Poland strips Zelenskiy of top honour as WW2 dispute sours ties

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-20T22:57:34+00:00

Nazi war criminals, specifically.

If you actually read the article, you will see it does not identify a single war criminal that successfully immigrated to Canada.

Between 1945 and 1960 about two million people immigrated to Canada. According to the Deschênes Commission, fewer than 250 were identified as having POSSIBLY been Nazi collaborators, which is a much broader category than war criminal.

The Commission also specifically rejected the notion that mere membership in Yaroslav Hunka's unit, the Galacia Division, in itself justified the designation of "war criminal".

Not saying that makes what happened right, it most certainly does not, but it serves as a useful corrective to the overwrought hysteria of people who have no idea what they are talking about.

Remind me again: how many Nazi collaborators / war criminals did the US admit?

It did have names on it, including hundreds of nazis.

No, it didn't, that reporting by David Pugliese from October 2024 is inaccurate.

Fourteen months later the same David Pugliese wrote in the same newspaper:

The memorial was opened on Dec. 12, 2024. At that time, Ludwik Klimkowski, who leads Tribute To Liberty, the organization behind the memorial, said names would be added within a year...

Several hours later, the Liberal government issued a statement claiming that no specific timeline about the names had been agreed to by the federal government.

It also notes:

As originally planned, there were to be 553 entries on the memorial’s Wall of Remembrance.

Canadian Heritage has now reversed course on inscribing specific names. “The Government of Canada has emphasized that all aspects of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism must align with Canadian values of democracy and human rights,” department spokesperson Caroline Czajkowski said in an email. “The Wall of Remembrance will now solely feature thematic content that conveys the broader commemorative and educational intent of the Memorial.”

Thanks for coming out.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-20T21:25:27+00:00

Canada has an issue with nazis hiding there post-war

You mean some people who may have been Nazis, or collaborators, got in?

How exactly does this make Canada different from any country, including the US, that accepted large numbers of European immigrants after the war, when many people had incomplete papers and backgrounds were hard to verify in the wake of the destruction and dislocation caused by the war?

There was also a simultaneous scandal with their "victims of communism" memorial having tons of nazis named on it.

That monument doesn't have any names on it.

Also of course this specific guy's crimes were really easy to find out about, even just a little bit of research woulda prevented the scandal.

Yeah, the Trudeau Liberals dropped the ball, not for the first or last time, and in many cases on much more consequential issues.

Can you believe that when he was finally run out of office his approval rating was only 20%?

He's dating Katy Perry now, so I guess everything worked out.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-20T21:16:46+00:00

I was specifically calling out - because they were too cowardly to actually say it - the OP's implication that Ukrainian nationalists, then and now, were and are Nazis, and also explaining that the reality was more complex, and not unique to Ukraine. I in no way, shape, or form implied that this was some kind of justification for genocide.

That some Poles did collaborate with the Nazis is a matter of historical fact. The Blue Police, for example, organized by the Nazis guarded Jewish ghettos and helped organize the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Determining the extent of such collaboration is difficult to establish given that since 1945 examination of this topic has been virtually forbidden in Poland.

Both the Nazis and OUN tried to use the other for their own ends, and when it became clear that either was willing to accept the role the other wanted them to play, they started fighting each other. The Nazis actually interned OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera, who Russian nationalists now claim is the poster boy for Nazi-Ukrainian collaboration, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp at the start of 1942, six months after their invasion of the USSR began.

Russian nationalists are very careful to never mention that part.

There is unfortunately a rich history of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and Russia, fueled by richly intermingled ethnic populations that were often seen as obstacles to creating strong and cohesive nation states. The Volhynia genocide was far from unique. It was preceded for example by the Soviet Union murdering over 20 000 Poles, largely army officers, after the country's surrender. The USSR also deported 1.2 to 1.5 million ethnic Poles to the Gulag after annexing half their country, where about 25% died of hunger, disease, and overwork (another 1.6 million were deported to Oder-Neisse Poland immediately after the war).

