In case you missed it, the Canadian Parliament on September 22 gave a standing ovation to Nazi war criminal Yaroslav Hunka as if he was a hero.
It turns out that Canada has a Nazi problem dating back decades. The country is a safe haven for Nazis, and according to Op India, it is also a "hunting grounds for Jewish groups and other officials looking to bring them to book."
Politico EU sees things differently, though. In an op-ed it published on October 2, writer Keir Giles tried to revise Holocaust history while engaging in a whitewashing campaign.
Giles also smeared Austrian Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, claiming he was found to have "made broad accusations that were found to be 'nearly totally useless,'" and that "put the Canadian government to a considerable amount of purposeless work."
(Related: Remember earlier this year when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decorated his military unit with a "Nazi" title?)
The shame Canada has had to bear over the Hunka fiasco apparently required a public relations hitman, in this case Giles, to "run cover and deflect," to quote one X (formerly Twitter) user who expressed criticism towards Politico EU.
Giles writes that the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center claims that Hunka's "crimes against humanity during the Holocaust are well-documented," but that these claims do not "seem to have any more substance than the accusation by Russia."
In other words, this is just more "Russian propaganda" manifesting its ugly head – because when in doubt, just blame Russia.
"The result of all this is that otherwise intelligent people are now trying to outdo each other in a chorus of evidence-free condemnation," Giles further writes.
To be fair, there is a witch hunt taking place against Hunka's family members who were born long after any possible crime could have been committed during World War II – but is Hunka himself as innocent as Giles and Politico EU seem to think he is?
Canadian Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman recently called Hunka "a monster," while Poland's education minister is attempting to extradite him back to Poland in order to then determine whether or not he actually committed any war crimes himself.
Giles says the situation is more complex than people are making it, arguing that a more thorough "debunking" or "fact-checking approach to countering disinformation" would reveal these complications more clearly – though the audience would have to be "willing to put in the time and effort to read the accurate version of events, and be interested in discovering it in the first place."
"This means debunking mainly works for very specific audiences, like government officials, analysts, academics and (some) journalists," he writes.
"But most of the rest of us, especially when just scrolling through social media, are instead likely to have a superficial and fleeting interest, which means a lengthy exposition of why a given piece of information is wrong will be far less likely to reach us and have an impact."
On the flip side, Giles relies heavily on an anti-Russia bias to prove his point, arguing that Russia is responsible for "propaganda narratives" that include looking at Hunka as a war criminal – which makes sense since he fought against the former USSR.
Giles entitled his article after this fact, stating that "Fighting against the USSR didn't necessarily make you a Nazi." So, what do you think about this matter?
The latest news about mainstream media corruption can be found at Propaganda.news.
Sources for this article include: