BY ANDREW FEINSTEIN

Our democracy is in crisis. The two main parties are virtually indistinguishable in their offers of permanent austerity, forever wars and environmental degradation. 

Keir Starmer, the MP for Holborn and St. Pancras where my family and I have lived for around 22 years, is emblematic of this crisis. His politics are mendacious, unprincipled and in the interests of his billionaire donors rather than the constituents he was elected to serve.

I have seen real leadership in action: I was privileged to serve under Nelson Mandela as an MP in South Africa. His leadership was selfless, principled, accountable, transparent and honest. Everything that Keir Starmer is not.

His almost immediate abandonment of many of the ten progressive pledges on which he was elected to lead the Labour Party is a clear sign he cannot be trusted. 

Starmer has now gone a step too far by refusing to support an unqualified ceasefire and a halt to arms sales to Israel amid the greatest human tragedy since World War Two: the genocide being committed in Gaza. 

How is it possible that a former human rights lawyer, who must see the horrific images that we all view on our screens every day, has not even commented on the highest court in the world’s interim ruling that Israel is likely committing genocide and ethnic cleansing? 

The ICC’s decision to seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, including “starvation of civilians, wilfully causing great suffering and cruel treatment”, casts Starmer’s support for a siege of Gaza – cutting off water and power – in an even more appalling light.

His attempts to deny such support, despite video evidence confirming it, smacks of a remarkable lack of honesty or contrition.

He has backed the Conservative government’s indefensible position on the crisis, rather than demanding an end to the carnage, to occupation and to apartheid – the only route to a just peace in the region. 

The Labour Party’s appalling stance on Gaza has fuelled a concern, enunciated most explicitly in a report written by Martin Forde KC, that the party operates a ‘hierarchy of racism’.

It oxymoronically expels life-long anti-racist Jews, supposedly to combat antisemitism, while taking little if any action against Islamophobia and anti-black racism. 

As Nelson Mandela opined: “You are either against all forms of racism and discrimination, or you are part of the racism problem.”

Watch Andrew’s campaign launch

The UK government, supported by the Labour Party, is not only enabling and facilitating the genocide in Gaza, but also profits from it through the continuing sale of the weapons being used to kill innocents. 

I believe these arms sales are in contravention of British arms export controls, our obligations under international law and as signatory to the International Arms Trade Treaty.

The notoriously corrupt British defence sector has for decades routed money to our main political parties and to individual politicians – mostly once they have left office, for decisions taken while in office. 

These companies are the most heavily subsidised by the public purse, meaning that we the taxpayer are subsidising the arms being used in Gaza, the undermining of the rule of law and the corrupting of our political system.

I am committed to rooting out corruption in politics. I resigned from the South African Parliament on principle in 2001 because our then President Thabo Mbeki refused to allow an unfettered investigation by my oversight committee into a massively corrupt arms deal which benefited senior ministers, officials, corporate executives and my own party. 

Since then, I have spent the past 23 years investigating and writing about political corruption, especially in the global arms trade: the most corrupt of all trades – the bribes from which oil the wheels of our political system.

https://www.declassifieduk.org/andrew-feinstein-why-i-am-standing-against-keir-starmer/

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Boris Johnson used to be a joke but he’s become a beast. The man who held the banner of the fascist Azov brigade, desecrating the place where Churchill spat at the Naz*s

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Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Though it’s well known (by now) that U.S. President Harry Truman’s Administration, and Eisenhower’s afterward, extracted from the conquered Nazi forces after WW II thousands of Nazis who were eager to assist the U.S. and UK, in order ultimately to defeat the Soviet Union (whom all Nazis hated), less well known is that both Winston Churchill and his successor Clement Attlee similarly assisted ‘former’ Nazis, and helped them to find refuge and work in Canada after WW II. By contrast — and this fact is massively suppressed by ‘historians’ in U.S.-allied countries — the Soviet Union itself fervently executed any Nazis and pro-Nazis that it could capture. Whereas the Soviet Government was intensely ideologically opposed to nazism, the U.S. and British post-WW2 Governments were not, but simply treated this matter as, essentially, one empire (theirs — America’s coming worldwide power, with the UK being its tag-along) conquering and taking control over another (the German empire, but also the Japanese empire, and the Italian empire — and the entire world). By contrast, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin’s attitude on this imperialism-matter was very different from theirs (but identical to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s had been), that imperialism of any nation is unacceptable. Stalin believed this way because Karl Marx’s philosophy condemned imperialism. (The ideologically anti-imperialist Stalin had Leon Trotsky killed because Trotsky advocated for there to come into existence throughout the world a Marxist empire — something that Marx himself would have viewed as a contradiction-in-terms, a self-contradiction.) Though FDR opposed communism on account of communism’s domestically or internally being a form of dictatorship (leftist communism instead of rightist fascism — the capitalistic type of dictatorship), Roosevelt agreed with Stalin on international affairs more than he agreed with the ideologically committed imperialist Churchill about imperialism — FDR was dead-set against it. FDR intended that after WW II, all empires, including Britain’s (and America didn’t have any empire until Truman became President after FDR died, though President Teddy Roosevelt had wanted America to have one), would be totally ended: Truman even allowed what came to be called “the British Commonwealth,” a continuation of the English empire under a different name and with slightly weaker control over its colonies; and he allowed essentially the same for France. FDR would not have.