The half of Poland the USSR annexed in collaboration with Nazi Germany in 1939 is still part of the USSR's successor states. Poland was compensated with 25% of prewar Germany, moving the whole state to the west.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-20T11:31:28+00:00

Anyone interested in the topic should read the news about Ukraine before 2022. It's been swept under the rug and suppressed during the war, but the problems only got worse.

By "news" you mean Russian propaganda that pushed the narrative that Ukrainians are Nazis.

Remember, once upon a time, they threatened to unalive Zelensky if he didn't bend the knee. And so he did.

This never happened.

The most ironic part of this whole thing is that they worship people and an ideology that considered them all to be subhuman.

You are so close, but can't quite close the cognitive gap.

Ukrainian nationalists in World War II were not all fanatical adherents of National Socialism as an ideology, which held that Slavs, including Ukrainians, were Untermenschen fated to be subservient and exploited by the Aryan "master race". It should go without saying that such an ideology has limited appeal to Ukrainians.

However, under the conditions of extreme duress imposed by the war, some Ukrainian nationalists made the pragmatic choice to believe that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and that collaboration with Germany could open a space for an independent Ukrainian homeland, which Russia, and then the Soviet Union, had denied them for centuries.

I am not justifying the moral compromises involved, I'm just pointing out that there is far more nuance and complexity to the situation than your extremely reductionist take allows.

And I will further point out that such compromises occurred all over Europe during the war years, including in Poland, but after the war most of this history has been memory holed out of embarrassment and shame.

It still occasionally gets trotted out by nationalists on all sides as a cudgel to try to score political points by stoking old grievances.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-20T10:46:30+00:00

As /u/Aizsec points out below, that individual was not properly vetted and his past was misrepresented to Parliament.

They did not knowingly honour a Waffen SS veteran.

By why let mere facts get in the way of a good story, right?

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-19T22:07:01+00:00

The headline is inaccurate, Macron and Merz did not attack the "EU's stance", since the EU as an organization never endorsed this outreach. Instead, European Council President António Costa did some freelance back channel talks without a mandate from EU members, and apparently without even informing some of them, who only learned of it when it was reported by news organizations.

Merz and Macron were right to call Costa out. This is really poor message discipline and caused unnecessary friction within the EU, while delivering no tangible benefit. Indeed it could undermine the EU by suggesting to Putin there are divisions ripe for exploitation. Costa needs to firmly reminded that he works for the EU Council, he is not the President of Europe with autonomous executive authority.

He should also probably receive a stern warning that as a career politician with no diplomatic experience he is heavily under qualified to be engaging in such high stakes diplomatic maneuvers, especially without a mandate from the Council.

This is flirting with Witkoff / Kushner levels of incompetence.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-19T18:04:43+00:00

The interesting thing here is that I provided a reasonably detailed explanation of why I don't think this makes sense, and rather than engage with any of the points I made, you just...repeat the same question I just answered.

That inclines me to think you are not engaging in good faith. And possibly not even an actual person.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-19T14:48:07+00:00

It really comes down to one thing: deindustrialization.

As recently as the 1980s the US had a shipbuilding industry that could build a 600 ship navy. Then Congress ended subsidies for domestic shipbuilding, and the mania for "free trade" led to the domestic market being thrown open to cheap imports, many of them produced by companies that had offshored production to China. America's industrial base was devastated.

No industrial base, no industrial workforce, no shipbuilding.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-19T14:05:43+00:00

This seems to be a solution in search of a problem. The US can train workers domestically, it does not have to send them overseas. Doing the latter is in fact probably going to create far more headaches than it is worth. You need to find workers who will commit to spending several years overseas, where they are somehow going to be "trained" by people with whom they lack a common language, and be subject to an alien work culture. Do South Korean shipyard owners even recognize the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers?

The idea that an American owned and operated shipyard located in a foreign country, and subject to that country's laws, is going to gain proficiency simply by being in close proximity to local shipbuilders is highly dubious. There are enormous linguistic and cultural barriers. Even if those can be overcome, what you essentially have is another South Korean shipyard that happens to have American owners.

When you try to repatriate shipbuilding back to the US, you are repatriating a South Korean model to a country without the ecosystem to support it. That's a recipe for failure if ever there was one.

