the New York Times recently reported that Washington is listing Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland as its “favourite candidate” to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as NATO Secretary General when the Norwegian’s term expires in September 2023.
Freeland is being backed by US imperialism to lead the aggressive military alliance because she is a warmonger with far-reaching personal and political ties to Ukrainian fascism, which has become a key figure in the Western powers’ predatory war against Russia.
Choosing the next leader of the US-led alliance is viewed as a crucial issue in Washington and European capitals. The next Secretary-General will oversee some 300,000 NATO “high-standby” personnel in Europe. It will therefore play a crucial role in the continuation of the war by the imperialist powers to subjugate Russia to semi-colony status and take control of its natural resources.
In his article of November 4th the Times In typical fashion for a newspaper that has falsely promoted every American war of aggression for the past three decades, Freeland’s personal and political ties to far-right and openly fascist forces have been shamelessly concealed.
After Freeland was present in Kyiv in 2014 to “celebrate” the fascist-led coup that toppled pro-Russian President-elect Viktor Yanukovych, the Times notes: “[His]Ukrainian grandfather, a grateful immigrant to Canada, was involved when he was younger in a Ukrainian nationalist movement that saw the Nazis as useful allies in the fight against the Soviets.”
Contrasting with this innocuous description of Freeland’s grandfather as a misguided young man is the fact that Mykhailo Chomiak was a high-ranking Nazi collaborator. From early 1940 to early 1945 he was editor of the only Ukrainian-language newspaper authorized to appear in Nazi-occupied Poland.
the Krakivsky Visti (News from Kraków), produced on a press stolen from a Jew dying in a Nazi death camp, published a steady stream of anti-Semitic and anti-Polish racist nonsense, regularly touted Adolf Hitler as the leader of a new Europe and an ally of Ukraine, and sat actively engaged in recruiting members for the 14th Waffen SS Division, known as the Galicia Division. The Galicia Division was involved in horrific massacres of Jews and Poles in 1943 and 1944.
Chomiak was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which worked closely with the Nazis, was involved in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, and was implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews during the Holocaust. The OUN was an explicitly fascist organization whose goal was the creation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.
The faction Chomiak belonged to, the OUN Melnyk (M), served the Nazi occupiers directly by being incorporated into the administrative and security apparatus of the General Government (Nazi-occupied Poland). The other faction led by Stepan Bandera, the OUN(B), focused on integrating its armed forces into the military and claimed to be more “independent” of the Nazis. Indeed, the activities of both factions and their quest to create an “independent” Ukrainian state depended entirely on the patronage of Nazi German imperialism.
After the fall of the Third Reich, Chomiak found refuge with thousands of other Nazi collaborators in Canada and the United States. Former members of the fascist OUN were among the first recruits of the newly created CIA, which was mainly concerned with recruiting Cold War “anti-communist” forces.
Canada emerged as a key player in enabling Hitler’s accomplices to whitewash their history and write a new narrative of Ukrainian nationalism fighting simultaneously for the “liberation” of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Ottawa not only allowed tens of thousands of former SS members and other Nazi collaborators to settle in Canada, but also provided financial support for an ideological campaign to legitimize far-right Ukrainian nationalism, including promoting the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress and founding the Canadian Institute in Ukrainian Studies from the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
The state intervened to help OUN-affiliated far-right forces seize control of properties and other assets belonging to groups representing the Ukrainian diaspora, which before World War II had been bastions of socialism and left-wing politics. (This story is covered at length in the WSWS series entitled The Fascist Friends of Canadian Imperialism).
Freeland comes from that background. After working as a student on the so-called “Encyclopedia of Ukraine,” a project aimed at disguising Ukrainian nationalists’ active support for Hitler and the Nazis and headed by Krakivski Visti editor Volodymyr Kubiyovych, Freeland traveled to she had been trained there in Soviet Ukraine in the late 1980s to foment far-right Ukrainian nationalism.
In the years that followed, the Canadian state facilitated the return to Ukraine of large numbers of exiles and their descendants associated with far-right nationalist groups, many of whom became important figures in the establishment of an independent capitalist Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinists. Halyna Chomiak, Freeland’s mother, returned to Ukraine to establish the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, which helped draft the country’s constitution.
