On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Lev Golinkin on the Cold War origins of the celebration of the Waffen SS.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the House of Commons in Ottawa, Canada, on September 22, 2023.(Sean Kirkpatrick / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)
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Last month, the Canadian parliament embarrassed itself during an official visit by Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky when the entire legislative body gave a standing ovation to a veteran of the Waffen SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi movement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later apologized for incident.
To understand what happened, it’s important to realize that Canada, like other Western nations, has a long history of sheltering Nazi war criminals. This was not a matter of negligence but official policy. During the Cold War, these hardened Nazi criminals were seen as valuable allies against the Soviet Union. This policy is all the more shameful because during World War II, the vast majority of Ukrainians who took up arms did so in the Red Army against Nazism.
Lev Golinkin, a Ukrainian-American reporter, has been doing excellent work for The Forward and The Nation bringing this shameful history to light. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I sat down with Lev to talk about the long history of Canada’s hospitality to Nazi war criminals. In the podcast, he references this enlightening video.
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Last month, the Canadian Parliament embarrassed itself during an official visit by Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky when the entire legislative body gave a standing ovation to a veteran of the Waffen SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi movement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later apologized for the incident.
To understand what happened, it’s important to realize that Canada, like other Western nations, has a long history of sheltering Nazi war criminals. This was not a matter of negligence but official policy. During the Cold War, these hardened Nazi criminals were seen as valuable allies against the Soviet Union. This policy is all the more shameful because during World War II, the vast majority of Ukrainians who took up arms did so in the Red Army against Nazism.
Lev Golinkin, a Ukrainian-American reporter, has been doing excellent work for The Forward and The Nation bringing this shameful history to light. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I sat down with Lev to talk about the long history of Canada’s hospitality to Nazi war criminals. In the podcast, he references this enlightening video.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen our skies engulfed in dystopian haze. We’ve had lethal heat waves ruin our Fourth of July cookouts. States have announced emergency water rationing due to record-breaking droughts. Tens of thousands of Europeans have been killed by extreme heat so far this summer; hundreds of thousands are being evacuated by apocalyptic wildfires. And we know it’s just the beginning—this is, after all, not just the hottest summer of our lives, but the coolest summer for the rest of our lives.
This didn’t just happen. Climate change is overwhelmingly the result of pollution and deception from specific Big Oil companies that were predicting decades ago that their fossil fuels would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would create “more violent weather” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Even as they used this knowledge to protect their own infrastructure, they orchestrated fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to lock us into the disasters we are currently experiencing.
But we’re not powerless in the face of these nightmares. We can take on Big Oil, and the fossil-fueled authoritarianism that these corporations have done so much to engender. And there are few people with more experience in these fights than Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media. He joined us for a great conversation about making polluters pay, the ways clean energy developments have totally transformed the climate fight, and how to balance hope and fear in the midsts of climate chaos.
Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation.
Intro song and music by Horse Radish.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.