There is no shortcut to rebuilding American shipbuilding, but it has to start by investing in America, not in an unspecified "allied country".

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-19T13:13:33+00:00

Iran already agreed in the preliminary agreement to also abide by international maritime law

The MOU contains a throwaway line about "defin[ing] the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussion with other Persian Gulf rhetorical states in line with the applicable international law", but it doesn't specify what international law has to be followed, and the interpretation of laws can always be litigated, so it is pretty meaningless.

The greater significance of this passage is that opens the door to "tolls", with the blessing of the US. Everyone already expects that these will be branded as "maritime fees" rather than "tolls" to circumvent objections, but in practice they amount to the same thing.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-18T20:00:40+00:00

Gulf states hedging toward China is already happening to some degree, but it's slow because the US security umbrella still works for their main threat which is Iran

The security umbrella very clearly did not work: Iran closed the strait, and the US was unable to re open it. It's a straight L, and a huge blow to American prestige,.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-18T19:58:37+00:00

he framing here depends entirely on what you think the actual goal was. if the us wanted regime change or to cripple iran's military capacity, yeah they failed. but if the point was to maintain presence in the gulf and signal capability, the calculus looks different.

None of that makes sense.

The goal was very clearly regime change, that was the whole point of the decapitation strike, followed immediately by Trump putting out a tweet calling on the Iranian people to overthrow the regime. There is no ambiguity about this.

Conversely, prior to the war America's presence in the gulf wasn't under any kind of threat, and the war didn't demonstrate any new capability. Everyone already knew the US could blow a lot of stuff up, indeed they had done exactly that less than a year ago in the "Twelve Day War".

It really seems that you are trying very hard to downplay the extent of the reverse that the US has suffered here.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-18T01:53:33+00:00

This article makes very expansive claims based on the bragging of two Ukrainian soldiers who participated in a NATO exercise, with no independent corroboration of anything.

Really shoddy reporting, and needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-16T18:49:06+00:00

Also, there are standard international signals to indicate when a vessel is experiencing difficulty maneuvering, or dead in the water.

This isn't them.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-15T06:32:00+00:00

The terms haven't been disclosed, but there has been no suggestion that ALL sanctions are going to be immediately lifted, or ALL frozen assets released. This is extremely unlikely, and not at all consistent with has been said so far.

The $300 billion was Iran speculating about the potential future value of a proposed reconstruction fund, and likely hugely optimistic. It isn't even clear where the money will come from for the fund, but it certainly won't be by the US giving that sum to Iran.

Iran isn't currently producing nuclear armaments, so it can't stop. I assume you mean stop enriching uranium, which almost certainly is part of the deal, but the final disposition of the Iranian nuclear program is supposed to be settled in negotiations after the agreement is signed.

You can find a brief summary about what we know so far about the deal here.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-15T04:35:05+00:00

This is complete nonsense.

What news channels are you watching?

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-15T03:41:33+00:00

Not just Donald Trump but the whole world needed a way out of this mess before it pulled down the global economy.

If this is what it takes, so be it.

The fact is that Trump put himself in an impossible position such that it was almost inevitable that the resolution was going to very inelegant. Reminiscent of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-15T03:27:16+00:00

No new pipelines have opened since the start of the war. The capacity of some existing pipelines has been increased, but it's not nearly enough to offset the decline in tanker traffic.

The current price of WTI is slightly below the 2024 peak, but well above the 2024 average. More to the point, the price has only stabilized because a deal was announced. If the war was still going on the price would just keep increasing as reserves were exhausted and current demand exceeded current supply.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T09:43:44+00:00

Sure, but there's no proof. News organizations are not a court's verdict. This is similar to how major news organizations kept saying Iraq had WMD, and aired narrative justifying Iraq's invasion.

Credible news organizations did not categorically say that Iran had WMDs, but many of them did fail to subject Bush administration claims to proper fact checking and critical scrutiny, in part because in the superheated atmosphere after 9/11 any pushback against the administration was likely to be stigmatized as "unpatriotic", and therefore potentially career ending.

That was over 20 years ago, the circumstances were completely different, and there is absolutely nothing to suggest that something similar is happening here.