In fact, a ferocious disagreement between Churchill and Stalin broke out over the nazism-issue — Stalin viewing Nazis as unreformable imperialists who must be killed while Churchill expressed a ‘humanitarian’ outrage against such a blanket condemnation of them — during the 1944 Yalta Conference, and FDR displayed there his extraordinary people-skills in order to defuse the conflict promptly so that the Big Three would work seamlessly together to win the war against the Axis powers.  Here is how that crucial incident was recounted in the masterpiece of history on this matter, How He Saw It, by FDR’s son Elliott Roosevelt, who attended with his father all of the wartime Allied Conferences that both FDR and Churchill attended, and he kept detailed notes on each one of them, which served as the basis for his book:

pp. 188-90: [28 November 1943]

Toward the end of the meal Uncle Joe [Stalin] arose to propose his umpteenth toast. … I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all of Germany’s war criminals — justice before a firing squad. I drink to our unity in dispatching them as fast as we capture them, all of them, and there must be at least fifty thousand of them.” [The U.S., under Truman and Eisenhower, instead protected almost all of the ‘former’ Nazis it could and hired them to help America’s Cold War against the Soviet Union.]

Quick as a flash Churchill was on his feet. … His face and neck were red.

“Any such attitude,” he cried, “is totally contrary to our British sense of justice! The British people will never stand for such mass murder.” [So declared one of the 20th Century’s — not in his rhetoric but in his actual orders as a public official — biggest mass-murderers (especially mass-murders of total innocents). His declaring this against another of them doesn’t exonerate Churchill but instead displays that in hypocrisy Churchill had no peer. At least Stalin was honest. Churchill wasn’t even that. And he was saying this in order to protect Nazis — in this war against Nazis, which for him turns out to have been instead a war against what for him was only a competing empire.] …

I glanced to Stalin: he seemed hugely tickled, but his face remained serious; only his eyes twinkled as he took up the P.M.’s challenge and drew him on. … At length, Stalin turned to Father and asked his opinion. Father, who had been hiding a smile, … nevertheless felt that the moment was beginning to be too highly charged with bad feeling: it was his notion to inject a witticism.

“As usual,” he said, “it seems to be my function to mediate this dispute. Clearly there must be some sort of compromise between your position, Mr. Stalin, and that of my good friend the Prime Minister. Perhaps we could say that, instead of summarily executing fifty thhousand war criminals, we should settle on a smaller number. Shall we say forty-nine thousand five hundred?”

Americans and Russians laughed. The British, taking their cue from their Prime Minister’s mounting fury, sat quiet and straight-faced. … 

“Well,” I said, … “Isn’t the whole thing pretty academic?” … All of a sudden an angry finger was being waved right at my face.

“Are you interested in damaging relations between the Allies? Do you know what you are saying? How can you dare say such a thing?” It was Churchill — and he was furious. …

Fortunately, the dinner broke up soon afterward.

