Justin Trudeau’s government sees fascists everywhere, except when one is standing right under their nose. That’s the brilliant if bleak irony of the Canadian parliament’s standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old veteran of the Ukrainian military who, it turns out, fought under the Nazis in the Second World War.
It was an extraordinary sight, surely unprecedented in the modern West. At the behest of the House Speaker, Anthony Rota, MPs rose to their feet and gave rousing applause to an old bloke who once fought on the same side as Hitler. It occurred following an address to the parliament by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He clapped too.
Trudeau himself, the most right-on man in Christendom, ostentatious loather of the far right (which is basically anyone who disagrees with him), applauded with vim for this former associate of the SS.
This is the same Trudeau who fantasises that Nazism lurks everywhere. Who gleefully brands his critics as ‘far right’. Who has damned everyone from parents worried about LGBTQ education to truckers concerned about vaccine mandates as footsoldiers of a 1930s-style populism.
Indeed, just a few months ago he sneered at the ‘far-right political actors’ who are trying to ‘outdo themselves with the types of cruelty and isolation they can inflict on already vulnerable people’.
MPs rose to their feet and gave rousing applause to an old bloke who once fought on the same side as Hitler
Read the article by Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator.