When Canada decided to create a, "Victims of Communism," monument they were warned that Nazis and Nazi collaborators would end up on the wall.
Call me a cynic, but when one looks at who was most vocal in supporting this edifice, an awful lot of them had Nazi or Nazi collaborator ancestors. (Chrystia Freeland most prominently)
This is not sloppy work, it's malice:
An expert warned Canadian Heritage that names listed for commemoration on the “Victims of Communism” monument in Ottawa could be linked to Nazi collaborators and potential war criminals, a confidential report obtained by The Maple shows.
The 2021 report authored by historian Michael Petrou told the government department they would need to conduct extensive background research on hundreds of the submitted names to ensure against problematic commemorations.
The Maple obtained Petrou’s report through an Access to Information request. Previous informal requests for the report were declined.
The “Victims of Communism” monument was originally a private initiative led by the charity Tribute to Liberty, but it has since been taken over by the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Tribute to Liberty remains an active participant in the project, and was slated to develop as-yet undefined public educational materials for the monument at some point in the future.
A CBC News report in 2021 revealed that the names of wartime Nazi collaborators and assorted fascists had been listed for commemoration on Tribute to Liberty’s website, the names having been submitted to the charity by donors as part of a fundraising drive.
Tribute to Liberty then supplied the list of names to Canadian Heritage in order for them to be commemorated on the monument’s “Wall of Remembrance.”
It is not clear if Tribute to Liberty undertook any kind of independent analysis or assessment of the names provided to them by the donors before turning over the list to Canadian Heritage.
I would be willing to bet heavy odds that Tribute to Liberty was willfully blind here.
To do otherwise would be antithetical to their fundraising. They are selling bricks in a wall, and saying, "No, sorry, we won't sell bricks commemorating Ante Pavelić because he was the head of the Ustaše and was directly responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, and Serbs," is bad for the brick business.
So, what is this all about then?
………
The Maple learned that Canadian Heritage also contacted University of Ottawa historian Jan Grabowski in April 2023 for help in reviewing the commemorative list.
In an interview, Grabowski told The Maple he had heard criticisms and concerns for years “about the monument being a ‘countermeasure’ to the Holocaust Monument, about the need to ‘elevate’ the suffering of the victims of Communism to the level of the Holocaust.”
Scholars refer to this as “Holocaust envy,” Grabowski explained.
Support for the monument came from right-wing nationalist organizations that are mostly active among Canadians of Eastern European backgrounds, he added.
“I also heard about the planned individual commemoration of some very unsavoury characters, some of them linked to mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust.”
At some point, Canada should address its post war support of Nazis.
It should, but it won't.
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