That book is especially important to investigative historians because it includes, more than all other of the historical records put together do, the entirely private (non-official — as opposed to the official records of FDR’s far less passionately publicly stated views against imperialism. In public, FDR didn’t want to offend world leaders such as Churchill who were committed to imperialism. During the War, he knew that Churchill’s hypocritical outburst posed a threat to Allied unity. These views that FDR privately stated against imperialism were the exact opposite of both Churchill’s views, and the views of FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, starting from 25 July 1945 on through the end of his Administration, and also of Truman’s personal hero and successor, Dwight Eisenhower throughout his eight years as the President, during which the Truman-created CIA escalated even further than under Truman its frequency of perpetrating coups abroad. Together, Truman and Eisenhower created the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, in order to set the U.S. Government irrevocably onto the path of ultimate control over the entire world — to becoming (as Hitler had been hoping for Germany to become) the world’s first and only all-inclusive global empire or “hegemon.” This is the reason why the United States and its allies accepted and protected, and established jobs for, the ‘ex’-Nazis that the Soviet Union was ideologically opposed to tolerating at all.

Elliott Roosevelt’s book was written as a protest against Truman’s having turned FDR’s foreign policy upside-down; and Elliott was perhaps in a better position to document this historical turnabout than anyone else was, because he was perhaps the closest of all persons to his father as FDR designed and carried out his foreign policies and his designing of the United Nations (which Truman neutered).

The 12 WW2 Allied Conferences that included both Roosevelt and Churchill were the Atlantic Conference (9-12 August 1941), First Washington Conference (22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942), Second Washington Conference (20-25 June 1942), Second Moscow Conference (12-17 August 1942), Casablanca Conference (14-24 January 1943), First Quebec Conference (17-24 August 1943), Cairo Conference (23-26 November 1943), Tehran Conference (28 November 1943 to 1 December 1943 — with Stalin), Second Cairo Conference (4-6 December 1943), Second Quebec Conference (12-16 September 1944), Malta Conference (30 January 1945 to 2 February 1945), and Yalta Conference (4-11 February 1945 — with Stalin). Elliot was with his father at each of the private meetings between FDR and Churchill, which were at 6 of these 12 Conferences — Atlantic, Casablanca, First Quebec, Cairo, Tehran, and Yalta (the 6 most important of the 12) — and he made detailed notes right after each of these private meetings between FDR and Churchill; and, unlike the formal Conference meetings, at which were also subordinate officials who produced the official records, these were unofficial recordings, and therefore are ignored by many ‘historians’ as-if those conversations — the conversations that most directly revealed the conflicts between Churchill and Roosevelt — didn’t even exist. Furthermore, in all of the memoirs, other records, and other accounts by FDR’s close aides at these conferences, such as by Sumner Welles and by E.R. Stettinius, exactly the same FDR-Churchill disagreements that Elliott’s book documents were displayed, though not in such striking detail as Elliott’s book did (since the were private, not official, meetings). And not only does his book document the deep disagreement between Roosevelt and Churchill regarding imperialism, but it also documents FDR’s having been, regarding international relations, nearly — if not absolutely fully — in agreement with Stalin about imperialism: Stalin shared Roosevelt’s contempt for and rejection of empires and imperialism, and this set both of them against Churchill.

And, so, for example, on 28 May 2024, Hunter Pauli headlined at declassifieduk.org a relevant article titled “KING CHARLES ACCEPTED AWARD FROM NAZI VETERAN: Exclusive: Charles received honorary degree from Ukrainian Nazi veteran when he was Prince of Wales in 1983.”These excerpts summarize it:

In his acceptance speech, Charles praised those who had “sacrificed their lives 40 years ago” in the fight against Adolf Hitler.

Yet the award was conferred on him by a Nazi collaborator – the university’s chancellor Peter Savaryn.

Originally from Ukraine, he served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS – the so-called Galicia division – during World War Two.

Savaryn was among thousands of Waffen-SS Galicia men who escaped to the West after 1945, often with British assistance. …

The admiration was mutual. Savaryn himself received a Royal honour, the Order of Canada, in 1987.

Governor General Mary Simon, the British monarchy’s representative in Canada, apologised for that last year. 

She stated: “Historical appointments to the Order of Canada reflect a specific moment in time, and would have been based on limited information sources available at that time.”

However Simon did not mention in her apology that Savaryn had awarded Charles an honorary degree in 1983.

Savaryn’s memoirs also include a photograph of him with one of Simon’s predecessor’s, Governor General Ray Hnatshyn. 

He received an honorary degree from the University of Alberta in 1994 in similar fashion to Charles.

This pattern of Savaryn and the British monarchy exchanging honours was omitted from Governor General Simon’s apology. …

The revelation that Charles received a degree from Savaryn will cause intense discomfort for the Royal family, which has previously been accused of being too close to the Nazis.

