WHY ARE WE CELEBRATING RED ARMY CONQUESTS IN THE STREETS OF TORONTO?
Paul Philip Willis
“Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother’s wounded, half alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse … The mother begs, ‘Soldier, kill me!’ ”
The late Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote this profoundly disturbing narrative in a poem called “Prussian Nights” in 1945, as he witnessed his fellow soldiers in the communist Soviet Red Army engaging in mass looting and raping in Eastern Germany as they advanced on Adolf Hitler’s Berlin.
It is a well-known historical fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), for most of its dark reign covering half the planet from 1917 to 1991, represented an evil force that committed well-documented atrocities including, but not limited to, the genocide of millions of Ukrainians in the 1932-33 Holodomor, mass imprisonment and unspeakable tortures visited upon political prisoners in the Gulag Archipelago, enslavement of most of Eastern Europe under the leadership of complicit and brutal puppet regimes, and countless other crimes against humanity perpetrated all over the globe for the greater good of communism.
Imagine my surprise then, having arrived a year ago at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square to attend an event ostensibly organized to celebrate Victory in Europe Day (VE Day — May 8, 1945), the date Western allied countries commemorate the surrender of Nazi Germany, spotting a small contingent of former Soviet Red Army soldiers, numerous Soviet display booths and even a participant waving the Hammer and Sickle flag. They were celebrating Victory Day, the Soviet version of VE Day.
The Soviets fought the Nazis on the Eastern Front, and for four years endured some of the harshest fighting in the war. That’s historical fact. But for those of us with a properly aligned moral compass and an understanding of that history, we rightly view the inclusion of Soviet forces in a ceremony celebrating our Western troops who fought for democracy and freedom, as an offensive attempt to create a false moral equivalency between the two societies.
Having signed a pact of non-aggression with the U.S.S.R. in 1939, Hitler felt secure enough to launch his blitzkrieg in Western Europe while the Soviet Union busied itself invading Eastern European countries, including Poland, where amongst other crimes it murdered 22,000 military officers and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest that same year. It was not until June 1941, when Hitler attacked Russia, that the Soviets joined in the battle with the Western allies. At the time Winston Churchill, in agreeing to support the tyrant Joseph Stalin, famously stated “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” There was no mistaking who the devil (Stalin) was in that statement; Churchill, and indeed all Western leaders, were under no delusions as to the evils of communism.
Upon the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, the U.S.S.R. quickly returned to its never-ending mission of imposing communism worldwide, through five decades of threatening nuclear war, invading susceptible countries, crushing rebellion in nations it oppressed (such as Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968) and providing logistical or moral support to murderous communist regimes in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia to name but a few.
Toronto’s combined VE Day and Soviet Victory Day ceremony was orchestrated in 2015 by Coun. James Pasternak in conjunction with a Toronto-based Soviet Committee formed to celebrate their victory in the Great Patriotic War (the name the Russians give to the Second World War), and once again, on Wednesday, Nathan Phillips Square was host to this disingenuous joint venture.
A review of the Soviet Victory Day website contains pictures of soldiers or actors marching down Toronto streets with Red Army uniforms, Soviet flags and banners flying, and an interesting description about how “… people of all nationalities and religions selflessly stood shoulder to shoulder in fighting the enemy of Civilization as we know it. It was this union of all Civilized Nations that led to the historic victory over fascism.” Of all the phrases one could accurately employ to describe the former Soviet Union, “Civilized Nation” is not one of them.
For all right thinking Canadians, especially those who are descendants of the millions whom the Communist Soviets oppressed and murdered, the participation of Soviet Red Army forces in a VE Day celebration is an abhorrent charade and a gross insult to our Canadian veterans, and those from our allied democracies.
The Swastika and the Hammer and Sickle both represent pure evil, the latter just had a longer run on flag poles. There ought to be no place for it on Toronto’s streets.
Paul Philip Willis is a freelance writer living in Toronto
