The Devil you know…

In his latest podcast, the excellent Neil Oliver takes aim at the Canadian establishment for its apparent ignorance of history in lionising Jaroslav Hunka, a 98 year-old Ukrainian who served in a Waffen SS unit fighting against the Soviet Union. In doing so, I feel he takes less care than he should to avoid committing his own historical solecisms.

While I have limitless contempt for the odious, oleaginous Trudeau, and while it was obviously idiotically unwise to flaunt a geriatric veteran of a Waffen SS unit in the Canadian parliament, I feel we should hesitate before condemning the man himself, in the absence of clear evidence that he was aware of, and supported, the darker purposes with which his unit is now known to have been associated.

The conflict between the USSR and the Third Reich was a fight between two dictators whose crimes were of a similar order of magnitude. The one that lost has entered the history books as uniquely evil, while the crimes of the winner have enjoyed an undeserved trip down the memory hole.

Speaking of the moral ambiguity inherent in Britain’s allegiance to the Soviet Union, once it had been invaded by Germany, Winston Churchill quipped: “if Hitler had invaded Hell, I would have made at least a favourable mention of the Devil in the House of Commons.” If that was true for Churchill in 1941, we must surely allow a similar moral license to a Ukrainian teenager presented with the opportunity of fighting to liberate his country from a regime which he knew from personal experience to be profoundly evil.  The army he joined to do so was that of a man who was relatively new to the super-baddie club, and of whom Hunka may, at the time of his enlistment, have known very little, beyond the indisputable merit of his being his enemy’s enemy.

So far as I can see, there is no clear evidence that Hunka’s unit is implicated in atrocious behaviour, amounting to war crime. Even if such evidence emerges, we should ask ourselves, before we tag him as a ‘Nazi sympathiser’ if we would have the courage to cry foul, or even to attempt to desert, on discovering that the organisation we had joined in the hope of liberating our country from a sadistic lunatic was not, as we had supposed it to be, a band of heroes fighting the monstrous Stalin. I suggest that that is a lot to ask of a teenager.

It’s often easy for the devil you know to appear worse than the devil you don’t. The obligation to learn and remember history is, as Neil reminds us, an important one. But it’s an obligation that cuts many ways.

Tom Forrester-Paton 29/9/23