By Dave McKee
The federal government looks set to answer for yet another Nazi scandal, this time involving the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism.”
Just a year after the House of Commons gave a Nazi war criminal a standing ovation, the Department of Heritage has been notified that of the 550 names engraved on its anti-communist monument, 330 were members of fascist organizations or were collaborators with Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War 2.
According to the Ottawa Citizen, which obtained a copy of the report to Heritage, many of the fascists on the memorial had committed war crimes in countries occupied by Nazi forces.
Initiated by the Stephen Harper Conservatives – stalwart defenders of human rights, unless you are Libyan, or Syrian, or Haitian, or Palestinian, or Indigenous – the monument project has received letters of support from all the parties in Parliament, including the NDP and Greens, and the Liberals continued with the project after they were elected in 2015.
Forgetting that Fidel Castro was an honorary pall bearer at his father’s funeral, Justin Trudeau committed an estimated $7.5 million in public money to this edifice honouring “victims” of the same politics to which Fidel ascribed and which provided tiny Cuba with social gains that still – after six decades of US blockade – set a global standard.
Nice to know that Ottawa decided to not fund First Nations child welfare, but chose instead to (literally) chisel the names of over 300 Nazi collaborators and war criminals into our collective heritage.
The idea that Nazi scandals might become an annual event might be shocking to some, but we shouldn’t really be surprised.
After all, the Canadian government has a decades-old tactic of recruiting radically anti-labour and anti-communist immigrants, with the purpose of dividing and weakening progressive social and political movements here.
After World War 2, an estimated 2000 Nazis and fascist collaborators were encouraged to immigrate to Canada. Many of them were then deliberately planted in workplaces that had militant, left-wing unions, as part of state strategy to purge communists and other radicals from the labour movement.
That is just one example of many, in which the Canadian government and fascist groups have cooperated in their effort to promote anti-communism and, in the process, weaken the working-class movement. Along the way, the history of these fascist collaborators and the crimes they committed were neatly wiped away from the public record for decades.
It should also come as no surprise that recent governments have resurrected this tactic. As social and economic conditions worsen for working people – a systemic outcome of the sharpening contradictions within capitalism – unrest, militancy and political radicalism are on the rise. At the same time, the geopolitical balance of forces is changing, with Western imperialism losing ground relative to other countries including Russia and China.
If you’re a member of the ruling class, with everything to lose, moments like this are hardly the time for liberal altruism. Instead, the high planners of capital reach into their toolkit for something to beat the working class back with. And the biggest club of all is fascism.
No single current situation proves this more than the ongoing, unquestioning support that Canada and its Western allies have given to the far-right government in Ukraine, from the time of the fascist-supported Maidan coup to the current efforts to train and arm openly fascist militias like the Azov battalion and ensure their full integration into the Ukrainian government and state.
If any good can come from this latest outrage, it is that the full history of fascist collaborators in Canada is exposed. This includes a complete accounting of fascists who have been recruited to Canada, how the government and ruling class worked with them to undermine the working-class movement here, and what connections continue to exist.
Otherwise, we might as well all prepare for next year’s Nazi scandal.
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