While hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on 22 September 2023, the Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons honoured the presence in the gallery of a 98 year-old “Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians.”
Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of history should have immediately recognised that any Ukrainian fighting against “the Russians”—our ally—in WWII must have been fighting for the Nazis.
Instead, the entire audience present in the Canadian Parliament, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Zelensky, leapt to their feet and gave a standing ovation to the beaming veteran of the Nazi Waffen SS 14th Galicia Division, which massacred Jews, Poles and Russians in the war.
This is now a huge scandal in Canada, with Trudeau disclaiming any knowledge and deflecting the blame entirely on the Speaker, who has taken the fall.
But Australia has the same problem, which nobody in Parliament or the media is talking about.
In supporting Ukraine with close to $1 billion since February 2022, the Morrison and now Albanese governments have, like Trudeau, also promoted outright Nazis in Australia.
On 23 February 2022, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said at the press conference: “My first thoughts are for all of the people of Ukraine, and for those many 38,000 Australians of Ukrainian descent who are here. I spoke to Stefan Romaniw, who heads up the Ukrainian community here in Australia….” In March 2022, Morrison gave a $450,000 grant to Romaniw’s Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations (AFUO) as support for their efforts to settle Ukrainian refugees.
Anthony Albanese has also met with Romaniw. As Opposition Leader on 14 February 2022, Albanese said in Parliament: “Last Friday I met with the chairman of the [AFUO], Stefan Romaniw, and other Ukrainian community leaders in Melbourne. I indicated to them Labor's clear position of solidarity with the people of the Ukraine and our absolute rejection of any Russian military action that violates Ukraine's sovereignty and independence.”
Liberal Senator James Paterson invited the AFUO to testify to his Senate inquiry into foreign interference through social media.
So who are Stefan Romaniw and the AFUO? Ask other Ukrainians in Australia, such as the Australian Ukrainian Congress, and they will tell you bluntly—they are Nazis.
Stefan Romaniw (pronounced Ro-MAAN-yiv) was for 13 years (2009-22) the worldwide Chairman of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B), which was founded in WWII by Ukraine’s most famous Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Despite efforts in recent times to whitewash OUN-B and its military wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as freedom fighters against the Soviets and Germans, there is no denying Bandera and OUN-B were often collaborators with the Nazis, including in notorious massacres of Jews, Poles, fellow Ukrainians, and Russians. Since 2014, the Israeli government has regularly complained to Ukraine about its increasing veneration of Nazi-collaborator Bandera.
One of the member organisations of Romaniw’s AFUO named on its website is the Brotherhood of Ex-Servicemen in Australia; the Ukrainian version of the name on the website, however, is the Brotherhood of the 1st Division of the UNA, meaning the Ukrainian National Army.
The UNA comprised the very same Nazi Waffen SS 14th Galicia Division which included the Nazi veteran applauded in the Canadian Parliament.
Australian Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick said: “The obsessive hatred of Russia that dominates our geopolitical analysis is now allowing real Nazis to walk openly among us.
“Whatever happened to ‘never again’?
“It is unacceptable that Australian taxpayers’ money has gone to an organisation chaired by a Nazi apologist, and which represents Nazi veterans of WWII, and that Ukrainian Australians who are trying to expose these Nazis are being ignored by politicians and the media.”
Dark history
Attempts to incite hatred of Russia and rehabilitate Nazis started immediately after WWII, even though the Soviet Union was our ally in WWII which suffered the greatest loss of life—27 million people—in defeating the Nazi war machine.
The architects of the Cold War—such as Winston Churchill, who wanted to immediately launch an attack on the Soviet Union at the end of the war; US President Harry Truman’s administration, including the Dulles brothers who set up the CIA; and politicians involved in anti-communist witch hunts in the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and later Senator Joe McCarthy’s committee—deliberately incited Russia hatred to consolidate their agenda, which included the creation of the military-industrial complex that US President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned against.
(The only US President to stand against this obsessive Russia hatred was John F. Kennedy Jr, who gave an historic speech in June 1963 crediting the Soviets with defeating the Nazis and winning WWII, and calling on his fellow Americans to try to understand their Soviet adversaries by looking at the world through their eyes.)
In the post-Cold War era, when there was an opportunity to consolidate peace, British and American neoconservatives instead pushed the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders, against the warnings of many experts, including former Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating, that it would lead to war, as it has.
To cover their role in provoking war, the Anglo-Americans and their Five Eyes minions including Canada and Australia have ramped up Russia hatred to extreme levels.
Nobody in the USA, UK, Australia etc. has ever been held to account for fabricating lies to invade Iraq and kill a million people, or repeating the crime in Libya in 2011 which Libyans are still dying from today, and the only person in jail in relation to those crimes is Julian Assange, the man who exposed them.
Yet British, American, Canadian and Australian politicians all hypocritically parrot the same talking points about Russia’s “illegal, immoral, unprovoked” invasion and promote actual Nazis as the good guys.
“By picking a side in this war, we’ve picked the Nazi side, which always was, and always will be, the wrong side”, Barwick said.
Click here to watch Robert Barwick and Richard Bardon discuss this scandal in detail on the 28 September Citizens Report, “Trudeau’s great Nazi whitewash unravels—is Albanese’s next?”