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Jason Kenney's Victims of Communism memorial received donations honouring fascists, Nazi collaborators
114 Plays3 years ago
The Liberal government is spending $7.5 million dollars on a Victims of Communism memorial that was started by Jason Kenney 14 years ago. Dan Boeckner of the Bottlemen podcast joins us to discuss the bipartisan consensus on the controversial monument, the news that the organization behind the monument received donations honoring fascists and Nazi collaborators who were responsible for the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people in Europe during World War 2 and much more.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Progress Report and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A new pod on the network that I want to recommend is the latest from Sweater Weather, where Team Advantage joins host Aaron Giovanone to discuss the struggles of Terry and Deener, two Western Canadian working class dudes, just trying to make a living in the FUBAR universe. Harbinger is a fantastic project, and the best way to support them is to go to harbingermediadnetwork.com, become a supporter, get exclusive-only content. I would really recommend it. They're great. But now, on to the show.
00:00:42
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwetchu, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory, on the banks of the Kasis-Kasau-Wanesipi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today to explore who the real victims of communism are, as well as dive into the freaks and psychos of the McDonald-Laurier Institute. The McDonald-Laurier Institute for Race, War, and Ethnic Cleansing is what I'm renaming it.
00:01:09
Speaker
We have Dan Beckner of the Bottleman Pad podcast, as well as Wolf Parade and various other sundry musical projects. Dan, welcome. Hello. Thanks for having me on, Duncan. Oh, it's a real pleasure. I know your particular brain is very well suited to the conversation that we're going to have.
00:01:29
Speaker
And, you know, I'm a big fan of your posting and podcast content, so it's a lot of fun to have you on. But, you know, if we were the kind of, you know,
00:01:43
Speaker
podcast outfit that inserted like audio under stuff, we would definitely be inserting the audio of Captain Holt from Brooklyn Nine-Nine screaming, vindication, because you recently had your own little sweet, sweet vindication moment.
What is the Victims of Communism Memorial?
00:02:00
Speaker
You know, this is an issue you've been banging on, the victims of communism memorial is what we're talking about. But you've been banging on about the victims of communism memorial and the various, you know,
00:02:11
Speaker
Nazi collaborator psychos who were involved and who were being honored by this thing. And I feel that there's so much to cover here. So why don't we start from the beginning? What is the victims of communism memorial that's going up in Ottawa? Who is behind it? And please tell our dear audience about the Jason Kennedy connection. Okay. Well,
00:02:38
Speaker
You could look at the Victims of Communism Memorial two ways. You could look at it as a, and both ways are correct. You could look at it as a pet project by a bunch of, let's say, ideologically calcified wings of various diaspora groups in Canada who should not be taken seriously.
00:03:06
Speaker
Or you can look at it as kind of the end point of a almost 60, 70 year project to equivocate fascism with communism. Like a physical representation of that ideological project. Both are correct. On one hand, it's completely ridiculous and kind of a pet project. And on the other hand, it is,
00:03:34
Speaker
a physical manifestation of this ideology that's been allowed to just bubble and ferment and mutate here in Canada.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, so that is very fair. And we're talking specifically, I mean, the groups in question are Eastern European in nature. You know, we have Croatians, Ukrainians, Estonians, for the most part. When we're talking about victims of communism, the victims of communism, Memorial and the group behind it, what's the silly name that it has?
00:04:08
Speaker
The name they have given themselves is Tribute to Liberty. Yeah, the Tribute to Liberty folks, which again, that name is a giant red flag, by the way. But so my understanding is that in 2007, Kenny was in Toronto talking with a Czech ambassador.
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. That's right. He was at a place called Marisk Park, which was a large privately owned park. It was owned by a originally like a Czechoslovakian diaspora organization. I'm not sure how they divided it up after the after the split between Czechia and Slovakia, but yeah.
00:04:53
Speaker
And there, Jason Kenney found a sculpture of a man being crucified on a hammer and sickle and thought that that was really fucking awesome and that we need to do that, but like a million times bigger, essentially. Yeah, that's right. So he was with the Czech ambassador in the park and he saw this statue, which is called crucified again, and it's
00:05:18
Speaker
It's a pretty gruesome statue of a figure crucified against a hammer and sickle. And yeah, he decided that more Canadians should be able to see something like this, that essentially we needed a big monument for everyone who had fallen out of a guard tower, you know? Every single guard at Auschwitz who was put down by the Red Army.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, every single Croatian who stubbed their toe shoveling bodies into a giant pit, you know, like. And so this became a pet project of Kenny. This was this was right around the time where he was he was, I think, just a parliamentary secretary at this point. Like he I don't think he was in cabinet yet. And he just is a notorious fucking busy body.
Jason Kenney's Influence and Controversy
00:06:10
Speaker
He took to this project and he got it off the ground. And here he is. Here he is in parliament kind of talking about it.
00:06:17
Speaker
It's just a funny bit of audio I dug up here.
00:06:20
Speaker
stand in full solidarity with a coalition of over two dozen cultural communities in Canada, Mr. Speaker, who came to this country as refugees from totalitarian communist states, Koreans, Vietnamese, Ukrainians, all of whom remember, Mr. Speaker, members of their family and relatives who lost their lives under these systems, Mr. Speaker, I hear, unfortunately, heckling from the NDP on this point.
00:06:49
Speaker
Okay, I've never heard that audio before, but I have to say, having driven myself insane going through the history of this, he's really exaggerating about the amount of various communities involved at the start of this project. At the beginning of this project, it had the support of maybe seven distinct diaspora groups.
