In The Eyes of The Beholder : Vandalizing? or Identifying?

Cenotaph with emblem of 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS

On 26 May 1988, Monument to the Glory of the UPA, a memorial to members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, was erected. Soon after, a cenotaph was erected, displaying the emblem of 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), and an inscription dedicating it 'To Those Who Died For the Freedom of Ukraine'."
On October 14, 2017, the Embassy of Russia in Ottawa's Twitter account posted images of the monuments, alongside a bust of Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton, with a caption referring to them as 'monuments to Nazi collaborators'. Alexandra Chyczij, vice-president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, called these claims 'long-disproven fabrications'."
"Around June 21, 2020, the cenotaph was vandalized, with spray paint reading 'Nazi war monument'. Halton Regional Police Service initially reported that the vandalism was a 'hate-motivated offense', and refused to release images of the graffiti. Halton police later stated that the graffiti may have been targeting Ukrainians either as a whole or in the area, and that they did not 'consider that the identifiable group targeted by the graffiti was Nazis'."
St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery, Wikipedia

"The initial information collected by investigators indicated that the graffiti may have been hate-motivated, targeting the identifiable group of Ukrainians in general, or Ukrainian members of this cultural centre."
"At no time did the Halton Regional Police Service consider that the identifiable group targeted by the graffiti was Nazis."
Halton Regional Police

"Your homeland has become more beautiful since you have lost -- on our initiative, I must say -- the residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia's good name -- namely the Jews."
"I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles, I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway."
SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, speech to 14th Waffen SS Division, May 1944

Well, Himmler was, of course, quite correct in his assessment based on Nazi intelligence. And when the 14th Waffen SS Division received the order from the Nazi command, they wouldn't have hesitated to carry it out, nor to murder the Jew they so greatly detested. When the Russian Embassy highlighted the veneration in the Ukrainian-Canadian community of the Nazi-linked 14th Waffen SS Division, and spoke of the viral anti-Semitism it denoted, they knew whereof they spoke.

Fascist Germany knew it would have little problems involved in establishing some of their largest slave labour and concentration death camps in Poland, meant to carry out the Final Solution of Europe's Jewish population that would see them exterminated, freeing Europe from their presence, even as Poles themselves suffered privation and death at the hands of the Nazis. But then so did every country in Europe overrun by the Nazis of the Third Reich.

SS leader Heinrich Himmler greets members of the 14th SS Division during the Second World War. Police say graffiti left on an Oakville monument to the SS division is being investigated as a hate-motivated crime. (Photo courtesy US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

The existence of the monument memorializing the Ukrainian Nazis has long been known. The Jewish community protested its existence even while the Ukrainian community defended it, denying the Ukrainian 14th Waffen SS was in collaboration with Nazi Germany. When the Russian Embassy in Ottawa highlighted the memorial and its purpose, it also made allusion to Canada's then-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland's grandfather, a Ukrainian newspaper publisher operating in Poland, collaborating with the Nazi occupation, praising the Germans and their mission to rid the world of Jews.

Canada's frosty relations with Russia may have originated in former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rejection of Moscow and Vladimir Putin with its invasion of eastern Ukraine, aiding ethnic Russian Ukrainian insurgents who claimed the Donbass region for Russia, and the annexation of Crimea, but the hostility between Ukrainians and Russia over the Holodomar when Soviet Russia ransacked the grain harvest in Ukraine to truck to Russia, leaving millions to starve, has been fully in the freezer since Chrystia Freeland was named Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Someone unknown, at some time in the past several weeks had painted "Nazi war monument" on the stone cenotaph commemorating the 14th SS Division's role in the Second World War. Ukraine's detestation of Soviet Russia saw it view Nazi Germany, then at war with Russia, favourably. Germany's mission to eradicate the Jewish presence also sat favourably with the Ukrainians who were quick to volunteer for the special corps at Germany's invitation, to become allies at a time when Germany was pressed for additional manpower.

These were Ukrainians who were eager to pledge their allegiance to Hitler, and become part of the Nazi Waffen SS organization, eventually to become involved in killing Polish women and children, along with Jews. When the news first surfaced of a monument being desecrated, there were researchers who knew exactly what the monument glorified and they quickly set the record straight, that this was no racist hate-motivated crime. Leading Halton Regional Police Chief Stephen Tanner to observe: "The most unfortunate part of all this is that any such monument would exist in the first place", in Canada.

Waffen SS troops in the second world war. The 14th SS Division was made up of Ukrainian nationalists who joined the Nazis and fought on the eastern front. Photograph: ullstein bild/Getty Images

Allied troops from the U.S., Canada, Britain and Russia were beginning to gain the upper hand over the Axis powers, leaving Germany short-handed as the tide of the war slowly turned. Ukrainian manpower was invited to join the Waffen SS organization, allying themselves with the Germans in their genocidal mission, while helping shore up German forces battling the allies. According to professor Per Rudling of Lund University Sweden, several similar monuments exist throughout Canada memorializing Nazi collaborators.

"Beyond the Ukrainian diaspora, these monuments went largely unnoticed", he noted in his book Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement. It is time, he said, that Canadians conduct an open discussion regarding the presence of such monuments in the light of what they represent. As far as the Ukrainian Canadian community is concerned, their SS members were Ukrainian patriots, heroes fighting the Russians who had occupied and looted Ukraine.

A veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) marches with people dressed as UPA soldiers on October 11, 2009 in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to mark the 67th anniversary of the founding of UPA in 1943. YURIY DYACHYSHYN/AFP/Getty Images

A Polish judge in 2017 issued an arrest warrant for 98-year-old Michael Karkoc who had been a 14th SS Division deputy company commander, for war crimes. The man, who had been living in the United States, died before a court trial could be held. The accusation against him was coordinating the massacre of 44 civilians, women and children among them, in the Polish village of Chianiow, in 1944.