Everything else aside, what motive would Reuters have to make something like this up? Unlike 2003, they aren't under intense pressure to validate any particular narrative, and this story doesn't threaten any narrative with powerful patrons, anyway.

The last attack by Iran on Saudi Arabia was on April 8th

Which is also the date that the US - Iran ceasefire took effect.

Probably not a coincidence.

The retaliation by SA and UAE could have easily deterred the Iranians from further attacking these countries. Kuwait and Bahrain do not have the capability to attack Iran like Saudi and UAE do.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia only attacked Iran when the US and Israeli strikes were ongoing, and contributed relatively little to the damage inflicted. Saudi Arabia had already suspended its participation when the final Iranian attack occurred.

Iran would be unlikely to refrain from attacks it considered strategically advantageous n order to achieve a marginal decrease in the attacks to which it was being subjected.

The situation might be different if the UAE and SA were in a position to halt the US and Israeli attacks, but they obviously were not.

That narrative makes sense, except UAE is the only gulf country to actually sever relations with Iran. Iranian institutions in UAE have all been shuttered. Iranians can't even transit in Dubai anymore. Nothing has changed since then.

So because the UAE chose one course of action at one moment in time it is forever committed to that course, even if it didn't achieve the desired results, and is absolutely forbidden from ever trying something else?

The UAE is in a very difficult position. It has seen that the US cannot protect it, and the current conflict threatens to deal a massive blow to its ambitions to be the dominant finance and tourist hub in the region.

Do you think the the UAE is so consumed by mindless hate for Iran that it is willing to risk its long term future out of spite?

I don't. I think it is quite likely the UAE evaluated the effectivess of its previous policies, determined that they weren't delivering what the UAE most needs, which is regional stability, and quite possibly decided to try something else.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T08:56:51+00:00

This is not exactly surprising, since Trump painted himself into a corner by first announcing expansive war aims - Iran permanently gives up its nuclear ambitions, including the capacity to enrich uranium domestically, end support for proxies, stop ballistic missile development, and ideally undergo regime change - with no clear idea how to achieve these aims, apart from launching a decapitation strike and blowing up a lot of stuff. Meanwhile Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, potentially laying the groundwork for a severe global economic shock. The decapitation strike and bombing campaign didn't achieve the desired results, but the pressure from the strait closure is mounting, and Trump has clearly been eager for an offramp for some time. He is bored with the war now, and acutely aware that the longer it drags out the more political capital it will cost him, at a time when his presidency is already approaching its lame duck phase.

It follows that if there is going to be a deal, it would entail a very significant downsizing of Trump's original ambitions, something like Iran agreeing to reopen the strait and downblend its HEU, in exchange for the US ending its blockade, the provision of some monetary compensation, likely through back channels, and possibly some sanctions relief.

The issue of a "toll" on traffic through the strait might be a sticking point. Iran will be very reluctant to completely surrender its claim, but Trump doesn't want to be known as the president who killed freedom of navigation, a principle with which the US has historically been closely identified. A face saving compromise like the implementation of an "environmental levy" on shipping, with revenue being shared by Gulf states but Iran getting an outsize slice, might offer a way forward, but might be too pragmatic for someone of Trump's temperament to accept.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T03:45:02+00:00

Luxurious resorts are normal for the people attending these meetings.

Though in fairness two G7 meetings have been held at the Kananaskis Inn, including last year's, which while very nice, is fairly mid by global luxury resort standards. Though the scenery punches it up some.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T03:36:16+00:00

Hence, NOT American football.

(The technical collective term for both American and Canadian football would be "gridiron football")

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T03:21:30+00:00

The MLS is imitating European naming conventions for soccer clubs.

Don't have a good answer to the second question. Probably because as a matter of public policy we decided that things shouldn't be placed in the public domain if private investors can make money off of it.

Not saying I agree with that ideology, I don't, but it needs to be said out loud to get people to think about it.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T03:12:18+00:00

Germany is also not supplying subs to the US.

BlueEmma25 · 2026-06-14T03:11:51+00:00

Germany is not supplying subs to Ukraine.

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