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New broadcast by Chris Cook with John Helmer, Victoria, B.C., Canada

Click to listen   

Interview starts at Minute 37:15:

“Leave aside the ideology, leave aside the issues, leave aside the big policy politics: there’s one thing you don’t do when you make a foreign minister your country’s representative – you don’t put a liar in the job.”

For the current state of the Russia-Canada relationship, click to open. And for Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland’s Galician history and war record, click

The history of the Galician hijacking of the history of Ukraine from Jews, Poles and Russians can be read in the academic publications of John-Paul Himka, now retired from the post of professor of Ukrainian history at the University of Alberta. Follow his research on the role Freeland’s grandfather, Michael Chomiak’s newspaper played in the destruction of the Galician Jews here.  Chomiak’s records in Alberta were the principal source.  Freeland, according to Himka,  read the manuscript in advance “pointing out problems and and suggesting improvements.” As printed in his newspaper Krakivtsi Visti (“Cracow News”), Grandfather Chomiak’s idea, with German support, was to liquidate the Jews and Poles and cleanse Galicia on both sides of the Polish-Ukrainian frontier in the west.  Granddaughter Freeland’s idea is to cleanse the Russians from the east.

In remembering and retelling the story of what happened,  Himka (right) concludes in another paper, there is “a blank spot in the collective memory of the  Ukrainian diaspora”, and a “double standard in discussing war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Ukrainians as opposed to those perpetrated against Ukrainians. Memoirs and eyewitness accounts, for example, are considered untrustworthy evidence for the former, but trustworthy for the latter; that is, Jewish or Polish first-hand accounts of Ukrainian war crimes are dismissed as biased, while an important Ukrainian victimization narrative, the famine of 1932-33, has relied primarily on just such eyewitness accounts.”

In Himka’s narrative of what Chomiak’s Galician readers, associates and friends did in Lviv in 1942, one of the results was the confiscation of the newspaper, printing plant and other assets of the newspaper which Chomiak took over from the Jewish publisher, Moshe Kanfer. He was forced to flee to the Jewish ghetto at Lviv, and then transported to his death at the Belzec concentration camp; for details, read this. The consequence was Chomiak’s enrichment.  (Minute 22:15).

The next year, on February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister,   gave his Berlin sports palace speech calling for “total war”, “confidence in the Führer more passionate, more unshakable than ever”, and all “the men and materials need[ed] to give Bolshevism its mortal blow”.  Russians and Jews were the same target. According to Goebbels, “the goal of Bolshevism is Jewish world revolution. They want to bring chaos to the Reich and Europe, using the resulting hopelessness and desperation to establish their international, Bolshevist-concealed capitalist tyranny.” Against them and that, Germany “intends to take the most radical measures, if necessary, in good time.”

Chomiak not only ran the Cracow newspaper. For Emil Gassner’s media department of the German administration, Chomiak also ran a weekly for Chelm, 350 kilometres to the east on the Ukrainian frontier. Here is Chomiak’s endorsement of Goebbels’ speech and his repetition of the death sentence for Russians and Jews.  

In 1939 about half of the Chelm population of 30,000 was Jewish. By the time Chomiak left for Vienna, there were none.  Cracow’s Jewish population was 70,000, one-quarter of the city, in November 1939. By the end of the war in May 1945, 4,282 were found to have survived.

Gorilla Radio is broadcast weekly by Chris Cook on CFUV 101.9 FM from the University of Victoria, British Columbia. The radio station can be heard here. The Gorilla Radio transcripts are also published by the Pacific Free Press. For Chris Cook’s broadcast archive, click to open

 

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