00:07:14
Speaker
with the Ukrainians at the, at the lead. So the UCC were really, uh, sort of, and, and this is the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, just, just for the people who aren't brain poisoned like ourselves. That's right. That's right. And this is the thing you'll see over and over again is that, is that the UCC are, uh, in, in terms of, um,
00:07:36
Speaker
anti-communist, the Esperate groups here in Canada, the UCC are by far the most powerful and influential. So they were sort of leading the charge on this. And at the time he gave this speech, yeah, there were considerably less than 24 different groups involved. It's more like six or seven.
00:07:57
Speaker
And just like a handy heuristic, whenever anyone anywhere is talking about like organized anti-communism, like an anti-communist group or NGO or political front, that is shorthand for one thing.
00:08:13
Speaker
And it's shorthand for like fascists or Nazi collaborators. Yeah. Yeah. It's shorthand for people who, uh, who really need to, for people who are on the losing end of history in that part of Europe. You know what I mean? Like, and, and you know, the more we talk about this, the more we'll see, but their main ideological project is to, is to rewrite the history of the second world war and to change public opinion.
00:08:41
Speaker
And so who gets counted as a victim of communism? I mean, this is this is the funny part, right? I mean, we were joking about it earlier, but like technically, you know, does Mussolini and Hitler and the guards at Auschwitz, those are technically victims of communism, right? Well, by, you know, by this monuments metric and by the metric of the people that they they've chosen to memorialize. Yeah, basically, I when I started digging into this,
00:09:11
Speaker
Essentially, Tribute to Liberty has something called the Pathway to Liberty, which is a digital archive of the names of people who are being memorialized. Those people are submitted by private citizens or organizations who have made cash donations.
00:09:33
Speaker
to tribute to liberty to the victims of communism memorial. So the way it works is you donate a thousand dollars minimum and you get a brick on the pathway to liberty and then you get to write a name and a little description of what you're memorializing.
00:09:50
Speaker
And I, as I went through the, some six, 700 names, I kind of divided them into three different groups. So first group would be, you know, relatives. So people who were, you know, not, you're not going to read their names in history books. These are private citizens, you know? So it would be like, okay, this, this brick is for my grandfather who was deported from Poland.
00:10:18
Speaker
Uh, some of those stretch the definition of victimhood pretty far. Um, there are, there are, it's hard, it's really hard to fact check whatever, right? That, that sounds like absolutely. Yeah. But I mean, just by their own definition, you know, there's, uh, some people who are being counted as victims of communism say, uh, left Croatia in, you know, 1944.
00:10:45
Speaker
and settled in Ontario and started a business, had a family, and died of natural causes.
00:10:53
Speaker
There's an open question whether those people are victims of communism or not, you know, as if this are maybe people who did not wish to live under communism and then instead came to Canada. So there's that group. Then the next group I identified was just ideas or ideologies. So there are bricks to things like Vietnamese land reform.
00:11:19
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, there's a couple of bricks dedicated to land reform policies carried out by the Ho Chi Minh's government.
00:11:30
Speaker
It's unclear whether the land reform itself is a victim of communism. I get what they're saying. They're saying that land reform is bad. That land reform is communism and communism is bad. It's bad, yeah. Then there are a few people who just donated bricks for things like freedom or liberty, which is fine. That's fine. We love those things here on The Progress Report. Full support, yes.
00:11:57
Speaker
freedom, liberty, human rights. And then the third category is the problematic category, and that is actual historical figures. And most of the people being memorialized, I'd say 90% of them, historical figures, are either straight up fascists or fascist collaborators. So the big names here are Roman Shukovich,
00:12:24
Speaker
who commanded the Noctagull Battalion in Ukraine was responsible for liquidating hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Roma,
00:12:42
Speaker
Other Ukrainians, don't forget them. Yeah. Other Ukrainians, yes, definitely. Ukrainians who are not down with Nazi Germany. Ante Pavlice, who was the leader of the Ustasha, the fascist Croatian puppet state. Although puppet state, I mean, they really carved their own path.
00:13:04
Speaker
during the Second World War, Pavlich as the highest body count of any fascist leader after Hitler or Mussolini, and I won't get too into it, but his party's program of ethnic cleansing
00:13:22
Speaker
was so violent and disgusting that even the Nazi SS officers who were sent to sort of check up on his progress were disgusted and cabled Berlin asking High Command to tell Pavlage to cool it because it was making them look bad.
00:13:42
Speaker
That's how bad this fucking guy is. So there's that. And then there's, you know, and then there are people like archbishop Stepanich, who was the Catholic bishop for the Ustasha regime, who helped set up what we know as rat lines, sort of the Catholic Church's
00:14:01
Speaker
network to exfiltrate fascists after the war. And then so he's on there. And then a bunch of other people that I guess the Vitejian Rend is another good example. Ah, yes, we love we love our big Hungarian boys. Don't we? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So any Gorka relatives? No, no Gorka relatives, but but you know,
00:14:30
Speaker
I think it has to be said. There's a reason why it's Šukiewicz, Pavlice, and associated Croatian fascists, Hungarian fascists. These people are relying on the fact that the public doesn't know who Te Pavlice is or Roman Šukiewicz.
