Last month, the Canadian parliament embarrassed itself during an official visit by Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky when the entire legislative body gave a standing ovation to a veteran of the Waffen SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi movement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later apologized for incident. 

To understand what happened, it’s important to realize that Canada, like other Western nations, has a long history of sheltering Nazi war criminals. This was not a matter of negligence but official policy. During the Cold War, these hardened Nazi criminals were seen as valuable allies against the Soviet Union. This policy is all the more shameful because during World War II, the vast majority of Ukrainians who took up arms did so in the Red Army against Nazism.

Lev Golinkin, a Ukrainian-American reporter, has been doing excellent work for The Forward and The Nation bringing this shameful history to light. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I sat down with Lev to talk about the long history of Canada’s hospitality to Nazi war criminals. In the podcast, he references this enlightening video.

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