Roman Shukhevych, October 1943. Handout

In 1941, the battalion was dispatched to Lviv, capital of one of the Ukraine's Western regions. Though no hard evidence exists proving the battalion's involvement, a pogrom took place that killed several thousand Jews,  soon after the battalion's arrival. Another local militia known to have been responsible in the killings, led by Roman Shukhevych, was centrally involved. The same militia commander led a German police battalion in Belarus, implicated as well in civilian killings.

In Edmonton, at the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, a bust of the venerated Roman Shukhevych has a central memorial role. "Roman Shukhevych was the (independence) leader, very much respected even after the war, to continue this battle against the Soviet regime. He’s seen as a hero. He’s completely seen as a hero, and respected to this day as a symbol of the fight for freedom", insisted Paras Podilsky, spokesman for the Complex, of the man who commanded one of two Ukrainian divisions attached to the German army, called the 'Naghtigall'."

The cenotaph at Oakville's St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery, October 25, 2017. Peter J. Thompson / Postmedia

Conveniently Re-Assignment History to the Waste Basket

"It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk for attack by violent protesters."
"Yes, he [Sir Winston Churchill] sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial."
"We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history."
"Whatever progress this country has made in fighting racism — and it has been huge — we all recognize that there is much more work to do. But it is clear that the protests have been sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence."
“Would it not be better and more honest to ask our children to understand the context, to explain the mixture of good and bad in the career of Churchill and everyone else?"
"I will resist with every breath in my body any attempt to remove that statue from Parliament Square.” 
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Police officers stand in front of the Winston Churchill statue during a rally in Parliament Square in London on Tuesday. Ahead of expected protests on the weekend, the statue has been boarded up. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press)

"It's clear that we're in the middle of a public health crisis. So it's not safe for them [protesters], it's not safe for the people around them [for everyone to be gathering in crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic]."
"Secondly, we do have information that people are intent on coming to cause violence and confrontation."
London Police Chief Cressida Dick

The statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced in Parliament Square, central London after a demonstration outside the US Embassy on June 7, 2020. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images.

In Britain, those styling themselves anti-racism protesters, taking the opportunity of the Black Lives Matter protests set off by the Minneapolis police killing of African-American George Floyd in the United States, have made demands of government and its agencies at every level, universities and other groups who sought to memorialize events and personages in history as part of the nation's heritage, that it is their intention to see that all vestiges of Britain's imperial past reflected in monuments and statuary, the naming of institutions and public thoroughfares be extinguished.

Damage and the assaults of graffiti declaring Sir Winston Churchill -- the WWII saviour of Great Britain, who stood virtually alone with his British Empire support against the axis powers supporting Nazi Germany until the entry of the United States of America following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour -- forced the British government to close off Parliament Square and to board up the parliament-facing statue of Sir Winston Churchill, Britain's war years prime minister whose pledge to the country to 'never give up' in the struggle against the Thousand-year Reich was fulfilled in Germany's defeat.

In the United States, where the protests first emerged in late May, statues erected to memorialize Christopher Columbus were destroyed by ravaging mobs of violent thugs; the statues disfigured in Boston and Richmond, Virginia last week. Black Lives Matter groups protesting the death of George Floyd have outdone themselves in their destructive fury, aiming their vandalism at Confederate memorials n the south of the nation; Richmond and Birmingham, Alabama, Charleston, South Carolina and Raleigh, North Carolina. 

In Virginia, a statue of Christopher Columbus erected in Byrd Park, Richmond, was pulled down, and thrown face down into Fountain Lake; a just end, the mob felt, for a man who violently abused the indigenous people he found occupying the New World, when he 'discovered' it in 1492. A bronze statue that was dedicated in 1927 in recognition of a great explorer. Back in London, its mayor, Sadiq Khan, supported the protests' claims that controversial monuments that cause offence be removed. 

Churchill statue, Whitehall boarded up  Photograph: Blitz Pictures/REX/Shutterstock

The list drawn up by Black Lives Matter supporters includes statues of leading historical figures included among them, Sir Francis Drake, Nancy Astor, Christopher Columbus and William Gladstone "for celebrating slavery and racism", according to the campaigners. A figure of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was thrown into Bristol harbour before councils and museums were able to tuck it out of view.

Over a thousand demonstrators in Oxford fixed a demand for the removal of colonialist Cecil Rhodes' statue. Mayor Khan remarked that he "hoped" a new commission for diversity in the public realm would recommend removal of memorials that "don't accurately reflect our values", in a mayoral bid to place history in the dungeon of a revisionist garbage heap. If you can't see it, it cannot have occurred. London had "an uncomfortable truth" with historical links to slavery, according to Mayor Khan.

  Baden-Powell statue in Poole. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

"Our nation and city owes a large part of its health to its role in the slave trade and while this is reflected in our public realm, the contribution of many of our communities to life in our capital has been willfully ignored -- this cannot continue."  Not all are in agreement with the mayor's assessment. An assembly member, Susan Hall, stated that "Instead of virtue-signalling and starting a divisive debate, Sadiq Khan should focus on his job"

A list of 60 statues, plaques and monuments was put together identifying which among Britain's rich history of movers and shakers were to be destroyed, according to anti-racism activists who declared the "need to be removed so that Britain can finally face the truth about its past". Charles II, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Nelson, Prime Minister Gladstone, Sir Francis Drake, and Charles Grey, the former prime minister who oversaw the abolition of slavery in 1833, all listed given their "responsibility for colonial violence".  

The Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall being boarded up on Friday. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images