Start with the title: “Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi.” The Politico Europe editor approving it was either high on glue, or finally decided yesterday to come to work in his secret Schutzstaffel uniform. No other explanation fits.

Writer Keir Giles argued there’s “disinformation” and a “lie” in the outrage over Canada’s parliament cheering former Waffen SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka …

On “fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi”: didn’t it if you were Yaroslav Hunka, who was actually a Nazi? Giles protests Hunka’s Waffen-SS service is just a “hard sell” to current audiences because they’ve been “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” due to “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes.’” Hunka’s 14th Waffen Grenadier unit, aka the Galicia Division, was in 2003 found by the Polish government to have murdered about 1000 inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka, now in the Lviv Oblast of Ukraine. The report singled out the “14th sub-unit” of the Galizien, which may be why Poland’s education Minister just said he’s “taken steps toward the possible extradition of this man.”

It doesn’t matter, because this story was never about the moral choices of Yaroslav Hunka, but the decision by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canadian House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota, and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to applaud as a “Canadian hero” a former member of the SS.

[If Hunka had emerged into public notice for any other reason, all of these publications (Taibbi cites several Trudeau-apologist examples) would have assessed this far more honestly. Given the mainstream media’s inclination to paint normal conservatives as Nazi-adjacent in most cases, this is even more egregious. — Ed]