• Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Frank Sysyn, a history professor at the University of Alberta, says it’s accurate to say that Hunka was not a Nazi, despite fighting for Nazi Germany, because non-Germans weren’t allowed to join the party.

    He said Canada’s choice to allow veterans of the unit to live out their lives in the country ultimately came down to a decision that membership in the unit was not reason enough to prosecute someone, if there was no proof they committed individual crimes. Ukrainians, he added, are far from the only group of postwar immigrants to benefit from such an approach.

    “Most of our Italian immigrants of the 1950s, if they were men of a certain age, had probably been in the Italian army and fought for Fascist Italy,” said Sysyn, who is a member of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

    John-Paul Himka, a University of Alberta professor emeritus and the author of a book about Ukrainians and the Holocaust, said many of the young men who joined the Galicia division in 1943 were motivated by the atrocities they witnessed under Soviet occupation, including the murder of thousands of political prisoners and mass deportations to labour camps. “So for the people in this region, the Soviets were the nightmare and the Germans were relatively tolerable," he said. "So that, I think, explains why so many of them thought that what they were doing fighting against the Soviets was patriotic.”

    He said some Galician units did participate in atrocities, including murders in Polish villages. The division had an antisemitic newspaper and accepted into its ranks “policemen who had been very important in the Holocaust, who had rounded up Jews for execution and sometimes executed Jews themselves," he said.

    Klufas blames the branding of Hunka as a Nazi on “Russian disinformation,” adding, “the fact that he was a soldier does not mean that he was a Nazi.” He also said there was nothing wrong with Parliament applauding a man “who fought for his country.” However, he conceded that it “maybe wasn’t correct” in the circumstances, given that the people there didn’t fully understand the issue.

    what-the-hell

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Klufas blames the branding of Hunka as a Nazi on “Russian disinformation,” adding, “the fact that he was a soldier does not mean that he was a Nazi.” He also said there was nothing wrong with Parliament applauding a man “who fought for his country.”

      Can we applaud Russian soldiers then?

      • JuneFall [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        the fact that he was a soldier does not mean that he was a Nazi

        WTF. This is trying to apply the clean Wehrmacht myth on Waffen-SS volunteers. That the professor is saying only members of the NSDAP were Nazis is something that would be crossed out as wrong due to reduction in any homework you have to write at school or uni over here.

      • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Everything that is politically inconvenient for our ruling hegemony in this moment is Russian disinformation at worst, Soros funded as a middle ground, and Chinese propaganda at best. You don’t even have to justify or prove it. Just claim it and it becomes as real as the ground under your feet.

    • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Normal response: “The SS guy who slaughtered poles was a Nazi.”

      Liberal response: “well, ackshually, we have to first consider Plato’s dialogues. For example,”

        • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Yep. And not just the GOP and their tiki-torch-weilding fans, either. The fascism is fucking deeply rooted in U.S. politics, and always has been.

          ecological and economic catastrophes in the future that liberalism is wholly unsuited to deal with…they’re getting everybody else ready intellectually and emotionally for why that’s gonna be okay when it happens why they’re not really people…when we’re putting all this money into more walls and drones and bombs and guns to keep them away and so that we can watch them die with clear conscience

          This is what liberals (Democrats in particular) really mean when they say they want to “treat climate change like a national security issue”. People are suckered into thinking it just means they are going to take it seriously and prioritize it. No. It’s the same sense in which they have always used the term “national security”. It literally means they are going to crack down harder on immigration, make sure that capitalist enterprises close to the security state profit like crazy (e.g. securing them the Arctic trade routes), shoot “looters” when they are just trying to survive after climate disasters, crack down on the climate movement as it demands systemic change, etc. Aviva Chomsky did a really good talk a couple years ago about immigration and went into this very clearly.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Could you imagine this treatment for ISIS? “Well, he volunteered to join ISIS but we don’t know if he specifically did any crimes and you could see why am Iraqi would join ISIS to fight against Americam occupation. Anyway, ISIS beheaded a ton of people lol.”

    • Vncredleader [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      This shit is why liberal inteligencia are a disease. They serve the purpose of defending fascism. No western academia is free of this shit. I know this is Canada and not the EU, but this is why the entire “progressive” smiling liberals and socdems are so fucking evil. They are the moderate wing of fascism STILL

  • GarfieldYaoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    I hate how in the 21st century, nazism has become so popular that if you announce to normies that you disagree with nazis, at best you will be lectured on how you’re being a contrarian, and most likely you will be accused of being one of the BAD authoritarians…because you dislike the GOOD authoritarians.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      It is certainly automatic on many parts of, uh, certain websites that you’ll get responses to the effect of “the communists killed way more” and “at least the Nazis didn’t kill their own people”.

  • Vncredleader [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    created by

    Gotta make it as passive as possible. Makes it sound like Volkswagon today and not something that was at that moment created with the clean purpose of recruiting fascists