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we do have, uh, I'd be remiss to not remind folks of our, of our local angle on this is that we have a statue of Roman Shukovich here in Edmonton, outside of the Ukrainian youth unity complex, which our tax dollars helped pay for. Um, yeah, this, uh, the statue has existed since the seventies. Uh, when again, probably people had no idea who he was and.
00:15:11
Speaker
These histories really hadn't been written yet or at least written in English. And it was defaced with the entirely accurate words Nazi scum back in 2019.
Media Attention and Historical Evidence
00:15:21
Speaker
And the local Ukrainian community actually tried to get the hate crime investigative unit to look into this as a hate crime.
00:15:29
Speaker
which was hilarious. I was the one who actually broke that story. The CBC, so let's get into your vindication here. So the CBC headline on this. So the CBC deigned to cover this. Someone named Taylor Noakes, who's like a historian, wrote a piece for CBC. It was covered on their front burner podcast. And the headline is pretty good, right? Here's the headline.
00:15:54
Speaker
victims of communism memorial received donations honoring fascists nazi collaborators according to website yep which yeah 100% factual and uh you know they go on to call it a controversial monument you know they go into a little bit of you know anti-pavlich and roman shukovic's body counts um you know it's a cbc so it's not like
00:16:20
Speaker
amazing or anything. They definitely try to both sides it. But someone somewhere finally maybe figured out that we shouldn't be honoring Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Yeah. And I do think that they did not let Taylor go as far as he would have liked to with the article. But I also think that
00:16:44
Speaker
It's just, it feels good to have mainstream media covering this finally after, you know. And this is not the first time that, I mean, the history of the Victims of Communism Memorial has kind of been memory old because like you were saying, you know, this is a conservative project.
00:17:06
Speaker
Jason Kenney, it's a brainchild of Jason Kenney and that era of Canadian politics. And when the Liberals got into power, one of the first things they did was cut the funding for this project and reduce the proposed size of it. And change the location and like they were fucking with it, essentially.
Political Dynamics and Funding Changes
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So but prior prior to the Liberals getting elected, there were a bunch of op ed pieces on on this
00:17:36
Speaker
memorial and it's kind of troubled history. Like you had an association of Canadian architects coming out against it. You had people in Ottawa who were talking about city planning coming out against it. You had people working on specific designs coming out publicly against it. And then you had a public who rightfully were like, what the fuck is this? Why are we spending money on this? And I think
00:18:03
Speaker
I think no matter what side of the political spectrum you fell on, there were definitely people who were taking a look at this and saying, wait, my grandfather fought in the Second World War. Aren't these the bad guys? What are we doing here?
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah, just to go back to the CBC story for a moment, it has a very funny and very CBC quote from Efraim Zuroff, who's like a Nazi hunter and a director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. And the quote is, if Canada commemorates Ante Povellich or Roman Shukovic, it can throw its human rights record in the trash. It's like, oh, no, not Canada's sterling human rights record.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe he meant the trash where you take the trash out of the trash and put it into like the bio, the fucking biohazard trash. Yeah. The shit to be burned at very high temperature. Yeah. The stuff to be put in a concrete sarcophagus miles beneath the earth.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah. So you brought up the cost too. So this thing was originally supposed to only cost one and a half million dollars, but that cost has jumped five times to seven and a half million dollars. And not only has the cost jumped five times, but we're getting a smaller monument on a smaller parcel of land. That's right. That's right. You know, and yeah, some of the prehistory of this is like at
00:19:30
Speaker
And I won't get too far into it, but at one point, this monument was jockeying for position with the Holocaust Memorial Monument that was being built. And through this kind of like game of musical chairs, the Holocaust Memorial ended up getting proposed a site on the river outside of Ottawa, directly facing some giant smokestacks.
00:20:00
Speaker
Which obviously did not go over well. So this thing is actually under construction. The sod was turned in 2018 and some random Ottawa park has been, you know, been fenced off since then where they've been presumably working very hard at building this thing. There was when they did the sod turning and the kind of the opening of it, there was liberal cabinet minister for heritage multiculturalism at the time. A guy named Pablo Rodriguez is kind of longtime Quebec liberal.
00:20:29
Speaker
He was there and he spoke at the sod turning and the audio really is amazing. I'm just going to play it for you. This memorial will be a place for Canadians and visitors to remember the millions of people who suffer under oppressive communist regimes. It will also be a symbol of hope, a recognition of Canada's role in providing refuge to people fleeing persecution, people like many of you and me as well, because
00:20:58
Speaker
When I came here, I was a little boy, and my father was a human rights lawyer in Argentina. He was in prison, tortured many times for his work. And that's exactly the reason why we're in this country today. And Canada welcomed us as political refugees when it was way too dangerous for us to stay in Argentina. So my hopes is that the memorial will also remind us that democracy is a hard-won process. I could never take it.
00:21:25
Speaker
for granted. And it only works when each and every one of us participates. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That anyways, there's there's Paul.
00:21:38
Speaker
I'm begging you Pablo, read The Jakarta Method, a book which I recommend and also I just finished so it's like on my brain. But I looked into Pablo's family history a little bit and his father was a lawyer who no doubt represented communists and political dissidents and trade unionists.
00:21:57
Speaker
who were being murdered by the tens of thousands, by the Argentine junta, the military junta that was installed in 1976 with American support and the support of Henry Kissinger. Pablo Rodriguez's family home was literally bombed by this junta. And again, this Argentine military junta, like General Jorge Vadila, these were anti-communist fucking psychos.
