New York Times recently reported that Washington was promoting Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, as its “favorite” to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as NATO Secretary General when the Norwegian’s term expires in September 2023.
Freeland is backed by US imperialism to lead the aggressive military alliance because she is a war hawk with extensive personal and political ties to Ukrainian fascism, which has become the central proxy for the Western powers’ predatory war against Russia.
Choosing the next leader of the US-led alliance is seen as a crucial issue in Washington and European capitals. The next Secretary General will oversee around 300,000 NATO “high alert forces” in Europe, and thus become a central part of the implementation of the war of the imperialist powers in order to subject Russia to a semi-alert status. -colonial and take control of the country’s natural resources. Resources.
In typical fashion for the newspaper which has made misleading propaganda for each of America’s wars of aggression for the past three decades, has covered Time unabashedly about Freeland’s personal and political affiliations with far-right and outright fascist forces in his November 4 report.
Noting Freeland’s presence in Kyiv in 2014 to “celebrate” the fascist-led coup that toppled pro-Russian President-elect Viktor Yanukovych, observed Time“His Ukrainian grandfather, a grateful immigrant to Canada, was involved as a youth in a Ukrainian nationalist movement that saw the Nazis as useful partners in strength in opposing the Soviet Union.”
Contrary to this reassuring portrayal of Freeland’s grandfather as a misguided young man, the fact is that Mykhailo Tjsomiak was a high-level Nazi collaborator. From the beginning of 1940 to the first months of 1945, he was editor of the only Ukrainian-language newspaper authorized to be published in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Visit Krakowski (Kraków Nyheter), which was printed on a printing press stolen from a Jew who perished in a Nazi death camp, published a steady stream of racist anti-Semitic and anti-Polish filth, regularly hailing Adolf Hitler as the leader of a new Europe and an ally of Ukraine, and led an active recruiting campaign for the 14th Waffen SS Division, the so-called Galicia Division. This division took part in horrific massacres of Jews and Poles during the years 1943 and 1944.
Chomiak was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated closely with the Nazis, participated in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union and was involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews during the Holocaust. The OUN was an explicitly fascist organization whose goal was to create an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.
The faction to which Tsjomiak belonged, OUN Melnyk (M), served the Nazi occupiers directly by integrating into the administrative and security apparatus of the General Government (Nazi-occupied Poland). The other faction, led by Stepan Bandera, the OUN(B), has focused on incorporating its forces into the military, claiming to act more “independently” of the Nazis. The activities of both factions and their efforts for an “independent” Ukrainian state were in fact entirely conditioned by protection from Nazi German imperialism.
After the fall of the Third Reich, Tsjomiak, along with thousands of Nazi collaborators, found refuge in Canada and the United States. Former members of the fascist organization OUN were among the first recruits of the newly created CIA, which during the Cold War was mainly concerned with recruiting “anti-communist” forces.
Canada became a key player in facilitating the whitewashing of their history by Hitler’s accomplices, writing a new narrative of Ukrainian nationalism fighting for “liberation” simultaneously against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In addition to allowing tens of thousands of former SS members and other Nazi collaborators to settle in Canada, Ottawa provided financial support for an ideological campaign to legitimize far-right Ukrainian nationalism, including by state sponsoring the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the establishment of the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
The state intervened to help far-right forces associated with the OUN take control of property and other assets belonging to groups representing the previously established Ukrainian diaspora, which before World War II had been a stronghold of socialism and left-wing politics. (This story is featured in detail in the WSWS series of articles Fascist Friends of Canadian Imperialism)
Freeland grew up in this environment. After working as a student on the so-called “Ukrainian Encyclopedia”, a project aimed at concealing the active support of Ukrainian nationalists for Hitler and the Nazis, carried out by Krakivski Vistipublisher Volodymyr Kubiyovych, Freeland traveled to Soviet Ukraine in the late 1980s to ignite the far-right Ukrainian nationalism in which she had been schooled.
In subsequent years, the Canadian state facilitated the return to Ukraine of large numbers of exiles and their descendants with ties to far-right nationalist groups, many of whom became prominent figures in the establishment of an independent capitalist Ukraine after the arrival of the Stalinists. dissolution of the Soviet Union. Halyna Tshomiak, Freeland’s mother, returned to Ukraine to establish the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, which helped draft the country’s constitution.
