The mainstream Left manages to find Nazis everywhere.
Some claimed Donald Trump was a Nazi. Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s office slammed ‘Nazi’ Republicans this week. Someone even accused former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan of being a Nazi once.
To be clear: Being a Nazi is bad.
Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and that country’s Parliament honored 98-year-old Yaroslov Hunka for being a Ukrainian who fought against the Russians in World War II.
It was soon discovered that Hunka fought against the Russians as a Waffen SS Nazi soldier, which he volunteered for and swore an oath to Adolf Hitler. In his 2011 memoir, Hunka also ignored the mass slaughter of Jews.
So, yeah, he’s a straight up legit Nazi.
After this was learned, Trudeau immediately apologized and the Speaker for Canada’s Parliament, who had previously called Hunka a “hero,” resigned.
The consensus was immediate: Nazis are bad. No one disagreed. Canada accidentally praised one. This was cut and dry. No room for debate, a deeper discussion or reconsideration. Canadian officials appeared deeply embarrassed and were likely eager to move on.
Now, Politico: ‘Not so fast!’
On Monday, the news outlet published an op-ed by author Keir Giles with the curious title, ‘Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi,’ in which he writes (bold font compliments of Matt Taibbi):
This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.
Um… what?
Is Giles excusing this whole episode in Canada, that those responsible rightly apologized for, by saying Nazis were… complicated? That we should all be more… I don’t know… understanding?
About Nazis?!? Is this really how far some are willing to go to defend Canada’s political establishment?
It appears so. Taibbi asked if this bizarre offering from Politico was ‘The worst op-ed in history?’ Having reaction similar to my own – how in the hell is Politico going there – Taibbi observed, “We’ve reached the chapter in God’s novel where the dull, received-wisdom format of the Western op-ed is being deployed to argue National Socialism wasn’t all bad.”
So there you have it: Donald Trump, Republicans, Paul Ryan, all possible Nazis with no defenses offered or expected by Politico or similar center-left outlets.
But actual, verified and acknowledged Waffen SS Nazi soldier, Yaroslav Hunka? We shouldn’t rush to judgment.
Leave it to the political and media establishment to add an asterisk to the old consensus that ‘Nazis are bad*’ in defense of their own class.
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