00:22:27
Speaker
If you read the Jakarta Method, there was this worldwide project to essentially exterminate communists wherever you could. One of the people who was on the board of Tribute to Liberty, his name is Marcus Hess. He is one of the architects of the previous ideological project of these groups, which is Black Ribbon Day.
00:22:54
Speaker
which is coming August 23rd. Yeah, we love it. For those of you who don't know, it is a fake holiday equivocating fascism and communism. Two ideologies who definitely did not fight to the death at the cost of tens of millions of people during the 20th century. Anyway, Hess in promoting Black Ribbon Day enlisted the help of
00:23:23
Speaker
People like Jaroslav Stetsko in the Anti-Bolshevik League of Nations and even visited the OUN, which is like the armed wing of the Ukrainian nationalists, visited their headquarters in Munich as he was sort of cooking this up. It was an incredible picture of him and the OUNB leadership in Munich on behalf of Anti-Bolshevik League of Nations. So yeah, it was a global project to
00:23:52
Speaker
rewrite history and smash communism, basically. Like General Jorge Vadila, like the military dictator of Argentina, like received aid from the World Anti-communist League and on the board of the World Anti-communist League was Jaroslav Stetsko, like the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. These victims of communism memorial, like Pablo Rodriguez was speaking positively of opening up a victims of communism memorial where like
00:24:22
Speaker
The people who ran him and his father out of Argentina were collaborating with the same people. Yes. I don't know if your listeners are familiar with Michael Judge's Death is Around the Corner podcast, but I think in terms of contemporary historians, he's done the best job of
00:24:43
Speaker
bringing this bizarre era to light, what he calls World War III, which happened immediately after World War II. It was definitely a full court press against international communism. Or really just like any indigenous poor person in Central America.
00:25:07
Speaker
who were just believed to be communists and therefore fair game, you could just massacre them like roaches. Absolutely. Yeah, that's it. And we couldn't do this podcast without talking about your favorite politician and mine, Christian Freeland. Yeah.
00:25:25
Speaker
This monument, you talked about it as a conservative project, but there does seem to be increasingly growing bipartisan consensus on it. That bipartisan consensus seems to be led by Christia Freeland. Why don't you explain to our audience why that would be the case?
00:25:45
Speaker
That's one thing that I feel like I left out of the CBC article. I mean, for obvious reasons, this monument is just kind of the cap on a giant reservoir of really unpleasant shit that Canadians would have to think about, you know?
00:26:03
Speaker
And Freeland's involvement is essentially, she is the finance minister and this project being resurrected is part of her 2021 budget. So, yeah. Yeah. She's Treasury board. Every dollar that gets spent, she can weigh in on it either way, right? And the reason why she would
00:26:25
Speaker
before this is pretty obvious is that her entire, and I'm not exaggerating here, her entire life outside of Canadian politics, her main passion project has been sort of the defense and resuscitation of this imagined Ukrainian state that her Nazi collaborator grandfather
00:26:54
Speaker
told her about, you know? Yeah, she was in Ukrainian nationalism scouts, Plast, right? She was in Plast. You mentioned her grandfather. Well, her grandfather was the editor of the biggest Nazi propaganda organ in occupied Galicia, the most widely read Ukrainian language publication of its day.
00:27:18
Speaker
which was Krakowski-Wichty. And I've said this before, but, you know, it's like an extremely anti-Semitic newspaper, directed top-down by Nazi administrators, by specifically Emil Gaster, who was the propaganda chief. And its main function was to convince Ukrainians to join the SS Galizian 14th Division.
00:27:48
Speaker
which just side note, we also have a monument too here in Edmonton. Yes, yeah. And then, you know, so Freeland spent a lot of time around her grandfather as a young woman. She was in Plast, as you said. One thing that doesn't get reported on that we've covered on Bottleman before is that Freeland went to Ukraine while it was still part of the Soviet Union and immediately joined
00:28:14
Speaker
a anti-communist group there called Rook and she and the young man that she went over with were both interviewed by the KGB. He was interviewed personally and they were looking for Freeland. She left before they could interrogate her.
00:28:34
Speaker
And the admin to journal ran a piece on it. And I believe it was 1986 or 87, saying like, local woman on the road, you know, basically like under suspicion from the KGB. So this is what she's like, wow, extremely young, right. And then she goes back.
00:28:52
Speaker
to Ukraine. She goes back to Ukraine and then eventually goes to Moscow during the early 90s. She works as a correspondent for various international newspapers covering the looting and pillaging of the state. She learns absolutely nothing from
00:29:11
Speaker
living through like this financial catastrophe, this apocalypse, the GIDAR reforms, all of that. And as an aside, in the meantime, her mother is in a newly independent Ukraine, helping them set up a legal framework for adopting new laws around private ownership, right? So her freelance mother helped write the new Ukrainian constitution,
00:29:42
Speaker
And also her uncle Bogdan was working for, at the same time, was working for USAID, which in a project that was focused on de-collectivizing this agricultural land in Ukraine. So using the laws that
00:30:03
Speaker
Freelance Mother had put in place around private ownership to carve up and privatize and sell off this collective land. So this is a lifelong familial project, right? Like... And has anyone ever asked her about Roman Shukovich? I mean, she must know who he is.
00:30:28
Speaker
No one has ever asked her about Roman Shukovich as far as I know. I know that she definitely knows who he is because she contributed to notes on her, is it her uncle? Uncle. Yeah, on one of his books.
