery that their sovereignty is threatened? They will be bound to a cruel, deranged right-wing white-supremacist, mysogynist man with a mobilized base: it is truly time to take stock.
Europe’s economy has already been ruined by the actions of its ally, the USA. The USA drew them into a trap in Ukraine. It is probably the USA that blew up the Nord-stream gas pipelines, thus permanently cutting Germany from the relatively cheap gas its industry had so heavily invested in. This act of sabotage was not as a war aim – it was exploded too late for that – but merely in order to handicap a competitor’s industry. Some of the CIA men in charge of the sabotage are furious. They were told the aim was to prevent the war by shocking Russia. But the delay in detonating the bombs proved the aim was merely to help US industry. Note that the USA is not in favour of an independent inquiry into who did the sabotage of civilian infrastructure, let alone why. What we need to know is exactly that: Who did it? And why? The only plausible explanation is that published by brave journalist Seymour Hersh. This crime – the explosion of a civil infrastructure for nothing – will probably be one of the causes of the USA’s fall as an empire.
Before the USA falls, though, it is preparing for worse and worse destruction. It is not just through NATO, but also through all the other military treaties, like the one with India, that tightly bind all the US’s allies into the USA’s military machinery and military sales’ contracts. Thinking about the future, the minds of the leaders of these subjugated countries’ must boggle. Can they not see how this will sow the seeds first of fascism in their own countries and then being dragged into sanctions and war against other US trade adversaries?
How does this kind of drift towards war, first against Russia (using the Ukrainian people as pawns and army as gladiators) and then against China, happen?
President Biden’s foreign policy has, we should note, been led by three ideological hawks of the worst ilk, all Obama left-overs: National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken together with his newly appointed Acting Deputy, the notorious war-monger Victoria Nuland. She was the one responsible for the coup d’etat on 21 February in Ukraine. It was a coup d’etat that toppled the elected President Yanukovych. Her responsibility for this coup is one of the things that makes her notorious, and together with the USA’s Nord Stream gas sabotage, will likely be another cause of the USA’s downfall. She, Victoria Nuland, was caught on tape, published in early February 2014 before the coup, arranging with President Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine, one Geoffrey Pyatt, to set up, together with Vice-President Biden, responsible at the time for the Ukraine (as we all know because of his son Hunter Biden’s cashing in on his father’s influence when he was in charge there) and with Jake Sullivan, who the USA would put in power after the coup: the USA’s own “nominees” would come to power. They did. It did happen just as had been already published in the leaked phone-tapped conversation, a conversation that could never even be denied. It was not ever denied. The US-run coup took place 10 days’ later (Read BBC 7 February 2014 for transcript and listen to Youtube for recording of call, itself). So, immediately after the coup, what was already planned by Nuland, came true i.e. Arseniy Yatseniuk became Prime Minister, with Vitaly Klitschko the real leader as Mayor of Kiev (he still is Mayor and Zelensky’s right-hand man), but with PM Yatseniuk needing extreme-right winger fascist Oleh Thahnybok with him but “staying on the outside”. Russia then immediately after the coup d’etat annexed Crimea. And, the USA then went ahead with NATO plans to expand right into the Ukraine and Georgia, the red lines that Russia had drawn. We need to just remember all this, while we listen to the war-mongers of the CNN and BBC. If it were not for some very brave American intellectuals, it would indeed be hard to know what is happening. We need to read and study what is said by people like mainstream economist Jeffrey Sachs, mainstream political scientist John Mearsheimer, left-wing analyst Noam Chomsky, and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh – just in order to train ourselves to see through the propaganda that war and more war, US military bases and more military bases, arms production and sales and more arms production and sales, are “the only solution”. The NATO-fuelled war against Russia is a prelude, we must note, to a war being prepared against China.
Remember that, as part of the USA’s anti-China policy, President Donald Trump had signed a military treaty with his right-wing counterpart Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, drawing the two countries -- long-time adversaries while the USA was in an alliance with Pakistan – close together. Biden then got even closer to India, revamping the Quad – USA-Japan-India-Australia – which Australia had more-or-less got closed down during the earlier Labour government. This new alliance between the USA and India has all manner of unintended consequences – including putting a possible wedge between best-friends, Canada and the USA.
The speed with which the Biden administration has accelerated extreme-right foreign policy was, of course, possible because it, the Biden Administration, decided to leave in place much of the Donald Trump legacy of, for example, Sinophobia.
Conclusion
In Mauritius, it becomes important that we build on the existing possibilities for peace: the fact that a Non-Aligned Movement was possible, means it can be again. This way, we can bar all Mauritian ports to all warships, for example. The fact that USA military bases have been closed down (in Philippines, though re-opened now the extreme right is in power again there, in Puerto Rico, in Italy, and Ecuador) means they can be. We must get the base on Diego closed down. The fact that Nelson Mandela gave a promise not to re-set up the South African nuclear arms facility at Pelindaba, shows that a nuclear bomb country can dismantle its bombs. The fact that the Pelindaba Treaty is en vigeur now is something we can build on. The Mauritian Government can call for IAEA inspections. Arvind Boolell said, on a recent Radio Plus program when our member Lindsey Collen asked him a point-blank question, that he would call for inspections. So much the better. We will listen to see if the Labour Party campaigns on this. The fact that nearly half the countries of the world have signed the UN Treaty for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons means that we do not have to continue the abject policy of supposed mere “non-proliferation”.
Peace must be on the agenda. And peace means closing down all overseas bases, and closing down all arms industries.
Footnote (1): CNN on 24 February 2021 published a piece under the title “It’s time to confront the dark postscript to America’s role in defeating the Nazis” signed by Lev Golinkin. Note this is a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since the US has gone full-tilt into the war itself, such an article would have been turned down by all Western media, including the CNN, as being “anathema”. Here is how it read, in excerpts:
“The Ukrainian collaborator Yaroslav Stetsko didn’t have an aptitude for astrophysics; what he did have was a knack for organizing the butchers of Jews. On June 30, 1941, as Germany invaded Ukraine, Stetsko welcomed the Nazis, proclaiming the creation of a Ukrainian state which would “work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” As this was happening, members of Stetsko’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) were slaughtering thousands of Jews across Ukraine.
“At the end of the war, Stetsko – who had eagerly written about the need to adopt Germany’s genocide methods to exterminate Ukraine’s Jews – decamped for America, where he spent decades running the OUN from the US while traveling in the highest circles of Washington, DC. Both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush celebrated Stetsko as a staunch anti-communist freedom fighter. He died in 1986.
“Fighting communism is part of the reason Stetsko and thousands of others were welcomed by Western governments. As World War II rapidly transitioned into the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies recognized the potential of nurturing anti-Soviet groups in order to weaken the Kremlin’s hold over Eastern Europe. As a result, those who fought against Moscow became welcome assets. Some of the most organized and zealous assets also happened to be fascists and anti-Semites whose vision of freedom – and wartime experience – involved cleansing Jews and other ethnicities from their homeland. ...
“It’s far from the only time the West actively protected its assets. In 1992, The New York Times reported about Nazi-hunter John Loftus, who detailed the sickening campaign of ethnic cleansing of up to 100,000 Polish villagersorganized by mass murderer Mykola Lebed. Lebed, another Ukrainian nationalist who spent decades supplying the CIA with intelligence on the USSR, was protected. Indeed, a US National Archives report based on declassified CIA files showed the agency actively sheltered Lebed, tracking his media coverage and working to have federal investigators ignore his case.
“... Canada also took in Nazis and Nazi collaborators, including at least 2,000 Ukrainian Waffen-SS soldiers and collaborators from numerous other nations. In Canada’s case, the collaborators served an additional role: suppressingdomestic labor unions. The Eastern European “anti-communists,” as Nazi collaborators invariably branded themselves, became strikebreakers, helping stem socialism at home. Unsurprisingly, several industrial magnates, who had the most to lose from organized labor, were instrumental in bringing these individuals to Canada.
“These and thousands of other Holocaust perpetrators got far more than safe haven. They got a chance at the American Dream. For the past 70 years, as their victims lay in pits deprived of so much as a proper burial, they grew old and raised families, built communities, churches and schools. They even have monuments – America has memorials to Nazi collaborators from Serbia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, Ukraine, France and the Soviet union. You can find them in Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. “
