It’s the town where Yaroslav Hunka lives after he left the  British prisoner of war camp where he and other Ukrainian soldiers of the SS Waffen Grenadier Galician Division were held after the end of fighting in Europe in 1945. North Bay is where his son Martin Hunka was chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering company. By North Bay standards, the Hunka family is better educated and wealthier than most, donating substantial sums of money to the local hospital, universities, and Ukrainian national organisations, and through the Redpath mining company to local politicians.

North Bay is also where the children of these men demonstrate Hitler salutes and Nazi Party slogans on the local high school football field.

This is the model of small-town church-going people of modest but respectable means who share the prevailing ideology of their homeland grandparents who were on the side of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Stepan Bandera in the last world war. The smiles remain the same, the stand-up stiff-arm salutes have changed. The minds remain fixed where they were in their grandparents’ ideology – that was the collective fascism of a century ago.* These people continue to believe that for their liberation, the Russian race should be destroyed – “suffocated” is the state policy term used by Canada’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Joly.

The churches they attend organised a rally for this goal at the North Bay City Hall featuring statements by the two Hunkas; they were St. Andrew’s United, Trinity United, Emmanuel United Church, and Omond  Memorial United Church. “Nothing has changed,” Yaroslav Hunka said at what the churches called a “peace vigil”. “The same enemy. First Stalin was there and now this idiot. But Ukraine is not by itself like it was before. The whole world knows about Ukraine and the whole world supports Ukraine and that is very important.”

Martin Hunka added: “I think the support in Canada, the support around the world has been fantastic. At least now we have friends, whether that is going to translate into anything concrete on the ground, I think it already is.”

This is the town where the first Italian to become Speaker of the House of Commons in Ottawa  ran a business and collected election campaign donations. That’s Anthony Rota, the man who invited the two Hunka men to be guests in the Speaker’s Gallery during the speech of Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky on September 22. Rota and the government’s leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould, arranged for the two Hunka men to be seated in the front row of the gallery next to the leaders of Canada’s military and internal security forces, General Wayne Eyre, the chief of the Defence Staff, and Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Bryan Larkin, protected by two armed bodyguards.

When Rota spoke to introduce Hunka, he had just read from his script that in December 1941, after World War II had begun, the then-British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill appealed  to the House in Ottawa “to rally for continued support of his country at war. It was a defining moment of history, and one that must never be forgotten.” Hunka and the SS Galicians came next on the same page of Rota’s script. “We have here in the Chamber today Ukrainian-Canadians, Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought [for] Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support the troops today, even at his age of ninety-eight [cheering; applause]…. We thank him for all his service, thank you [cheering; applause].”

Rota was making an explicit equivalence in Canadian policy for war against Russia between Zelensky, Churchill, and Hunka. Ideologically, this was also the equivalence between Hunka’s service to the Reich, “and what is at stake — Ukraine’s freedom, but also preservation of the rules-based order which is a fundamental part of the future of the democratic world,” Rota wound up.

Rota didn’t write this 7-minute, multi-page 2,500 word speech by himself. In draft, Rota sent it for review and editing by Joly, the foreign minister; by Gould, in charge of the government’s business in the House; and by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. An Access to Information Act (ATIA)  request for the circulation list of the draft speech and for the other preparations for the Zelensky appearance, including the invitation list for the Speaker’s Gallery,  would provide the evidence. No Canadian reporter or publication has attempted to do this, yet.

Watch the hour-long House ceremony here.

For Canada’s black voters, underrepresented in the House of Commons, Rota also tried to link Zelensky’s and Hunka’s war against Russia to Nelson Mandela’s speech to the Canadian parliament.   

Every member of the House of Commons, General Eyre and Commissioner Larkin, stood and applauded Hunka’s wartime killing of Russians. Twice.

Top: the front row of Canadian officials in the Speaker’s Gallery of the House of Commons:  from left to right, unidentified Canadian official; General Wayne Eyre (red ring), chief of Canada’s Defence Staff; Bryan Larkin, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in charge of “specialized policing services”; unidentified Canadian official; Martin Hunka, retired chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering company of North Bay, Ontario; and his father Yaroslav Hunka  of North Bay (red arrow). The two unidentified men not wearing decorations have been identified by a local source as bodyguards for the two ranking officers between them; the vetting by them of those seated next to them, the Hunkas, and those seated behind them, would have gone into considerable detail of their security files – details now denied by every senior official of the government who were on the House floor applauding. Bottom: https://www.cbc.ca/