00:30:51
Speaker
on Ukrainian nationalism. Yeah, I mean, it's a rhetorical question. Of course, she fucking knows who Robin Shukovich is. Would you be accused of being a Russian spy if you actually managed to ask her that question? Also, yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you just think about that. This country expelled Russian diplomats because the Russian embassy here dared to bring to attention some very real things about her grandfather.
00:31:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. The facts, the facts are lying to you folks. Was my father a Nazi collaborator? Yes. Are the Russians doing disinformation, Skya, by saying this? Also, yes. Exactly. Don't ask me how that circle squares, but it's true.
00:31:40
Speaker
I mean the funny thing about Freeland though is that she seemed like she was going to be this next great liberal hope for Prime Minister after you know Justin Trudeau presumably burned out but but JT is still going strong and then and then we've also
00:31:55
Speaker
A new shiny object has caught the eye of liberals everywhere, and that is philosopher king Mark Carney, or as I like to call him, Michael Ignatieff 2.0. Yeah, that guy, just like an unsalted Trisket. Yeah, the worst Trisket. Super beige. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Freelance still probably has a lot of, she has a lot of support. I mean, the other thing too is that it's hard to kind of talk about, but the reason she is in,
00:32:24
Speaker
federal politics and has the power she has is because organizations like the UCC and there's like dozens and dozens of affiliated organizations are all like helping her and donating to her and volunteering for her and like a good portion of her political power you know comes because she was like wasn't even living in Canada right like she was like she was some like Reuters she went to Reuters and like
00:32:49
Speaker
ran some project that failed spectacularly and then she came back to Canada to run for the Liberals. That is an interesting thing about freelance careers that there's been a wave of
00:33:02
Speaker
I don't know, it's very manufactured. It feels like a Canadian version of like Hillary Stans or Kay Hive people, like just unequivocally supporting her for whatever she does. But if you look at her actual track record, not just as a politician, but as a journalist, it's like a long history of mediocrity and outright failure. Her journalism around
00:33:30
Speaker
around the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent looting of it in historical context is completely off the mark and totally wrong at every step. And her political achievements are, I don't know. I don't know. She's not allowed in
00:33:52
Speaker
She's not allowed to go to the Russian Federation. She's like persona non grata. They're not exactly a winning attribute for a foreign affairs minister. Right. Her support of one Guido, you know, like just I I'm struggling to find to find an example of something that she has done that has been even remotely good.
00:34:22
Speaker
Yeah. And then it's, it's true. It's, it's, uh, it seems manufactured. It seems like this, this is the person that we are, we're supposed to like, but I mean, the liberals can make anyone who they fucking want prime minister. You know, I mean, that's the funny, that's the great thing about the liberal party. Um,
00:34:41
Speaker
Justin Trudeau is still going strong. Maybe Justin Trudeau is going to be like his father. He's going to be temporarily chastened with the minority government, come back for another 10 years. Maybe his plan is to offer up these people who are so bland that they make him look good in comparison. There's just surround-
00:35:03
Speaker
And JT is so kind of like, doesn't give a fuck about foreign policy that like, Krista Freeland can just like show up and be like, oh yeah, by the way, we have to unequivocally support Ukraine. And here's a bunch of money for, you know, weapons and guns. And we're going to send our, our, our, our army over there. Like, like I recently read a report by, um, on the, on the Donbass conflict. And it is, it's well, like it's essentially like a civil war, right? Where, you know, Russian speaking Ukrainians.
00:35:32
Speaker
don't want to be a part of Ukraine, or they want a situation similar to like what Quebec has, or similar to what Catalonia has, or the Basque region has, where it's like, sure, like, we're not Russian, but like, we don't like, like the psycho Ukrainian nationalists that run the country, we would like a level of autonomy, right? Yeah, and Ukraine is a multi ethnic, or, you know, the area that the map says is Ukraine is a multi ethnic state, and has been
00:36:01
Speaker
since before communism. You've got... Yeah, with Poles and Russians and Ukrainians and Jews and Roma. Turks, you know, Turkic people, like people from Central Asia, like Tatters, like it's, yeah, it's, it is in a way almost like a Balkans of, it's like, it's like a Balkans East, a mini Balkans.
00:36:27
Speaker
And I think a good way to close out is that the psycho Ukrainian fascist ideology that underpins the victims of communism memorial and underpins the ideology behind it is one that is like Ukraine for Ukrainians. They want to build an ethno state. They want to literally ethnically cleanse all of the people who aren't Ukrainian out of Ukraine.
00:36:49
Speaker
and create a Ukraine for Ukrainians. That's the political project at the heart of this. Yes. And their vision of Ukraine is a very narrow one, which is something that was reinforced to me. Back in 2019, I did a tour of Ukraine with operators. We played three dates. And talking to people after the shows, depending on where we were, was very interesting. Most of the young people I talked to
00:37:18
Speaker
were, their appraisal of the situation was that Kiev was trying to impose Galicia on the rest of Ukraine, which doesn't really make sense. It would be like, you know, Alberta making, I don't know, I guess there's no real analog for Canada, but you know, Albertans taking power and being like, all of Canada has Albertan values.
00:37:52
Speaker
We are mandating F-150s for everyone. This is an anti-truck discourse podcast. We were talking about Justin, and Justin Trudeau recently inspired my latest brain worm slash rabbit hole.
00:38:11
Speaker
And it was a tweet from Justin Trudeau's Twitter account, so who knows if he wrote it. It could just be something in the calendar that they had to tweet about. But Justin Trudeau's Twitter account was tweeting about Nelson Mandela Day. And it's very funny to me because the tweet goes like this, with his words and through his actions.
