THEY DID NOT "NAZI" THIS COMING: TIME TO UPDATE THE 'N' WORD

 

OK, internet, do your thing!

by Colin Liddell

I Guess we should be glad that the Ukrainians managed to apparently "trick" the Canadian Parliament into giving a standard innovation to an ex-Nazi fighter, because the internet, as always, needed a new piece of hysteria bait after about one week of Russell Brand's now tedious "#MeToo" allegations. 

The story we're all supposed to pull our hair out about this time can be summed up by this quote from the Independent newspaper:

Canada’s House of Commons gave a rousing standing ovation to a Ukrainian veteran who fought in the Second World War – unaware he had served in a Nazi SS unit.

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, was sitting in the gallery when he was described as a “Ukrainian hero” and a “Canadian hero” to applause from prime minister Justin Trudeau and president Volodymyr Zelensky.

However, leaders were left red-faced when House speaker Anthony Rota subsequently apologised after it emerged that Hunka served in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, a voluntary unit made up mostly of ethnic Ukrainians under Nazi command.

An innocent misunderstanding, obviously.

But this is exactly the sort of thing the desperate Kremlin propaganda machine needs right now:

"Oh my God! See, we were RIGHT -- the invasion of the Ukraine IS a denascification operation. Even we didn't believe that, but now we do, blah, blah, blah."

Yawn... The real problem here, of course, is the over-hystericized meaning of the "N word" (by which of course I mean "Nazi," not the other one).

Despite constant misuse and overuse, up until 2022, the N-word meant two things: (1) a historical term for followers of the NSDAP, and (2) someone more contemporary who continued to ascribed all, or the majority of, the evils in the world to a certain biblical-related ethnicity.

After 2022 it means another thing as well. No, not the dumb Russian attempt to justify it's unprovoked mass invasion of its large generally peaceful neighbour. After 2022, "Nazi" now means -- and should mean -- someone who violently invades someone else's country without a generally agreed moral reason.

Right now the term "Nazi" applies to one better than President Putin and his gang of assholes, and, in a lesser sense, to the pathetic Russian people who allow this pointless war to continue relatively unchallenged in their homeland, because they've clearly been Nazified by Russian "de-Nazification" propaganda.

As for Yaroslav Hunka, this guy was a Nazi almost a hundred years ago, and then that was as a Slav fighting for a Nazi regime that was planning to genocide tens of millions of Slavs, because (guess what?) Eastern European history has always been a bit of mess. But messes have to stop sometime, not be used to make ever more messes. 

____________________

Follow @cbliddell

Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).