In Canada’s parliament, Nazi apologist professor demands apology for Hunka
Lubomyr Luciuk, a Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, speaks to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee meeting on March 21, 2024.
Written by: Aidan Jonah
Lubomyr Luciuk, a Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, has consistently caught The Canada Files’ eye when speaking about the actions of Ukrainian Nazis during WWII and Nazi importation into Canada more generally. But Luciuk’s latest escalation, having the gall to make his Nazi apologist claims to a Canadian parliament committee, which are written into the record, is another level entirely. He reached this new level, by among other things, demanding that Canada’s parliament apologize for calling Jaroslav Hunka a Nazi.
Yet there’s so much more to Luciuk’s testimony, and the parliamentary committee meeting which he among others, was invited to speak to.
Luciuk: Hunka isn’t a Nazi, he just wanted to fight those evil Soviets
It’s remarkable that Luciuk was invited to testify to a Parliament committee, but what exactly did he say?
Luciuk started off by talking of a 1985 KGB document that showed a program intended to create awareness of the presence of Nazi war criminals in Canada, as a “disinformation campaign started in the 1970s… intended to stoke tensions between the Jewish, Baltic and Ukrainian diasporas”. Luciuk said that supposed KGB ‘subterfuge’ is now being deployed to distract attention from Russia’s SMO in Ukraine, which he refers to as “Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine and Ukrainians”.
Luciuk regurgitated the farcical argument that just because a person couldn’t be a member of the Nazi party, that they weren’t a Nazi. Luciuk admitted that Hunka served with the Waffen SS 14th Division, but sought to justify his voluntary service, by citing a post from Hunka where he claimed that the USSR killed innocent Ukrainians and deported family members to Siberia. To further his defense, Luciuk spoke of the Deschenes Commission’s view on service in the Waffen SS 14th Division, which argued that:
The division shouldn’t be indicted as a group. But as this author noted, “a 2020 article by journalist David Pugliese would dispel the idea of the Deschenes Commission as being rigorous, with it instead going on to ignore the Waffen SS being ‘declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg Trials.’”
That members of the division had been screened by Europeans, Americans, Canada and the USSR. This of course ignores that Canada and the US explicitly wanted to bring fascists into Canada for anti-communist purposes and cheap labour. You can be screening, but what happens if you want fascists, the screening results become whatever’s needed to get them in.
That since people came to Canada after 1950 with full knowledge of the government of Canada, they could not have their citizenship revoked, which was granted legally through naturalization. This ignores that in Canada, by 1950, voluntary service in the Nazi SS was no longer grounds for automatic immigration rejection.
The massacres committed by the division against Jews and Poles, the many dead victims of the division, were just ‘communist propaganda’ in the High Commissioner’s eyes. So was the division murdering Polish resistance forces against Nazi occupation on Heinreich Himmler’s orders in 1944, in the process having “hanged, tortured, beat, burned, gassed and shot around 1500 women, children and men.” When the division killed more than 8000 people while on a campaign against Yugoslav partisans in June 1944, a majority of whom were innocent civilians according to Australian academic Terrence Goldworthy, this must have just been ‘communist propaganda’ as well. When the division assisted the mass murder of “Poles, Roma, and Jews in the towns of Moderowka and Huta Pienacka” and helped guard a Nazi concentration camp, this also was just, you guessed it, ‘communist propaganda’.
Wilgress’ claim is supposed to back Luciuk’s defense of Hunka.
Luciuk then shifted back to the core Ukrainian Nazi apologist argument, saying that the ‘facts’ of Hunka’s life showed that “as a teenager he fought in defense of Ukraine because of what he had witnessed the Soviets do to Ukrainians between 1939 to 1941”. And that “he had nothing to do with the persecution of any minority group”. Again, a Ukrainian Nazi apologist doesn’t care about the lives of the Jews and Poles massacred by the division, since being in the division means that even if he didn’t participate in the massacres of the Jews and Poles, he still had ‘something to do’ with the persecution of minority groups.
Ending off his testimony, Luciuk told the Canadian parliament committee, that Canadian parliamentarians should issue an apology to Hunka, for calling him a Nazi. Of course, he didn’t mention the MP Yvan Baker never called Hunka a Nazi, nor apologized for honouring Hunka in Canada’s parliament.
A Liberal MP, Jennifer O’Connell, asked Luciuk to explain how supposed propaganda against Hunka was used by Russia, and within the answer, Luciuk had called Ukrainian president Zelensky, “Ukraine’s Moses”, and Russian president Putin the “Pharoah”. Luciuk didn’t stop there, saying that parliamentarians fell prey to “Soviet disinformation regurgitated by Russia and their operatives in Canada, and their fellow travelers”. Who exactly these supposed operatives are, Luciuk did not say.
