A 'Human Rights' Conundrum

When last we heard from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, it was lobbying for equal time for its genocide—the Holodomor—with the Jews' genocide—the Holocaust—in the Canucki "human rights" mausoleum. It will be interesting to learn how the mausoleum, currently going up in Winnipeg at great expense to taxpayers, will end up dealing with the matter given that, as a new book of essays about Ukrainian-Canadians reveals, history may prove too complicated for the "human rights" wonks to unravel in way that is both factual and acceptable to Ukrainians:

The Soviet Union's control over Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s was a major complicating factor for Ukrainian-Canadians. The [Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association] ULFTA and the Canadian Communist Party looked to the USSR to lead the way, both in Eastern Europe and for working people worldwide. However, for those on the nationalist right and non-members of the ULFTA, the Soviets were violent invaders of their national homeland.

Orest Martynowyc describes this well in an essay that reveals how Hitler's Germany came to be seen by some as a national liberator.

The Second World War changed everything for Ukrainian-Canadians, both on the right and the left. In particular, the ULFTA and the Labour Temples were shut down over concerns about communist spies in the war's early years (before the USSR was at war with Germany).

And of course the Cold War in the 1950s caused further difficulties for Canadian communists. Shedding light on this era, a number of essays bring forward newly uncovered materials based on interviews and documents from both Canada and Russia.

There is a clear left-wing focus among the contributors in Re-Imagining Ukrainian-Canadians. And this leads to an insufficient level of attention on the non-communist side of Ukrainian-Canadian social life, especially with regard to Christian churches as social institutions.

There are two exceptions: an essay regarding anti-Semitic nationalist movements in the 1920s and 1930s and a biographical sketch of the Edmonton entrepreneur Paul Rudyk...

Actually, the museum has a perfect opportunity here to teach a valuable lesson, that being that, sometimes, victims can also be haters (something that conflicts with prevailing "human rights" dogma which holds that only white hegemons are capable of "racism"). I have no doubt, however, that this opportunity will go to waste as the dogma is hewed to and conveyed to the public.