The most significant import these elements brought back to Ukraine was a virulent strain of far-right nationalism. As Freeland noted in a 2015 essay entitled “My Ukraine, Putin’s Big Lie”, “Ukraine’s national consciousness was weak. The Canadian state, supported by a politically influential Ukrainian-Canadian Congress, was instrumental in reviving the Stepan Bandera cult in the years that followed. As a result, dozens of statues and other monuments of the fascist leader appeared all over western Ukraine.
This story goes a long way to explaining why Freeland secured such a vital position in the preparation and conduct of Canadian imperialism’s US-led war against Russia. After the 2014 fascist-led Maidan coup brought a pro-Western regime to power in Kyiv and prompted Russia to annex Crimea in response, Washington and Ottawa took the lead in reorganizing Ukraine’s armed forces.
They oversaw the integration into their ranks of fascist militias such as the notorious Azov regiment. Canadian troops on a military training mission in Ukraine briefed members of Azov and Centuria, an elite group of fascist officers. Canada simultaneously participated in the massive deployment of NATO forces on Russia’s western border and led one of its front battalions into Latvia. The deployment of similar battalions in Estonia, Lithuania and Poland continued the aggressive eastward march of the military alliance aimed at encircling Russia. March began the day after the Stalinists restored capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Freeland served most of the time as Secretary of State before being promoted to Deputy Prime Minister and Treasury Secretary by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after the 2019 federal election. The United States and its NATO allies managed to push Putin into his reactionary invasion of Ukraine in February Freeland has emerged as a leading voice for ruthless economic sanctions, including Russia’s withdrawal from the global payments network SWIFT. She also served as a key interlocutor between Ukraine’s government and its imperialist masters, boasting earlier this year of holding daily talks with Ukraine’s prime minister and finance minister.
The fact that Freeland is now being traded for the highest post in NATO underscores the predatory nature of the imperialist war waged by the United States and NATO against Russia. Far from defending Ukraine’s “sovereignty” and “democracy” since publications like the TimesWestern powers’ intervention aims to plunder Russia’s rich natural resources and seize control of a geostrategically crucial Eurasian landmass.
These goals require the use of ruthless military force abroad, threatening the world with a nuclear conflagration, and equally brutal methods of state repression at home to crush popular resistance to the subordination of society’s resources to imperialist war and conquest. For this reason, the imperialists have maintained close ties with the fascist forces.
The Political Use of Freeland for the Times and its predominantly bourgeois readership, which is an integral part of supporting imperialist war, is that it combines strong ties to Ukrainian fascism with the right dose of identity politics.
For these strata of society, Ms Freeland’s ability to become “NATO’s first female Secretary General” is far more important than a self-confessed warmonger and far-right Ukrainian nationalist who counts a prominent Nazi collaborator among her heroes. When Freeland was confronted with her grandfather’s past as a Nazi collaborator in 2017, she dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.” She repeatedly credited Chomiak for teaching her about Ukrainian culture and nationalism.
When she was Canada’s foreign minister, Freeland said Ottawa pursued a “feminist foreign policy” when she sent troops to Latvia, trained neo-Nazis in Ukraine and participated in “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea. In 2017, she announced a more than 70 percent increase in military spending in a decade and delivered a keynote speech on Canada’s new defense strategy, citing both Russia and China as “threats” to national security.
Freeland also has close ties to the labor bureaucracy, which Canada’s Liberal government sees as a key partner in enforcing austerity measures to pay for the war and quell class struggle. Since the outbreak of war, Freeland has been invited to speak at several labor conventions, including the Teamsters conference in June 2022.
Freeland’s appointment to NATO’s top post is by no means guaranteed. Since its inception in 1949, the Alliance has traditionally been led by a European, while an American general normally holds the post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
The prospect of a Canadian and an American filling the top two positions in NATO would no doubt raise eyebrows among European imperialists, particularly in a context where Germany has used the war to reinvigorate its ambitions as a major world power . Geopolitical tensions aside, warmongers in Washington, Ottawa, Berlin and Brussels could hardly find a more politically appropriate figure than Chrystia Freeland to spearhead their military alliance of death and destruction.
(Article published in English on 09 November 2022)
Total web buff. Student. Tv enthusiast. Evil thinker. Travelaholic. Proud bacon guru.
