PM Trudeau Applauds Waffen SS Veteran

Sometimes things really do change.

Writing about Canadian’s preening Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is, for me, sort of like taking the time to squeegee my glass shower curtain. It seems like a waste of time, but if I don’t do it, I must live with a major eyesore of lime coating the glass that I can’t avoid seeing no matter how hard I try. Even so, most of the time, I still don’t squeegee the glass, but nurture the vain hope that it will somehow just go way.

Prime Minister Trudeau has dashing Gallic (or perhaps Spanish-Cuban) looks, a fine head of hair, and cuts a splendid figure in a suit. However, these seem to accentuate his preening narcissism and shallowness, giving him the obnoxiousness of a dopy golden retriever jumping up on the table to grab one’s dinner.

There was a time not so long ago when the alliance of Ukrainian nationalists with Hitler’s SS during World War II was excoriated in bien pensant circles such as the one in which Trudeau grew up. The Ukrainian-American autoworker, John Demjanjuk was presented as the quintessence of the sort of monster created in the crucible of Stalin’s Holodomor, then conscripted into the Red Army, then taken prisoner by the German Wehrmacht that turned him over to SS villains, who in turn put him to work in the Sobibor extermination camp. It’s hard to imagine a more abused and abusive man.

There was also a time not so long ago when prudent and reasonable men like George Kennan advised President Clinton not to entertain expanding NATO into eastern countries like Ukraine because doing so would result in the United States government getting involved in a murky and contested region in which their aren’t any clearly identifiable good guys.

Though I’ve been trying to avoid looking at the news lately in order to make a deadline, I couldn’t help noticing Matt Taibbi’s report about Trudeau inviting a Waffen SS Veteran to attend Ukrainian President Zelenksy’s address to the Canadian House of Commons. As Taibbi described the occasion:

This week, both Trudeau and House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota are under fire after Rota invited, and Trudeau applauded, a 98-year-old former soldier from the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division named Yaroslav Hunka to attend an address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Rota praised Hunka as a “Canadian hero” from his time fighting the Soviets in World War II when, not that it matters, they were allies to the United States and Canada. Leaving the elderly Hunka out of this for the moment, these politicians could easily have turned up the man’s blogs about joining Hitler’s army, making the applause scene at least approach the max on the cringe scale.

Back when guys like Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau were soft on the Soviets and Soviet vassals like Fidel Castro, it was Ukrainian nationalists like Hunka who were considered the bad guys.Now we have the spectacle of Prime Minister Trudeau and President Zelensky (of Russian Jewish ancestry) applauding a Waffen SS veteran. Sometimes things really do change.