00:38:30
Speaker
Nelson Mandela sought to make the world more equal and he showed us it was possible. Together this hashtag Mandela day and every day, let's honor his legacy and follow his example. Let's keep building a more just future for everyone. And the part that really twigged me was through his actions.
00:38:46
Speaker
One thing that is in memory hold about Nelson Mandela was that he literally started up the armed wing of the African National Congress, which bombed and sabotaged targets throughout apartheid South Africa. He never renounced the use of violence and sabotage against the apartheid regime.
00:39:11
Speaker
This led me down a Wikipedia slash Google rabbit hole where I was learning about the armed wing of the ANC and the sabotage and bombing campaigns that they undertook. This is incidentally where I also learned about Joe Slovo, who was an Eastern European Jewish dude who was key figure in the ANC and eventually became the minister of housing after Mandela became prime minister, just like Marxist-Leninist, theorist, commander in the armed wing. His wife was assassinated by a
00:39:40
Speaker
by a letter bomb by the South African police. But reading up on this kind of sabotage campaign that largely wasn't very successful by the ANC, it was really like the international pressure that eventually led to the regime falling.
00:39:57
Speaker
But that got me to thinking about Canada and like, well, there's really no kind of like ANC equivalent in Canada. I mean, maybe you could stretch like the folks around Arthur Manuel and the land actions that are happening, you know, say over the past 10 years. And some weird part of my brain remembered that like nearly 10 years ago,
00:40:15
Speaker
that a report came out from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that was speculating, essentially speculating about what if there was an ANC Canada that engaged in effective economic sabotage.
Indigenous Uprisings and Racial Prejudice
00:40:28
Speaker
And before we get into that report, Dan, this is where you come in. What is the Macdonald-Laurier Institute? And they're like kind of adored. I mean,
00:40:38
Speaker
Maybe a year ago, I would have said they were a direct-to-video right-wing think tank. Now I think they actually do carry out their mandate of shaping public policy because a lot of their board members and the people who work for them have been appearing on CBC or writing articles of the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star. But yeah, they're a think tank.
00:41:05
Speaker
that takes domestic, they're a non-profit organization, they take domestic funding, and crucially they take funding from foreign governments to produce essentially propaganda to shape public opinion on whatever issues whoever is ever paying them wants to cover.
00:41:27
Speaker
And they are members of the Atlas network. That's right. Kind of like, you know, the right wing Randian objectivist, you know, worldwide network, you know, other Canadian members of the Atlas network include like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the Fraser Institute.
00:41:45
Speaker
organizations like that. Yeah, exactly right. They're like think tank, they produce reports, they write op-eds, they appear in media. The report that caught my eye from the McDonald-Laurie Institute and that I finally remembered and tracked it down was called Canada and the First Nations.
00:42:04
Speaker
cooperation or conflict? by a fellow named Douglas Bland, who was a retired lieutenant colonel or lieutenant colonel, however you say it, in the Canadian Armed Forces. He also taught defense studies at Queen's University for 15 years. But this report was
00:42:22
Speaker
essentially the McDonald-Laurie Institute turning a piece of fiction that Bland had written in 2009 called Uprising into a real report that John Iveson and the media reported on and that some people treated seriously. And in order to get a feel for the report, I think it's probably good to just kind of get a feel for the book, the piece of fiction that it's based on, the 2009 book Uprising. And here's the jacket copy.
00:42:50
Speaker
A surprise attack on the nation's military bases and power stations sends the armed forces scrambling. When impoverished, disheartened, poorly educated, but well-armed Aboriginal young people find a modern revolutionary leader, they rally with a battle cry of, quote, take back the land, end quote. Theirs is a fight to right the wrongs inflicted on them by the quote, by quote, the white settlers.
00:43:15
Speaker
They know they are too small to take the entire country, but they don't need to. Over a few tension-filled days, as the battle rages over abundant energy resources, the frantic Prime Minister can only watch as the insurrection paralyzes the country. But when energy-dependent Americans discover the southward flow of Canadian hydro, electricity, oil, and natural gases halted, they do not remain passive.
00:43:34
Speaker
Although none of the country's leaders see it coming, the shattering consequences unfold with the same plausible harmony by which Aboriginal protests decades ago became the eerie premonition of today's standoffs and quote, days of action, unquote. Yeah, so just to get a feel, I mean, I really like the, there's so many adjectives used to describe the impoverished, disheartened, poorly educated, but well-armed Aboriginal young people. Poorly educated, really, yeah.
00:44:03
Speaker
Well, they're not. I mean, revolutionaries usually come from middle class backgrounds because they have the time to actually read books and like more and they're not reading the right books though, Duncan. They're not reading the Fountainhead or. But I mean, the great part about this report is that it's like, yeah, this this would be like dope. Like, I mean, we've seen, you know, what's in solidarity blockades that blocked
00:44:31
Speaker
you know, railways across the country in which, like, freaked out, you know, white settler governments across Canada at the provincial and federal levels. Like, this is a great idea, but it's literally coming from, like, the worst person you know, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Like, when you were reading the the jacket description, it reminds me a little bit of the the genre of like ultra right wing, 1980s, ultra right wing American sci-fi writers. Like, there's a
00:45:00
Speaker
Larry Niven, Jerry Purnell book called Lucifer's hammer. Um, that that is, it's kind of, it's about like a post asteroid strike collapse of, uh, civilization and that, um, or, or collapse of American government. And that sandbox allows those guys to basically play out their most racist fantasies.