In the 1930s, Charles’ disgraced great-uncle, King Edward VIII, went to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler and his grandmother was filmed giving a Nazi salute.

Cruelty and pillage

Savaryn rarely spoke publicly about his wartime experiences, but admitted in an interview to joining the Galicia division in 1944 after much of the unit was encircled and destroyed during the Soviet liberation of Ukraine. 

Rather than fighting to free Ukraine from Soviet rule, the Galicia division retreated deeper into German-occupied Europe. Savaryn confessed to hunting down partisans during Slovakia’s uprising against the Nazis in 1944. 

According to the Military Historical Institute of Slovakia, “If we compare them to regular Wehrmacht units, the way they behaved, the cruelty and the pillage by the Galicia Division was much worse. The Galician Division was the most cruel, the worst of all.”

Savaryn then fought with the Galicia division in Yugoslavia against Tito’s communist partisans before his unit was withdrawn by the Nazis to protect Austria’s capital, Vienna, from the Soviets.

“They sent us to Austria to defend the German Reich, and again there was a lot of action,” Savaryn said.

He added that in Austria his unit was cut off from the rest of the division while holding its line of retreat. Rather than surrender to the Soviets he instead crossed the Alps into Bavaria, southern Germany, with 1,500 other Waffen-SS men and surrendered to American troops. 

He spent a year as a prisoner of war before being released into a displaced persons camp near Stuttgart.

There Savaryn met his wife-to-be who had family in Alberta’s Peace River Country. When the option to emigrate to Canada came, he took it, obscuring his Waffen-SS past.

“I did not say anything about my service at all,” Savaryn recalled in the interview.  “I said ‘I want to go to Canada’ and they said ‘well we need some farmers, we need some woodworkers,’ so I agreed to go to cut lumber.”

Savaryn arrived in Canada in 1949 alongside thousands of other Galicia division volunteers and headed west, eventually enrolling in the University of Alberta. 

MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence agency, helped many Waffen-SS veterans migrate to Canada, according to the historian Stephen Dorril.

British protection

The British government began lying to protect the Waffen-SS Galicia Division before the Second World War was even over. 

At the Potsdam Conference in occupied Germany in July 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill personally deflected a Soviet inquiry into the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator unit, members of which were then detained in a British prisoners of war camp, by referring to them as “a Polish division”.

In 1992, professor David Cesarani of the University of London’s Holocaust Research Centre published a book, Justice Delayed, detailing how Britain spirited the Galicia division out of prisoner of war camps into the UK early in the Cold War. 

The operation was led by the Foreign Office, then overseen by staunch anti-communist foreign secretary Ernest Bevin in the Labour government.

Facing extradition to the Soviet Union – and likely severe prosecution for collaborating with the Nazis – Bevin and his colleagues successfully lobbied to reclassify the captured SS soldiers from POWs to “Displaced Persons” (DPs).

This civilian refugee status allowed their importation into Britain as much-needed labour under the European Voluntary Workers system.

According to Cesarani, EVW programmes “were turned into a chute down which to eject ‘politically embarrassing elements’”. Despite official protests from other segments of the British government, “the political impetus built up relentlessly, crushing all opposition”.

Complaints about the import of an entire Nazi division of Waffen-SS soldiers into Britain made it to the House of Commons, where Jewish MPs vocally opposed the Foreign Office’s plan. …

Rehabilitating the SS

The Foreign Office’s response to criticism of its plan to import Savaryn’s unit to Britain involved a pattern of lies Cesarani called “the quiet rehabilitation of an entire Waffen SS division.”

“The transportation of the 14th Waffen-SS Galizien Division to Britain in May 1947 was not a covert operation, but the division’s history was sanitised and efforts were made to minimise its public profile”, Cesarani wrote. 

He added that “parliamentary questions were deflected and the protests from other departments of state were neutralised by the use of misleading and selective information”. Cesarani commented: “At times it appears as though the FO [Foreign Office] was actually operating a cover-up”.

Also lobbying in favour of the Galicia division was Tracy Phillips, a long term British intelligence officer who published a letter in the Guardian in 1947 defending the SS men in Britain by whitewashing their bloody legacy and Nazi service. 

Phillips had been sent to Canada in 1940 as a propagandist by Britain’s Ministry of Information to convert pro-Hitler Ukrainian fascist groups such as the Ukrainian Nationalist Federation, to the Allied side.