Source: https://pdba.georgetown.edu/
This is the House of Commons floor plan of 2005. There have been renovations, seating changes, and rule variations since then. Number 21 in this diagram is the Speaker’s Gallery where Eyre, Larkin, Martin and Yaroslav Hunka and the bodyguards were seated during Zelensky’s speech on September 22. In an attempt to explain how the Speaker’s Gallery was filled, the government organ CBC reported through a former chief of protocol, Roy Norton, that in the standard procedure Joly’s ministry would have been consulted on filling the Speaker’s Gallery guest list. Notwithstanding, Norton claimed the government would have had “zero role in inviting Mr Hunka, or for that matter most of the people who sat in the gallery”. Norton had been a Canadian foreign ministry diplomat for many years, ending up as chief of protocol until 2019. He was out of government before wartime security measures surrounding the Ukrainian president and Canadian general officers took effect.

The  standing, smiling, cheering, hand-clapping display of September 22 in Ottawa was, sociologically and psychologically speaking,¹ the same as German communities of the North Bay-kind and German officials of the House of Commons-type displayed throughout the 1930s and 1940s until they were stopped by the Red Army and silenced by Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. Not that their descendants in North Bay and across Canada have surrendered that German ideology in the seventy-eight years which have elapsed since then. The enthusiasm of the MPs to jump to their feet, shouting and saluting Hunka for killing Russians is evidence plain.

So are the subsequent attempts by the MPs, government ministers, and General Eyre to pin responsibility on Rota and claim ignorance for themselves. Eyre’s spokesman has announced “[the decision to recognize Hunka] was made independently within the Speaker’s office, without the involvement or awareness of people in attendance, including DND/CAF [National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces] members present.” The implication is that the chief of the Defence Staff twice stood to applaud without knowing who or why, and without understanding what Rota had said.

Deputy Prime Minister Freeland’s acute nervousness at concealing her role in celebrating Hunka and the Galician division was visible when she was questioned by a reporter six days after the event, on September 28. Asked whether she supports the reopening of the Deschênes Commission, the Canadian government investigation of war criminals in 1985-86, so that “Canadians can know how many veterans who fought with the Nazis are here in our country,” Freeland fidgeted with her hands for several seconds before evading a direct answer.

“As a government,” she said, “we are going to be very thoughtful about any further steps that need to be taken.”

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland at her press conference on September 28. Source: https://twitter.com/

A new investigation, if it were held and if the Deschênes Commission files on immigrant Ukrainian participants in German war crimes were reopened, would identify the German Army, SS and Nazi career of Freeland’s maternal grandfather, Mikhail Chomiak, who was still wanted for his war crimes in Poland in the 1980s. The first report of Chomiak’s active involvement in the liquidation of the Jewish communities of the Galician region around Lvov, appeared here in January 2017. At the time, Freeland dismissed the evidence as Russian propaganda.

Hunka has identified the British Army and its intelligence units as likely to be holding files on him and other members of the Galician division during their time in British prisoner-of-war camps between 1945 and 1951. According to Hunka, “on the last day of the war, the Galicia Division broke contact with the CHA in Styria, Austria, and surrendered to the British Army. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, I met many guys from different villages of the Berezhany region. I remember that Yaroslav Babuniak, Stepan Kukuruza, Yaroslav Lototskyi, Lev Bahlay, Volodymyr Bilyk, Ostap Sokolskyi, Lev Babiy, Yaroslav Ivakhiv were there from the Berezhany gymnasium. I think it was God’s will that we should go around the world like the tribe of Israel, tell the world about Ukraine, and forty-five years later come to it with help.”

A Canadian government press release claims the British government asked Canada to take Ukrainian POWs like Hunka as immigrants. Hunka himself has not revealed where he met Margaret Edgerton, the English woman he married in 1951, before the two moved to Canada in 1954.

Edgerton’s obituary reveals she was born in Warwickshire, but this does not reveal how she met Hunka “after the Second World War.” Altogether, nine years of British Army, MI6, and MI5 records on Hunka are so far unmentioned in the Canadian and international reporting of his case.

Published in 2011 in Combatant News, a US-based platform for Ukrainian soldiers who had served the Ukrainian National Army (UNA), Hunka titled this statement “My Generation Memoirs.”