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, like this is how the race war would go kind of thing, right? And this is essentially what, what Doug Bland is doing. He's essentially just like fanficking out his like race war scenario. Yeah. He's holding, he's holding the flashlight under his chin and he's looking at himself in the mirror, you know? And, and national post hack, John Iveson like treated this report seriously when it came out and like wrote it up. He was quoting. Report based on a fucking speculative fiction novel.
00:45:54
Speaker
Essentially, I mean, the book isn't mentioned in the report, but like, I mean, you just have to, I mean, come on, we're not idiots here. And it's like, one thing that's mentioned in the report many times and also brought up by Ivison in his coverage is the use of the word like warrior cohort or warrior cadre. And like the stat that he uses to justify this using this language is that like 42% of First Nations folks on the prairies will be under 30 by 2017.
00:46:22
Speaker
He's doing demographics. Yeah, exactly. Because the economy is dependent on moving resources over long, hard to defend, linear pieces of transportation infrastructure, and we simply just do not have the cops to guard it all, shit's going to go down. This is Bland's hypothesis, right?
00:46:44
Speaker
And so he lays out this very realistic scenario. He goes over all of the places that you could fuck with. It's a handy instruction guide if folks ever really wanted to do this. But it's like, oh yeah, Manitoba is the most vulnerable West East transportation hub in Canada, according to Bland. So just FYI. And it also has a large indigenous population compared to settlers.
00:47:13
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Read the report, folks. He also talks about the railways and roads leading into Thunder Bay because of all the shipping that goes through there. Again, I haven't read the book, obviously, but it might be interesting to write this book, but from the point of view that this is of how to do it and not be racist.
00:47:41
Speaker
rewrite this book, but make it based is what I'm saying. And this was clearly a reaction to the, I don't know more movement, right? Like this is, this comes out in 2014, I don't know more was 2012, 2013, clearly the like the, you know, he, Douglas Bland specifically and like,
00:48:02
Speaker
white settler power brokers were freaking the fuck out. And like as a follow up to his report, Bland wrote another book called Time Bomb, Canada and the First Nations. Oh God. And essentially he's just like updating his his like his his priors. He's just like updating his his 2009 book and his McDonald's Laurier report. And again, it's he's like, sorry, I got to say, like in digging into the McDonald's Laurier Institute, they
00:48:32
Speaker
They're interfacing with indigenous communities. They love to kind of wave that around, but if you look deeper into what they're trying to do, you know, what their project is, it's essentially to convince indigenous communities to allow resource extraction on their territory. That's all it is, you know?
00:48:57
Speaker
It's like we support the financialization and the lifting up of these communities through building pipelines.
00:49:05
Speaker
You know, that is exactly. So Brian Lee Crowley, who is like the whitest man in existence, like literally go Google. Brian Lee Crowley is the executive director. He's some muckety muck with with McDonald-Lorey Institute. He's incredibly white. He is featured. He's called like eight, eight or nine pages. He is featured in the first in the First Nations section of the draft report of the Alan inquiry report that was that was sent to me.
00:49:33
Speaker
And it's essentially him just doing that. It's him taking eight or nine pages of just talking about like, yes, indigenous people actually really want oil and gas development on their land, and here's the ones that do, and here's what they say. And yes, that is their entire project at the Macdonald-Lorey Institute. And my own personal interest aside, I would say it's disgusting, it's fucking disgusting enough that this group of
00:50:02
Speaker
Mutants accepts money from the Latvian Defense Department and then publishes 8 to 10 articles a year about why we need to increase troop strength in Latvia. That's gross. That's horrible.
00:50:18
Speaker
if you're really gonna go after the MLI for anything, it's this stuff. This is the most insidious stuff that they do, personally, for me. Yeah, and when you get into the actual suggestions, like here's how we solve the problem part of the bland report, this is where it gets really fucked up. So he's like, it starts off fine, like Marshall Plan, you pour money into infrastructure projects on First Nations reserves and lands and all that stuff.
00:50:45
Speaker
Which is like yeah great, but then but then you get into like
00:50:49
Speaker
literal ethnic cleansing. I'm just going to quote from the report. Build across Canada on an individual and or family basis a comprehensive First Nations resettlement program to include health care, secure and safe housing, education employment programs for all ages, to facilitate and support the voluntary migration of First Nations people from reserves to villages, towns and cities or high employment areas off reserves. Voluntary migration.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah. So what would be what would happen to the land after they left their dug? Yeah, that's I mean, that's just that's the second cleansing like there's really no way around it. There's also another insane suggestion that talks about
00:51:33
Speaker
the incarceration of Aboriginal folks. It's like instead of just like abolishing prisons or reforming them or dealing with it in a different manner, he says, special emphasis in such reform should be placed on separating young Aboriginal prisoners from older Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal prisoners as part of a program to disconnect youthful offenders from criminal recruitment and to encourage targeted social rehabilitation. Wow, yeah.
00:52:01
Speaker
We're just going to kidnap your kids and do residential schools again. It's great. Don't worry about it. The report also seems to place the blame in true libertarian fashion on the individual for systemic substance abuse issues, anything related
00:52:24
Speaker
intersectionally to like generational trauma, you know, the attempted genocide of these people and, and yeah, and just state supported mass poverty, that all gets blamed on the individual. When it comes to when it comes to drugs, there's that that was a pretty that was a pretty disgusting section of this report three.