The Ukrainian Nationalist Federation was the Canadian affiliate of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the openly fascist Ukrainian independence group closely associated with Waffen-SS Galicia men and other Nazi collaborators.

Working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Phillips organised what came to be known as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress as a pro-Allied umbrella group for Ukrainian nationalist organisations, which soon became dominated by the OUN. …

Sinister legion

Repression of left-wing Canadian Ukrainians continued into the postwar era. Today their legacy is continued by the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, whose Edmonton branch has demanded apologies from Canadian leaders and the removal of Edmonton’s Waffen-SS memorials.

This was after the Canadian House of Commons gave a standing ovation to fellow Waffen-SS Galicia veteran Yaroslav Hunka last year, prompting Speaker Anthony Rota to resign.

“If honoring Yaroslav Hunka in the House of Commons was a shameful act that had to be corrected, then so must all these other cases be corrected,” the Association said in a statement.

Its president, Glenn Michalchuk, told Declassified: “A very thorough investigation of this whole history is necessary and needs to be published.” …

Rise in Canada

Before he died in 2017, Savaryn was the most high profile and politically successful of the Galicia division veterans in Canada. 

He allied with future Alberta premier Peter Lougheed of the Progressive Conservative Association during the long reign of the province’s Social Credit Party to deliver votes from Edmonton’s large Ukrainian population.

In a 2014 oral history interview, Savaryn traces his loyalty to Alberta’s Tories to a 1956 speech in Edmonton by soon-to-be-elected Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker.

Diefenbaker eulogised Ukrainian independence leader Symon Petliura on the 30th anniversary of his assassination. The killing was perpetrated by a Jewish anarchist in Paris in retribution for the tens of thousands of Jews slaughtered by Petliura’s forces during the Russian civil war. 

Savaryn’s memoirs picture him placing flowers on a memorial to Petliura in Paris, as well as a photo with Diefenbaker.

“He was a fantastic speaker, Diefenbaker. And he called for the dismemberment of the Soviet empire to free freedom-loving Ukrainians. I liked him so much that from then on I was Conservative,” Savaryn said.

Lougheed and the Conservatives won big in Alberta in 1971, taking over the province and governing it uninterrupted for decades. Savaryn rose with the party, and in 1976 was unanimously elected as president of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta.

“I kept telling Peter [Lougheed]: ‘broaden the base, involve the ethnics, like Ukrainians and Germans, that no one is enlisting,’” Savaryn said in an interview with the Edmonton Journal, the mouthpiece of Alberta’s Conservatives.

Knights of the Golden Lion

In 1974, Lougheed cut the ribbon to open Edmonton’s Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, a Ukrainian nationalist community centre featuring a bust of Roman Shukhevych, an infamous Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. 

Shukhevych’s troops killed thousands of Jews and Poles during the war, with units he commanded later folded into the Galicia division.

In his memoirs, Savaryn refers to the Galicia division as “the Knights of the Golden Lion” – a reference to an old Galician kingdom’s coat of arms adopted by the Ukrainian SS men as their unit’s insignia.

Also pictured in Savaryn’s memoirs is his presence at the consecration of the Galicia division memorial in Edmonton’s St. Michael’s Cemetery in 1976 by Catholic Cardinal and Ukrainian nationalist Josyf Slipyj. The memorial lies close to the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex.

Both memorials have made news in recent years after being defaced, with calls for their removal by local Jews ignored.

Savaryn’s memoirs, available only in Ukrainian, have been mentioned by English-language scholars critical of the postwar Western historiography of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, much of which was propagated by Galicia division veterans and their ideological allies in Canada. 

This includes the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, a nationalist revisionist research institute Savaryn helped found.

Other luminaries photographed with Savaryn who appear in his memoirs include former Canadian prime ministers Lester B. Pearson and Joe Clark, Pope John Paul II, Archbishop of Canterbury Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa.

The 1965 East German Brown Book listed and described thousands of ‘ex’-Nazis at and near the very top of West Germany’s Government and major corporations, whom the East German Government had records and testimony on and was trying to get for prosecution on possible war-crimes charges. On 23 March 2024, I headlined about this nazi participation continuing even in the now-unified (all-U.S.-controlled) Germany, under the headline “How Germany Is Still Controlled by Nazis”.

We live in the world that Truman made, not in the world that FDR had been so brilliantly and so carefully planning to bring about.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/churchill-truman-protected-all-the-nazis-they-could-to-defeat-russia/

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