During two years of interrogations of Hunka and the other Galician veterans in Italy, the British government prepared some for covert operations against the Soviets in the Ukraine, and resettled others in the UK. “When the 8,500 Ukrainian former soldiers of the Galicia Division were transferred to the UK from Italy in May-June 1947 they were accommodated in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in various parts of the UK, mainly in the agricultural areas of eastern England and southern Scotland. Occasionally the men were moved between camps. In July 1948 the numbers of men in camps at or near various locations were as follows: Hempton (Norfolk) – 1,682 men, Mildenhall (Suffolk) – 1,401, Allington (Lincolnshire) – 1,319, Moorby (Lincolnshire) – 1,264, Botesdale (Suffolk) – 1,010, Dalkeith (Scotland) – 958, Lockerbie (Scotland) – 463, other locations (including hospitals, where invalids were held) – 300. After the men were released from POW status (August-October 1948) and admitted into the European Voluntary Workers (EVW) scheme, the POW camps in which they were being held were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as hostels.”

Another Ukrainian account of British efforts to prevent Hunka and the other Galician veterans from being repatriated to Soviet Ukraine to face war crimes trials is described here. Because Hunka came from Berezhany, in the Ternopil region, the British classified him as a Polish national rather than a Soviet, and this protected him from deportation to his homeland.

That he and his associates may have participated in the killing of between 4,000 and 8,000 Jews in the area between 1941 and 1943 is suggested in this brief timeline. Hunka claims that in 1940 when he was a 15-year old high school student in Berezhany, he was one of six Ukrainians in a class of forty; two were Poles; and “the rest [32] were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they ran away in front of such a civilised Western people as the Germans.”

In 1941, when the killing of the Jews of Berezhany was under way, Hunka has written that “I was just 16 years old, and the next two years [1942-43] were the happiest years of my life. I did not imagine that what I experienced in those two years would give me love for my hometown so much that it would be enough for me for the rest of my life. Little did I know then that dreams of those two years, of the company of charming girls, of cheerfully cheerful friends, of fragrant evenings in the luxurious castle park and passages through the city would help me overcome the troubled times of the following years.”

In 1943, Hunka, then 18 years old, reports that “in two weeks, eighty thousand volunteers volunteered for the division, including many students of the Berezhany gymnasium. None of us asked what our reward would be, what our provision would be, or even what our tomorrow would be. We felt our duty to our native land – and left!” The massacres of several thousand Polish villagers started in the Ternopil region after this mobilisation in 1943, and after the Jews had been wiped out, including all of Hunka’s schoolmates. The most notorious of the Galician division’s attacks was the destruction of the Polish village and inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka in February 1944.

Hunka’s whereabouts as the Galician units moved through his home region killing Poles was almost certainly recorded by British military interrogators when Hunka was in their POW camp in Italy from 1945 to 1947. The British evidence on Hunka would have been passed to the Canadian immigration authorities if they had requested it at the time Hunka applied to leave the UK for Toronto.

The same evidence, and more, was gathered by the Polish authorities in Warsaw, where the Galician division and individual name files are being opened now at the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). Soviet military and security files on Hunka are also available in Moscow.

In January 2017 Galicians vandalized the memorials to the villagers of Huta Pieniacka with Ukrainian national and SS graffiti.  

British government propaganda is reporting the Hunka affair as a debate between elderly Jews and nonagenarian Ukrainians arguing over past and disputed history which Rota, government ministers, General Eyre, and every member of the Canadian parliament knew nothing of until now.  This is also the line taken by Gould whose first tweet to protect Hunka and herself claimed:  “Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided. Exiting the Chamber I walked by the individual and took a photo. As a descendent of Jewish Holocaust survivors I would ask all parliamentarians to stop politicizing an issue troubling to many, myself included.” What Gould meant was that she and the Jewish community do not want Hunka’s past record to upset the current alliance between the Jews and Ukrainians of Canada to prosecute the war against Russia.

The German Foreign Ministry, headed by Annalena Baerbock, the leading promoter in Berlin of race war against Russia, defended the standing salute for Hunka given by Sabine Sparwasser, German ambassador to Canada, who was in the Speaker’s Gallery near Hunka. According to the ministry spokesman, Sebastian Fischer (right), reading from a prepared statement, Sparwasser had no idea what she was standing to applaud. “The true identity of Mr. Hunka, namely that he was a volunteer member of the Waffen-SS, was not known to those present, since his participation had not been announced.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) version of what happened in the past claims “the Galicia Division has been accused of committing war crimes, but its members have never been found guilty in a court of law.” This BBC report makes no reference to Poland or to the Polish massacres at all. It depicts public criticism of Hunka as a Jewish community protest, boosted by Moscow. “While far-right extremism still exists in Ukraine, it is much smaller than what Russian propaganda tries to make people believe…”

Source: https://www.bbc.com/

The Polish government investigation of Hunka has begun since the Hunka affair was publicised.