00:52:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's because they didn't, they didn't read rich dad, poor dad and like figure out how to do passive income is why they're poor. Yeah.
Liberal Support for Right-Wing Projects
00:53:02
Speaker
So, so Dan tie it all together for us. How, how does this, this, I mean, brain worm rabbit hole I went down to on the MLI, but how does the MLI and Christia Freeland and the victims of communism moral, how does it all kind of like tie together?
00:53:16
Speaker
Well, I mean, the connection between Kristia Freeland and the Victims of Communism Memorial is pretty apparent. It's pretty out there. She's part of that community. She's worked for that community, worked on their ideological project for free for most of her life. So there's that. But with the MLI,
00:53:44
Speaker
There's material connections and then there's a bigger ideological connection. With the MLI, it's like people like Marcus Colga are big donators and supporters of the VOC monument, but they are also out there trying to shape public policy and Canadian foreign policy manufacture consent for Canadian foreign policy as it relates to Russia and China and any kind of state that they deem
00:54:14
Speaker
sort of in line with the Soviets that sent their grandparents to the Gulag or whatever. And I think it is just a long history of Canada weaponizing this ideology against
00:54:34
Speaker
Anything socialist there is a world where like we talk about how Stalinism was bad, right? Yeah, and and and Stalinism was bad and like lefties shouldn't tolerate You know tankies doing or supporting or endorsing Stalinist shit. Like it's just stupid. It's not helpful but like be when it when the initiative to like call out Stalinism is led by like literal Nazi collaborators and
00:55:00
Speaker
Like, it's not coming from an authentic place. No. Right. It is a very deliberate political project. Its entire function domestically is to discipline the left. Right. Like, is to squash the left. And I think it just sort of illustrates that
00:55:21
Speaker
quote unquote, liberals would much, much rather work with people who would like to commemorate someone like Roman Shukovich than people who would like to talk about like the rich or a guy or a guy who wants to do literal ethnic cleansing of indigenous people. Exactly. They would rather they would rather give those people space to put their opinions out than then people who want to talk about, you know, maybe the labor history of Canada.
00:55:51
Speaker
or the whole part of the Ukrainian diaspora who
00:55:59
Speaker
were actively socialists and communists and helped bring things to this country like healthcare and labor rights for workers. Who had all their shit taken away by the federal government and just given to these Ukrainian nationalists. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of a tangent, but that's something I think
00:56:23
Speaker
we have to remember when we look at this stuff is that if we're talking about the UCC or these nationalist Ukrainians, we're not talking about the Ukrainian diaspora as a whole. And I think an intended side effect of these people
00:56:40
Speaker
speaking for the Ukrainian community in Canada as a whole is that the leftist Ukrainians that built those communities are effectively erased from history. Somebody asked me on Twitter, where's a good place I can read about Ukrainian leftism in Canada or the importation of fascism to this country post Second World War?
00:57:05
Speaker
There's not a lot of material. That one has really written like a comprehensive history of it, to my knowledge. I mean, there's not even like a Vincent Bevin style Jakarta method on like Eastern European anti-communist fascist projects, right? Like it just simply, it just hasn't been written. It hasn't been explored. And it's a huge hole in kind of Canada's in the past 60, 70 years of Canadian history because we let in a bunch of
00:57:33
Speaker
Nazi collaborators into this country. And we allowed them to speak for that whole community and control the narrative. And I think the Victims of Communism Memorial is kind of their argument ender in a way. That's one of the functions that it serves, is to say we have the last word on what the Ukrainian diaspora in this country thinks about socialism.
00:58:00
Speaker
Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. I'm really glad I got you on. Uh, we're coming to the end here, so feel free to plug your pluggables. How can people find you on the internet and follow along and support your work? Okay. Well, uh, I'm, uh, chip Brony and the air rifle on Twitter. Um, I will be posting, uh, pictures of my dog. Uh, I will be arguing with my partner about Metallica. Um, you can see all that very important debate. Yeah.
00:58:29
Speaker
Um, and then if you want to support me financially, uh, you can subscribe to operators, Patreon, which is, uh, music and, uh, music related projects, but put out like two songs a month. Uh, we watch movies every Sunday. It's a nice community. Uh, I also have the bottleman podcast with my co-host Riley two episodes a week, where we talk about, uh, how Canada is fake.
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah, the Bottomland Podcast is a fantastic listen. I cannot endorse or really speak about any of Dan's musical projects because I've never heard them. I only know him through his kind of brain worms and posting on this, or the fascist diaspora in Canada. But Bottomland Podcast is really good.
00:59:24
Speaker
And folks, if you like this podcast, you want to keep hearing more podcasts like it. It's very easy, a few easy ways to support us, you know, subscribe, rate, review us. It's very easy. Apple Podcasts really likes reviews for some reason. And also if you want to join the nearly 500 other folks who keep this little independent media project going, it's very easy. There's a link in the show notes. The URL is theprogressreport.ca slash patrons.
00:59:50
Speaker
putting your credit card monthly contributions are really help us out 5, 10, $15 a month. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, or comments, I'm really easy to get ahold of. I am at Duncan K at progressalberta.ca. I am also on Twitter entirely too much at at Duncan Kinney. Thanks so much to Cosmic Famucominist for our amazing theme. Thank you for listening. And thanks again to Dan for coming on. This was great. And goodbye.