It’s hard to come up with ways to justify Canada’s PM and Parliament for giving a standing ovation for a fucking Waffen SS veteran, and Matt Taibbi doesn’t even try:
Let me get this straight:
A year and a half ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced a Jewish member of parliament named Melissa Lantsman for standing with “people who wave swastikas“. Lantsman had criticized Trudeau for fanning “the flames of an unjustified national emergency” in response to the “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests. The “swastikas” Trudeau referenced were, as even Snopes conceded, virtually all “pictured on signs as a way of mocking and protesting government restrictions”, comme ça:
By saying Lantsman stood with “people who wave swastikas”, in other words, Trudeau really meant she was standing with “people who called me a Nazi”. He declined to apologize, which of course is his prerogative.
This week, both Trudeau and House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota are under fire after Rota invited, and Trudeau applauded, a 98-year-old former soldier from the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division named Yaroslav Hunka to attend an address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Rota praised Hunka as a “Canadian hero” from his time fighting the Soviets in World War II when, not that it matters, they were allies to the United States and Canada. Leaving the elderly Hunka out of this for the moment, these politicians could easily have turned up the man’s blogs about joining Hitler’s army, making the applause scene at least approach the max on the cringe scale:
Amid the subsequent outcry, Trudeau squeaked out a handful of sentences that collectively gave off least a faint aroma of apology, though he personally didn’t apologize for anything, and invoked “mistakes were made” phrasing …