The mainstream Canadian media are also trying to restrict the public controversy to a debate between Jews and Ukrainians, and direct the ensuing public apologies to the Jewish community. Here, for example, Irwin Сotler, former Canadian justice minister and Liberal Party attorney-general, speaking from Jerusalem, makes the point that in 1948 “it was easier to get into Canada if you were a Nazi than if you were a Jew.” Сotler explained the reason for this was “indifference and inaction by successive Canadian governments. As a result we became a sanctuary for Nazi war criminals and no accountability.”

Сotler was misrepresenting the record. He knows that before the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Anglo-American alliance took the same view as the German Reich that the “Judaeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” put Jews and Russians into the same category for targeting as enemies. After 1945 it took time before the same alliance, including Canada, removed Jews from the war targeting. Russians have remained, however. Сotler is as committed to waging the present war against them as Hunka and everyone else in the Canadian parliament.

Endnote

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

First, is the mRNA vaccine even a vaccine? The World Health Organization (WHO) says,

Vaccines train your immune system to create antibodies, just as it does when it’s exposed to a disease. However, because vaccines contain only killed or weakened forms of germs like viruses or bacteria, they do not cause the disease or put you at risk of its complications.

The mRNA vaccines do not contain “only killed or weakened forms of germs like viruses or bacteria.” Even worse, reports of adverse reactions to the mRNA purported vaccines are on the increase, even causing death. So if the mRNA “vaccine” is not by definition a vaccine, then people opposed to being injected with the experimental mRNA “vaccine” can not truthfully be labeled anti-vaxxers.

Second, even if mRNA “vaccines” were accepted to be vaccines, is it still proper to call vaccine skeptics anti-vaxxers? Is the ad hominem truthful? Assuredly many, if not most, of the people opposed to being jabbed with the mRNA “vaccines” and other experimental vaccines have been willingly vaccinated previously to protect against other infections, among them whooping cough, chicken pox, measles, smallpox, rubella, tetanus, mumps, and perhaps others. Having received so many vaccinations, and having agreed to their children being vaccinated, then how accurate is it to demean these people as anti-vaxxers?

Third, are the vaccine skeptics opposed to others who of their own volition receive vaccines? Vaccine skeptics take action to protect their bodily sovereignty; they do not force others to receive or refuse vaccination. So they are not anti-vaxxers.

Fourth, the vaccines are experimental. On 29 September, Globaldata Healthdcare reported, “Currently, there are over 2,000 COVID-19 clinical trials recruiting patients, with 16% being for vaccines and 84% for therapeutics.” One cannot ethically be mandated to take part in an experiment. Informed consent is required.

Are some people opposed to being vaccinated by any vaccine for COVID-19? Sure, some are. Others are just opposed to having an experimental mRNA “vaccine” injected into their body. They have heard that these mRNA “vaccines” are not genuine vaccines; many would, however, accept a traditional vaccine that has been demonstrated experimentally to be safe and effective. These vaccines tend to be most prominent in China, and their usage in the West would cut into the mega-bucks that western pharmaceutical companies are currently reaping. Yet China has declared its COVID-19 vaccines a global public good and has donated its vaccines to various developing countries.

There are many reasons to doubt the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. Many vaccine skeptics are aware of several physicians and scientists cautioning against taking the vaccines.

Dr Gérard Delépine, an oncologist, orthopedic surgeon, and statistician at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Paris analyzed the pre- and post-vaccine trends for 14 countries and found overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are correlated with new infections and mortality. In other words, the vaccines appear to be killing people who are getting vaccinated, sadly ironic since people became vaccinated so they wouldn’t suffer or die.

There are reports of vaccinations being associated with blood clots causing death, Bells palsy, central nervous system disorders, eye disorders, menstrual irregularities, etc. There are the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports of tens of thousands having died after receiving being vaccinated.

Some people think the dangers of COVID-19 are overhyped. For example, when examining the data for winter-burden all-cause mortality prior to and since the appearance of COVID-19, there has been no significant difference in deaths from previous years.

People are leery of the information surrounding vaccinations. Is there a cover up? For instance, reporting deaths or injury to VAERS after vaccination can get you fired. Corporate/state media have been criticized for censoring medical experts who question the vaccine safety, saying “the COVID jabs are causing the proliferation of toxic spike proteins throughout the vascular systems of injection recipients.”

Given all this, is it any wonder that some people are fearful of the COVID-19 vaccines? And the fear is not limited to the mRNA “vaccines” because vaccine trials are still ongoing, although emergency use authorization had sped up the roll out of vaccines. The vector vaccine Oxford-AstraZeneca usage was stopped in several countries, especially in Europe; in Canada the National Advisory Committee on Immunization recommended provinces stop using AstraZeneca. The vector vaccine Janssen/Johnson & Johnson also received emergency use authorization and it has had its problems. In particular, a pause in its use occurred to “investigate whether the vaccine triggers a rare but serious side effect — the development of diffuse blood clots, even though the few individuals who developed the condition had low platelet levels.”

Are the Establishment’s vaccine experts speaking ex cathedra or are they presenting the scientific evidence to support their stance? Since many of us non-experts are barraged by contradictory information surrounding COVID-19, it is incumbent upon people to do their own research to ascertain the verisimilitude of the reports. Apply open-minded skepticism. Scrutinize the credentials and expertise of the person(s) reporting, but more so the factually accuracy of their pronouncements along with the morality and logic applied thereto. Are the reports in peer-review science journals or tabloid newspapers? More important than the source, however, is the actual information. Ask is the evidence solid, are the facts accurate, is the logic coherent, and are the conclusions proffered credible? And always ask cui bono? Should anyone be profiting exorbitantly from the ill health of other people?

The venerable professor Noam Chomsky spurns the pejorative use of the term anti. Chomsky promotes vaccination, but doesn’t call people resistant to vaccination anti-vaxxers. Nonetheless, he does depict them as people who are “willing to be a danger to the community.”

Another means of demeaning a group is to accuse them of being deniers.

There is a contingent of people who are skeptical that Earth is succumbing to global warming. They are disparaged as climate deniers rather than stating that they are climate skeptics. Some people have provided a serious scientific rationale for their skepticism; others are not so well versed in science but have listened to or read accounts of why people need not fret an imminent and catastrophic climate change.¹

And there is the hot-button issue of abortion. Both sides seek to describe themselves as pro-. On the one hand, those who support the woman’s right to choose whether or not to undergo a procedure to terminate the fetus will label themselves as pro-choice (they will steer clear of describing themselves as pro-abortion). The pro-choice people will argue that it is the woman’s body, and she has sovereignty over her body. On the other hand, those who are against terminating a fetus will label themselves as pro-life (they will not describe themselves as anti-abortion). They seek to protect a nascent life form.

If one applies the rationale of the pro-choice crowd, then they should support the right of vaccine skeptics to enjoy dominion over their body and, if the vaccine skeptics so choose, accept their unwillingness to being jabbed.

The vaccine skeptics, however, are in the minority it seems. This is unsurprising given the government, corporate media nexus that pushes for vaccination. Nonetheless, being in the minority is sometimes the best place to be. In the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out a study into obedience. The subjects were assigned the role of a teacher. They were introduced to a confederate, the learner, who they met outfitted with attached electrodes. During the experiment, the learner would be on the other side of a partition, out of sight of the teacher. The teacher’s job was to give the learner an electric shock each time a mistake was made. The shocks were increased for each mistake, eventually reaching a zone marked danger and finishing in a 450-volt zone marked XXX. An experimenter in a lab coat would prod the teachers to continue administering shocks until the end of the test despite learner hesitancy to shock the obviously distressed learner who was heard moaning, and this prodding continued even after the learner failed to respond. Roughly two-thirds of teachers obeyed the experimenter right through 450 volts. Such is the nature of human obedience — at least, for two-thirds of humans.²

Today, people are not only being encouraged to be vaccinated, but those that resist are being coerced. Nowadays, Milgram’s experiments would encounter difficulty receiving permission from a human research ethics committee; regardless, the audacious and draconian force the Establishment employs against the unvaccinated minority poses a grave ethical scenario.

The state actors say the science supports them, but the data they present is scarce. If the science is that strong, then there is no need to silence doctors, scientists, professors, and intellectuals who have reached different conclusions. Bring the two camps together and present the science, data, and evidence in an open and fair debate that allows people to reach an informed and fact-based conclusion. Otherwise, people who resist vaccination have a reasoned right to their skepticism, and are undeserving of ad hominem directed against them. An information war shouldn’t be mired by invective.

Image credit: Photograph: Jordan Sigler/Alamy

1. To be clear, this writer has noted a definite uptick in heat waves year after year, an increased incidence of storms, reports of glaciers melting, flooding and such events that point to a global warming trend.
2. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.