Written by: Aidan Jonah

Historical revisionism is the point of order for a declining Canadian political elite, which views with terror the rise of anti-colonial thinking in the population and the strengthening of a socialist-multipolar oriented state alliance crippling NATO’s colonial capabilities. No comparison is more revealing than the Ontario government’s attitude towards education around Palestine and towards the historical Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Ukraine).

The Ontario government openly condemned the inclusion of a Nakba Remembrance Day in the Peel District School Board’s calendar. Ontario’s education minister, Stephen Lecce, demanded that the PDSB remove it, under the guise of wanting no politics in the classroom. But last fall, the same education minister spoke proudly about imposing mandatory ‘Holodomor education’ on Grade 10 students, based on a Nazi myth that baselessly claims that the USSR starved Ukrainians for opposing agricultural collectivization. As part of this ‘education’, the Ontario government gave $400,000 CAD to support the ‘Holodomor’ bus tour, run by an organization which aided a Ukrainian Nazi’s army medical section and whose COO formerly trained a Nazi Ukrainian battalion, the Azov Battalion.

Politics in the classroom are fine when its about spreading Nazi propaganda

Lecce’s professed attitude towards politics in the classroom, when Palestine is on the menu, is such:

“Over the past months, I made my expectations clear to all school boards that there is no room for politics or the influence of personal opinions in Ontario classrooms. At a time when so many young Canadians are divided, it is critical that schools bring people together.”

But when it comes to imposing Nazi propaganda – ‘Holodomor’ education - on young students, Lecce’s attitude towards politics in the classroom is much different, seeing it as part of:

“Ensuring the next generation embraces democracy & freedom, & never sits on the sidelines in the face of evil.”

The reason for this is clear. Young people grappling with the Western colonialism against Palestine - with Zionists as the colonial enforcers given leeway to set up a colonial outpost in the Middle East amid a wave of anti-colonial national liberation efforts - produces very uncomfortable questions about the nature of Canadian foreign policy in constantly backing Zionism from even before Israel came to exist, Canadian imperialism more broadly, and Canada as a colonial state itself. Meanwhile, the ‘Holodomor’ propaganda serves to demonize a historical socialist anti-colonial nation, the Soviet Union (USSR), which led the way in defeating the fascist Axis powers during WWII. Lecce and Canada’s political elite seeks to ideologically charge young people for capitalism and against socialism.

The concern about politics in the classroom only comes because acknowledging colonialism against Palestine is based in reality and a threat to Canadian imperialism. It is not a genuine concern for Lecce.

Nakba reality versus the ‘Holodomor’ lie

The Nakba was a colonial crime rooted in British imperialism. Back in 1917, Lord Balfour, a key figure in British politics, gave his support to Zionist ambitions to establish a colonial country from the territory of then British Palestine. Yves Engler explained that after WWII, Canada worked to impose a partition plan that gave a massively oversized area of British Palestine to Zionists based on population, under the false idea that Arabs and Jews couldn’t live together in peace. Canada’s former Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, was then a diplomat, where he helped impose this partition plan at the UN without consultation of the Palestinians. As Engler noted, Pearson said Israel was “the land of my Sunday School lessons” where he learned “the Jews belonged in Palestine.”

Canada’s support for colonial Israel was based on Western political interests, explains Engler:

“Support for Israel has been based on the idea that it is a valuable Western military outpost. Of central importance to Canadian support for the 1947 partition plan was the belief that a Middle Eastern Jewish state would serve Western interests. An internal report circulated at External Affairs during the UN negotiations explained: ‘The plan of partition gives to the western powers the opportunity to establish an independent, progressive Jewish state in the Eastern Mediterranean with close economic and cultural ties with the West generally and in particular with the United States.’”

In 1948, in violation of an already biased partition plan in its favour, with Arab countries militarily opposing the imposition of Israel into the Middle East, Zionist militias forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroying villages and committing numerous massacres. The first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said in 1948:

“We must do everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return… The old will die and the young will forget.”

Fascist Israel, a true Nazi successor to the just fallen Nazi German menace, rose firmly into existence as a state through the Nakba. Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis before WWII, and helped break an attempted economic boycott of Nazi Germany via the Ha’avara Agreement in 1933, outright ensuring Nazi Germany wouldn’t face an international economic boycott. Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) Co-President, Bruce Katz, further noted that “Yitzhak Shamir who would later become Prime Minster of Israel had been part of a proposal made on the part of the Stern Gang in 1941 to ally themselves with Nazi Germany as a means of driving the British out of Palestine.”

In 1948, with the Nakba, Zionists who then founded Israel took the Nazi torch from Nazi Germany, which they’d willingly assisted in a time of trouble.

Canada never enforced its Foreign Enlistment Act against Canadians who were part of committing the Nakba. No sanctions ever came against Israel for the Nakba.

Meanwhile, Zionists, with anti-colonial sentiment popular, have tried to brand themselves as ‘de-colonial’, meaning that the colonial crimes that were necessary to create their state are especially important to cover up. This explains why the Ontario government, congruent with past Canadian elite sympathies, being strongly Zionist, condemns a day acknowledging the Nakba. This cover up would be damaged if the BC Education Ministry integrated learning about the Nakba into the elementary and secondary school curriculum, as demanded by the BC Federation of Teachers – so it’s no surprise that Zionists are also opposing this demand. Education recognizing the Nakba, given Israel’s Nazi nature, is anti-Nazi education, and fighting for it should be applauded.

But there is a lie, unlike the real Nakba, which is in the interests of the Canadian political elite to discuss in the classroom. That lie is the ‘Holodomor’.

The ‘Holodomor’ myth began to be spread in the West, by western propagandists such as William Randal Hearst and Rhea Clyman, and Ukrainian nationalists, “to cover up Nazi collusion (in conspiracy with the rest of the NATO states)”, in tow with the myth that “communism was a conspiracy to ethnically subjugate the Ukrainians and other nationalities in the Baltics”, noted Marthad Umucyaba for The Canada Files.

The myth goes that the Soviet Union imposed famine on Ukrainians in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, because they were ‘freedom fighters’ who opposed Soviet ‘authoritarianism’, so that the will of these ‘freedom fighters’ to fight would be sapped.

The reality is that Kulaks, who opposed Soviet collectivization of farming, were hoarding crops and killing livestock, just so the collectivization would be impaired.

Umucyaba noted that when the 1932-33 Great Famine occurred:

“There was nothing the Soviet government could do about the crop failures with the current level of development, the sanctions against them by the west, and the environmental conditions of grain rust and frozen topsoil. Grain rust, in particular, complicated matters further due to being difficult to detect visually, but deadly enough to destroy the grain completely.”

Umucyaba explains further:

“There was never a deliberate attempt by the Soviet government to starve Ukrainians during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. The Kazakhs suffered worse from the famine than the Ukrainians, with no national myth being spread to this day about Kazakh genocide. Even in the territories of Greater Russia itself, people starved to death. This myth is put to rest by this fact: exports of grain to Ukraine by the Soviet government during the famine exceeded any other region.”

Editor’s note: To learn more about the ‘Holodomor’ as a Nazi myth, read Douglas Tottle’s book, “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard”.

But whereas education about the real Nakba is opposed by Canadian political elites, ‘Holodomor’ education is backed by Canadian politicians at the provincial and federal levels. Since 2014, a ‘Holodomor’ tour bus from the Nazi-apologist Ukrainian Canadian Congress’ aid arm – Canada-Ukraine Foundation - has been running in Canada, obtaining backing from multiple provincial governments from 2015 on, and the Canadian federal government between 2017 to 2020, to the tune of millions of dollars.

Anti-Nazi education is opposed by the Ontario government, but Nazi education has been in order for almost a decade in Ontario.

Imposing historical revisionism on young populations is crucial for the NATO unipolar political order to have any chance of surviving the rise of a multipolar anti-colonial world order, and this seeps down to the Ontario government. Their desperation is palpable, impossible to miss.

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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