The most important import these forces brought back to Ukraine was a virulent branch of far-right nationalism. As Freeland observed in a 2015 essay titled “My Ukraine, Putin’s Big Lie”: “The national consciousness of Ukraine was weak.” The Canadian state, backed by the politically influential Ukrainian Canadian Congress, made significant contributions in subsequent years to the revival of the cult of Stepan Bandera, with the result that dozens of statues and other memorials to the leader fascist have sprung up across the country. western Ukraine.
This story goes a long way to explaining why Freeland secured such a prominent position in the preparations for Canadian imperialism and in the implementation of the US-led war against Russia. After the fascist Maidan coup in 2014 brought a pro-Western regime to power in Kyiv, prompting Russia to annex Crimea in response, Washington and Ottawa took the initiative to reorganize the armed forces Ukrainians.
They oversaw the integration of fascist militias, such as the infamous Azov Battalion, into their ranks. Canadian troops involved in a military training mission in Ukraine instructed members of Azov and Centuria, an elite group of fascist Ukrainian army officers. At the same time, Canada joined the massive deployment of NATO military forces along Russia’s western border, leading one of the alliance’s forward battalions in Latvia. The deployment of corresponding battalions in Estonia, Lithuania and Poland continued the aggressive eastward march of the military alliance, with the aim of encircling Russia, which began following the Stalinist restoration of capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Freeland served as Minister of Foreign Affairs for much of that time, before being promoted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance following the 2019 federal election. When the United States and their NATO allies successfully enticed Putin into his reactionary invasion of Ukraine in February, Freeland became a key spokesperson for ruthless economic sanctions, including Russia’s withdrawal from the global payment network SWIFT . She has also acted as a key interlocutor and intermediary for the Ukrainian government and commanders of imperialism, and boasted earlier this year of having daily conversations with Ukraine’s prime minister and finance minister.
The fact that Freeland is now named head of NATO underscores the predatory nature of the imperialist war that the United States and NATO are waging against Russia. So far as Western powers intervene to defend the “sovereignty” and “democracy” of Ukraine, that publications like Time endlessly claims that the conflict is about plundering Russia’s rich natural resources and seizing control of the geostrategically crucial Eurasian landmass.
These goals require the deployment of ruthless military force abroad, threatening the world with a nuclear storm, and no less brutal methods of state repression at home to crush popular resistance to the subordination of societal resources. to imperialist war and conquest. This is why the imperialists have cultivated intimate attachments to the fascist forces.
The political utility of Freeland and its applicability to Time and the paper’s predominantly middle-class readership that forms a central support base for imperialist warfare is that it combines its close ties to Ukrainian fascism with the necessary dose of identity politics.
For these social strata, Freeland becoming “NATO’s first female Secretary General” is far more important than being an avowed war hawk and far-right Ukrainian nationalist, who describes a prominent Nazi collaborator as the one of his heroes. . Confronted in 2017 with his grandfather’s dossier as a Nazi collaborator, Freeland called it “Russian disinformation”. She repeatedly praised her paternal grandfather Chomiak for teaching her Ukrainian culture and nationalism.
During her tenure as Canada’s foreign minister, Freeland proclaimed that Ottawa was pursuing a “feminist foreign policy” by deploying troops to Latvia, training neo-Nazis in Ukraine and participating in naval “freedom of navigation” exercises. in the South China Sea. In 2017, Freeland announced an increase in Canada’s military spending of more than 70% over a decade and gave a keynote speech on the country’s new defense strategy that called Russia and China “threats” to national security. .
Freeland also has close ties to the labor bureaucracy, which Canada’s Liberal government sees as a key partner in imposing austerity to pay for war and suppress class struggle. Since the war broke out, Freeland has been invited to speak at several union annual meetings, including the 2022 Teamsters annual meeting in June.
Freeland’s appointment to NATO’s top job is by no means guaranteed. Since the formation of the alliance in 1949, it has traditionally been led by a European, while an American general usually holds the post of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
The prospect of a Canadian and an American occupying the top two places in NATO will undoubtedly raise eyebrows among European imperialists, especially under conditions where Germany has resorted to war to rekindle its ambitions to global superpower. Beyond these geopolitical tensions, warmongers in Washington, Ottawa, Berlin and Brussels could hardly find a more politically relevant figure to lead their military alliance of death and destruction than Chrystia Freeland.