Glenn Michalchuk, National President of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, the faction of the Ukrainian-Canadian community which has always opposed the veneration of fascists, says Luciuk’s comments “were made to obscure the truth about the history of the Galician Division and its role in support of Nazi aggression, occupation and the murder of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles and others in its rampage across Europe.”
Luciuk on a deeper level
Luciuk’s apologia for Nazi collaborators goes back decades. As he proudly stated in his parliament testimony, he was involved in the founding of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association in 1986 – serving as their first research director, just when there was pressure to investigate the presence of Nazi war criminals in Canada. The UCCLA itself says its “roots trace back to 1984, when the [UCC’s] Civil Liberties Commission (CLC) was constituted to deal with unfounded allegations about ‘Nazi war criminals’ in Canada.”
During the commission, Luciuk, as the UCC’s spokesperson and UCCLA (UCC’s Ukrainian Civil Liberties Committee successor) research director, worked successfully to have Justice Deschenes not consider Soviet evidence in the process of producing his findings.
The Deschenes commission not considering the USSR’s evidence of Nazi collaboration and Nazi war crimes meant critical swathes of evidence, given their prime physical location to collect such evidence, meant Nazi war criminals in Canada could count on far less evidence being available of their crimes.
Michalchuk said, in opposition to Luciuk’s veneration of the commission:
“The fact that he [Luciuk] refers to the Deschênes Commission's exoneration of the crimes of the Galician Division is testament to the need to pursue exposing the role of official circles in providing these criminals safe haven in Canada.
The Association of United Ukrainian Canadians offered the Deschênes Commission access to information we possessed about the Galician Division and its role in the active collaboration with the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the war crimes it committed in doing so. The Deschênes Commission did not hear from the AUUC, and others who had evidence, so that it could absolve the Galician Division and continue the cover up of the role of the Canadian state in admitting these war criminals.”
Back in 2002, a Luciuk op-ed in the Montreal Gazette complained about the “lobby” that “ceaselessly claims” that there’s thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada, never detailing who this “lobby” is. But this ‘claim’ is a fact, historian Irving Abella and other showed that Canada intentionally imported 2000 Waffen SS 14th Division members in the years after WWII, and had the RCMP seeking out Ukrainian fascists in 1947, before dropping the farce that Nazi SS volunteers couldn’t be admitted to Canada in 1950.
In his testimony to Parliament, Luciuk propped himself up by mentioning how he was in the room (present in the lockdown) when the Minister of Justice when he revealed the Deschenes’ Commission’s findings. The commission’s findings claimed that the Nazi war criminal problem in Canada was massively overblown.
Luciuk’s Montreal Gazette op-ed, back in 2002, also called for a “Commission of Inquiry on Soviet and Communist war criminals in Canada”, while never acknowledging that Canada fought alongside the allies including the USSR, against the fascist Axis during World War II. This commission call was made again in 2024 during Luciuk’s testimony to parliament. This author found that the 2002 op-ed indicates clearly the kind of people Luciuk would want investigated:
“Luciuk would complain about two individuals, ‘Joseph, a former NKVD Lieutenant, and Nahum, a onetime Communist partisan”, who ‘wrote books, in English, boasting of their roles in liquidating anti-Soviet Lithuanians and Ukrainians,’ being allowed into Canada.'“
In 2017, Luciuk outright defended, in the Ottawa Citizen, Hill Times and Kyiv Post, the Nazi collaboration of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather, Michael Chomiak, Editor of Krakivski Visti. In the Ottawa Citizen, Luciuk claimed that “another journalist told me the paper’s editors had no affinity for Nazi aims but used their positions to sustain the Ukrainian resistance”.
This author noted in a 2020 article, that “Photos have resurfaced of Michael Chomiak accompanying Nazis in the highest levels of government during the occupation of Soviet Ukraine, leaving no remaining doubt that Michael Chomiak was in fact a Nazi.”
David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen explained in more detail, back in 2017, that:
“Chomiak noted he edited the paper first in Crakow (Cracow), Poland and then in Vienna. The reason he edited the paper in Vienna was because he had to flee with his Nazis colleagues as the Russians advanced into Poland. (The Russians tended to execute collaborators well as SS members).”
Pugliese notes that the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum said Krakivski Visti and another similar paper’s “editorial boards carried out a policy of soliciting Ukrainian support for the German cause,”. Pugliese further quoted the museum as saying:
“It was typical, within these publications, to not to give any accounts of the German genocidal policy, and largely, the editions resorted to silencing the mass killing of Jews in Galicia. Ukrainian newspapers presented the Jewish Question in light of the official Nazi propaganda, corollary to the Jewish world conspiracy.”
The same Krakivski Visti would hail the founding of the Waffen SS 14th Division that Hunka voluntarily served in, both of whom Luciuk did apologia for in Canada’s parliament.
In January 2024, Luciuk released a book called “The Galicia Division: They fought for Ukraine”, which seeks to, as Marthad Umucyaba explains, “casually explain away the massacres and ethnic cleansing of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division by pretending they never happened,” while pretending that there are no Nazi monuments in Canada. Days later, Luciuk opposed an opinion article in the Globe & Mail calling for the opening up of Nazi importation archives.
Luciuk’s defense of the Waffen SS 14th Division and its members is a longstanding effort.
Luciuk not the only apologist for Ukrainian Nazi Hunka to speak in the meeting
Ukrainian Canadian Congress’ CEO Ihor Michalchyshyn unsurprisingly defended the Waffen SS 14th Division as ‘freedom fighters’ against both the USSR and the Nazis. Michalchyshyn echoed the infamous post-Hunka incident letter from Dr. Paul Magosci, who claimed, falsely, that “there’s no proof that the Galicia division engaged in war crimes.” Magosci, echoed by Michalchyshyn, lied again, stating that the characterization of Waffen SS 14th Division members as “Nazis, fascists, war criminals or monsters is inflammatory and unsupported by the historical record”.
Michalchyshyn would spread the same lie as Luciuk, that the Deschenes Commission was a definitive commission on Nazi war criminals in Canada. (11:23-11:27)
Both Michalchyshyn and Jars Balan of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies would agree with Conservative MP Tom Kmiec, who previously admitted there was a NATO proxy war against Russia using Ukraine, who proposed that experts in diaspora groups be involved in vetting parliamentary guests (11:32-11:34). There’s irony here, as the UCC were responsible for Hunka being invited to Canadian PM Trudeau’s Toronto rally with the right-wing of Canada’s Ukrainian community, according to the PMO, just before Zelensky touched down to speak in Canada’s parliament and Hunka was honoured. In Michalchyshyn’s testimony, he claimed this invite came because UCC donors were en-masse invited to attend, at the PMO’s request. The UCC was also behind Hunka being invited to Trudeau’s official reception for Zelensky.
So, while the UCC and CIUS would want this mechanism to cover things up, Canadians may benefit from it, given their denial of the Waffen SS 14th Division’s Nazi nature and war crimes, because fanatics like them would greenlight the honouring of other fascists, being genuinely convinced they aren’t fascists.
The only exception to the outright apologia for Hunka and the division’s Nazism and war crimes came from the Zionist organization, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. But even then, CIJA cited the Hunka incident as an ‘embarrassing’ problem because it helped ‘Russian propaganda’. The important context is that CIJA constantly does apologia for Israel’s Nazism. They just oppose Nazism which acts against Jewish people, not Palestinians.
Quite ironically, Luciuk would seek to twice smack down (12:42-12:43 and 12:49-12:50) CIJA for opposing Hunka’s honouring in Canada’s parliament, saying that disagreements about history shouldn’t be used to oppose the honouring, that – towards CIJA – Hunka’s honouring shouldn’t be opposed just because they find him ‘disagreeable’. Luciuk said, “just going on Google and Wikipedia and searching for information is pretty fraught, I’m not sure if you would invite me.” Apologists for different Nazis went toe to toe, for all to see.
A telling committee meeting
It is telling that the Canadian parliament only allowed defenders of Nazi actions past and present to testify to the PROC committee meeting, focused on how to avoid another Hunka incident. The priority is on how to avoid embarrassing Canada’s political elite and fascist diaspora organizations, and avoid hurting Canada’s international image in such a way again.
Michalchuk says that, in contrast to the farcical committee meeting that just occurred, parliament should deal “with this fully as the only just response to the infamy committed when they gave Hunka a standing ovation.”
The priority is not to combat Nazi apologism and the influence of fascists intentionally imported into ‘democratic’ Canada, to bolster Canadian colonialism and imperialism.
“Canada can not claim to be a democratic, progressive and inclusive country so long as it hides these and other wrongs behind walls of ignorance, not wanting to know or outright lies about the truth,” said Michalchuk.
Think long and hard on what this committee meeting says about Canadian society.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.
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