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You’re going with both sides, huh? You know those things can still be true and nazi monuments can still be bad, right? Did I or anyone else praise Stalin? Or even FDR who oversaw the interment of Americans?
As has been pointed out upthread, this is a monument to volunteer Nazis. They happened to be Ukrainian. There were also Ukrainian resistance fighters opposing Moscow who weren’t Nazis (still are!).
No one is preventing anyone from bringing nuance to the discussion here. Numerous posters have done exactly that already. What is not being countenanced, although anyone is still welcome to make them, are disingenuous arguments conflating all Ukrainians with Nazi volunteers or condemnation of Nazis with praise of Stalin. This is the same bullshit argument that conflates confederate traitors with Southerners.
Again, you’re welcome to post it, but expect to have it pulled apart swiftly.
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I knew you, Mindysan33, would not let me down!
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Looks like somewhere between 10k-20k so, admittedly, I was on the high side there.
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You’re going with straw men, huh? Here’s what I said:
Directly? No, but you also warned against
Given that Japanese-interning FDR, totalitarian genocide author Stalin, and open racist Winston Churchill led those efforts, I’m not sure I see much daylight between what you said and praising those folks–especially given your repeated assumptions in this thread that anybody who isn’t in agreement with you must be …
Again, my point is not that Nazi monuments should be permitted anywhere–as I said already. They should not. We should tear them down, including this one.
It’s that perhaps we should remember that the people who put this statue up in 1988 were likely motivated by condemning the regime that was at that time continuing to oppress their living family members. So they put up a monument to some undisputedly bad people who were dead, because those undisputedly bad people fought against other undisputedly bad people who were, in their view, worse, and whose whose ideological descendants were continuing to oppress their former countrymen.
That’s the nuance that appears to be missing from at least one side of this discussion.
Yeah, I saw that #, but I didn’t see it sourced. From my readings, which were some time ago, given the state of the Confederacy in 1865 I would put the number much lower. But, I’m totally prepared to be wrong. /shrug
To Nazis? No thanks.
There is a difference, though, between German soldiers who fought in WW2 and Nazis. I saw memorials to the former all over Germany when I drove through the countryside a few years ago. Nothing huge or ostentatious. Just names, units, and places served–plaques and stone memorials.
FDR ≠ USA
Stalin ≠ USSR
Churchill ≠ UK
This all aligns with my original point that:
Ukrainian Nazis ≠ Ukrainian immigrants to Canada and therefore shouldn’t be memorialized.
Nazis. Say anything you like, it doesn’t change that fact. Your exact same argument can be attributed to hundreds of groups of oppressed people over time who have joined forces with dubious sponsors to defeat their oppressors:
French and Native Americans
Cherokee and Confederates
US and Mujahideen
US and Nicaraguan Contras
US and Kurds
US and Muslim Brotherhood
US and… lots, actually
Agreed. And that’s precisely the struggle that monuments like this debase and erode.
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Unless you’re talking about German resistance fighters, there is quite literally not.
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Nuance was provided above. Perhaps take some time to read the topic before complaining about a lack of nuance.
It goes beyond anti-Communism and beyond even anti-Polish sentiment. No-one who volunteered for a Waffen SS unit could claim that they were unaware of the core eliminationist mission of the organisation. Given Ukraine’s long history of violent anti-Semitism – one that predates the Nazi era by many decades – I’d be willing to put money on the proposition that most of this unit’s volunteers found that mission perfectly acceptable.
As my comment history here shows, I have no patience for apologists for the expansionist adventurism in Ukraine of either the Soviet empire or the current regime of the former KGB thug. The flipside of that, though, is that I’m also not tolerant of whataboutism or historical “revisionism” that tries to excuse right-wing populist Ukrainians, including the current ones as well as the ones who joined the SS and are, shamefully, memorialised in Toronto.
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Here in Montreal there’s a statue of Norman Bethune, a doctor who went to Spain in 1936 on the Republican side, and to China before WWII. If I remember, the actual statue came from China.
He set up.a mobile blood transfusion clinic in Spain. But he was a Communist, so that may have impacted on him getting a statue.
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I thought technically nazis were party members. You couldn’t hold a position of power without joining the nazi party, but you could be in the German army at a low level without being a nazi.
For that matter, I’m pretty sure they had conscription, so being a part of the army didn’t mean agreement.
Yes, lots of Germans didn’t say anything. But some of that was fear. So we can’t blame all Germans.
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In part, my suggestion about lack of nuance was a response to this:
… which seemed to me to condemn that calculation, but appeared to me to implicitly excuse our converse calculation–i.e., that the Nazis were a threat so awful that making a formal alliance with the Soviets was preferable. (I think our calculation was probably the better of two awful options, but sixty million dead Russians and eastern Europeans might disagree with me.)
But I take your point that I wasn’t reading it in the context of your other comments on the BBS at large.
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You’d be wrong. Speaking of nuance, there were other choices besides joining the Waffen SS (or the Hiwis) that were available to the Ukrainian who objected to the Soviet presence in his homeland and wanted to resist-- the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, for example (problematic right-leaning nationalists, to be sure, but the not the kind of full-on Nazi collaborators honoured by the monument under discussion). The context of my other comments here doesn’t change that fact.
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As an American, I carry the blame for our history of genocide, chattel slavery, imperial adventuring and countless unjust wars. That is both the burden and the responsibility of US citizens. Refusing to accept the blame for our nation’s sins is to memorialize a history that does not exist. For people who were contemporary of those sins and didn’t resist, I’ve got zero sympathy. There are plenty of examples of those that did.
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The Nuremberg Trials set an assumption that if you were in the party before 1933, you were a full fledged Nazi. Beyond that, there were lots of factors that calculated into your culpability: age, rank, specific job, etc. it’s messy, sure, But I’m perfectly happy to make a distinction between the Minister of Railroads and the 18 year old kid who guarded the coal mines with AAA guns, even though both were working to the same end.
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The eradication of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and any other group they didn’t align with and the establishment of a white ethnostate? Right.
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