The following speech was delivered by Keith Jones, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada), at the May 1, 2024 International Web Convention, held on Saturday, May 4.
There are events that suddenly reveal fundamental truths about a complex social phenomenon hitherto hidden by the mystification and lies of the ruling class. One such event took place on September 22, when the Canadian Parliament and assembled dignitaries, including Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and diplomatic representatives of Canada’s G7 allies, rose in unison to give a standing ovation on Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen SS, aged 98. Yaroslav Hunka.
Facing an international outcry, Canada’s Liberal government and union-backed opposition parties later claimed that their praise of Nazi Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero” and “Canadian hero” was an unfortunate mistake. .
What a despicable fraud!
The mobilization of the political descendants of the Ukrainian fascists, who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust and their war of extermination against the Soviet Union, has been at the heart of the efforts of the Western imperialist powers to encircle and subjugate Russia.
Ukraine’s far right spearheaded the February 2014 coup orchestrated by Washington and Berlin, with support from Ottawa, to overthrow the country’s democratically elected pro-Russian president. Now fully integrated into the Ukrainian military, with the help of Canadian Armed Forces trainers, the Azov Battalion and other fascist militias constitute Ukraine’s shock troops in NATO’s war against Russia. Supporters of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) occupy leadership positions within the Zelensky regime and Ukraine’s military security apparatus. They are Washington and Ottawa’s fervent supporters of a war against Russia down to the last Ukrainian.
The promotion of Ukrainian fascists by NATO powers stems from the predatory goals and interests they pursue through the war against Russia. As they did in two world wars of the last century, imperialist powers are waging war to seize strategic resources, markets and territories – trying, vampirically, to reinvigorate themselves through an orgy of death and destruction.
The presentation by the Canadian Parliament of the Nazi war criminal Hunka also testifies to the outsized role that Canadian imperialism played in the political and ideological preparation, outbreak and prosecution of the US-NATO war against Russia.
As World Socialist Website Canadian imperialism has widely documented a more than three-quarter-century alliance with the Ukrainian far right. At the end of the Second World War, Canada provided refuge to tens of thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators – Waffen-SS veterans like Hunka, as well as supporters of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and of his Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
To advance Canada’s foreign policy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and combat powerful left-wing sympathies among the country’s large Ukrainian immigrant population, Ottawa helped Ukrainian fascists whitewash their crimes and propagate Ukrainian nationalism virulent anti-Bolshevik and anti-Russian. In the words of the most famous Ukrainian-Canadian historian, the government-founded and funded Ukrainian-Canadian Congress (UCC) placed the “glorification” of the fascist Bandera and his supporters “at the center of the national identity project Ukrainian”.
Among those who participated in the export of this far-right nationalism aligned with Western imperialism to Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy was Chrystia Freeland. Freeland, himself the grandson of a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, is now Canada’s deputy prime minister and the leading Ukrainian war hawk in Trudeau’s Liberal government.
The events of the past seven months have provided a terrible confirmation of what was revealed in microcosm in the Hunka affair, of the predatory character and violent and barbaric development of Canadian and world imperialism.
The Canadian ruling class fully supports Israel’s genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza. The mass slaughter of civilians with 2,000-pound bombs, the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, the razing of entire neighborhoods, the starvation of the population of Gaza – all of this is justified in the name of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” .
Meanwhile, Ottawa is increasingly embroiled in US imperialism’s global war against Russia and China, and its quest for unbridled domination of the Middle East. Earlier this month, the Trudeau government released a defense policy update announcing tens of billions in additional military spending over the next decade. Canada, it was argued, must have the military capabilities to wage war on every continent and ocean in order to maintain “global stability” and the “international order” imposed by the West. .
The same political establishment that praised Nazi SS veteran Hunka and considers Ukrainian fascists valuable allies denigrates the ongoing mass protests against the genocide in Gaza and against Canada’s complicity in the massacre as anti-Semitic. With increasing audacity, it works to criminalize and oppress them.
This is a continuation of their previous efforts to thwart and prevent any meetings opposing the war in Ukraine initiated by the United States and NATO. Last June, the IYSSE and the SEP organized the first public rally against the war in Ukraine in Canada’s most populous city, Toronto, defying a concerted campaign led by the Ontario Minister of Labor and the Ukrainian Congress far-right Canadian (UCC) supported by the government to censor it.
The greatest fear of the Canadian ruling class, as of its imperialist partners and rivals, is that the growing rise of the working class will be imbued with a true anti-war, that is, socialist and internationalist, perspective.
Workers from all sectors of the economy, including more than half a million Quebec public sector workers, West Coast dock workers, supermarket workers, federal government employees and National Steel Car workers , have stopped working over the past 12 months to oppose the government-backed bill. reduce real wages due to inflation and reverse decades of concessions. Last year alone there were more strikes than the previous six years combined.
This movement – as evidenced by the numerous tentative agreements rejected and approved by unions and the increasingly important role played by rank-and-file committees affiliated with the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, IWA- RFC – is evolving, and can only develop further as a rebellion against the corporatist unions and for the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the struggle for workers’ power.
The role of the state-sponsored union apparatus in the systematic repression of class struggle is illustrated by the alliance between the unions, the NDP and the Liberal government, in their support of the Trudeau government in a two-front war , supplying billions of weapons to Ukraine. and supporting the genocide in Gaza, while labor productivity increases in the country, thanks to austerity and wage cuts.
As the clouds of war gathered in 1934, Trotsky declared that our task was to follow the map of class struggle, not war. Six years later, at the start of the Second World War – a war made inevitable by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s stifling of the revolutionary aspirations of the working class in Spain, France and elsewhere – he declared: “The revolutionary party bases its entire policy on the class consciousness of the workers, while the Comintern is only concerned with contaminating and poisoning this class consciousness. »
As global capitalism in crisis plunges humanity into the abyss, it forces workers and young people around the world to resist. If the working class is to win, this resistance must be raised by understanding that the objective logic of workers’ resistance to war, reaction and social inequality is a global socialist revolution. And it must be armed with revolutionary leadership and a strategy based on the lessons of history. There is no better way to mark May 1, 2024 than to take on this task and join the ICFI.
