Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, has resigned. He recently mistook an ageing Nazi for a Ukrainian freedom fighter in bygone times and a Canadian hero by virtue of his being a citizen of Canada. When the truth emerged that Yaroslav Hunka, the ninety-eight-year-old man given a standing ovation in parliament soon after visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had addressed its members, had actually been a member of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, a Nazi military unit also known as the First Ukrainian Division in the Second World War, faces went red in Canada.
Rota, moments after the scandal broke, apologised for his mistake in presenting a Nazi war criminal as a Ukrainian hero. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, not in very good political form in the aftermath of his allegations of Indian government involvement in the murder of a Sikh-Canadian Khalistani militant, spoke of his embarrassment over the blunder. It is perhaps for the first time that a former Nazi has been so precipitately honoured by a legislative body and so quickly deprived of the honour. Rota should have gone into the antecedents of Yaroslav Hunka before portraying him as a Ukrainian patriot in parliament.
The Hunka episode is a fresh reminder for people everywhere that crimes committed generations ago are not to be erased from the public mind. It is also a pointer to the thought that no matter where war criminals, whether Nazi or of other extractions, happen to be, they need to be ferreted out, shamed and tried for their crimes. The atrocities committed by the Nazis are unprecedented in history --- the invasion of countries beyond Germany, the setting up of puppet regimes, the systematic wiping out of Jews across Europe --- and will forever be testimony to the evil committed by man.
Hannah Arendt coined a depressingly interesting phrase for the destruction men wreak through the darkness of their minds. She called it the banality of evil. Was it that? It was indeed and yet much more, for the Nazis took evil a good many notches up toward sophistication. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau are today embedded in the human consciousness to inform us, without end, of the very many ways in which evil is designed and developed as a weapon against all that is good and decent in our world. The men who went to the gallows after the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War were the human manifestations of that evil. They paid for their crimes.
But has evil been buried through all these trials and hunting down of Nazis? In our times we have seen Yahya Khan and Tikka Khan carry out atrocities against Bengalis that would have pleased Adolf Hitler. Slobodan Milosevic felt no qualms in unleashing evil against Muslims in an unravelling Yugoslavia. The murder of Tutsis in Rwanda by Hutus was evidence that for all our modernity, evil lurks in the heart. Pol Pot made piles of the skeletons of Cambodians his Khmer Rouge murdered. In our hearts there are subtle spots where racism and hate rule, factors which the Nazis cleverly employed in their macabre mission of ensuring the rise of and rule by an Aryan class.
The world has of course moved on from Hitler's National Socialism. But there is too the truth that the world has not sat back complacent in its belief that Nazi evil has finally been stamped out. Nazi-hunting not many years ago zeroed in on Kurt Waldheim, the man who served as Secretary General of the United Nations for a good many years before going on to be President of his native Austria. How did Waldheim keep his Nazi past concealed for so long and so well? For that matter, how did Hunka, so rapturously honoured by Canada's parliament, keep his black record concealed under the rug so assiduously?
For all one knows, there are yet ageing Nazis somewhere in South America, especially Argentina, where a large number of them fled after the fall of Berlin in 1945. Some of them, dead and alive, have been identified over the years. The dramatic nature of identifying and capturing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 --- the job was done by Israel's Mossad --- and bringing him to trial in Jerusalem and having him executed in 1962 is the template on which Nazi hunters work today. Simon Wiesenthal is dead, but the single-minded dedication he brought into the job of tracing Nazi fugitives and bringing them to justice is yet the benchmark in reminding the world of Hitlerite evil.
Holocaust deniers, in all this global campaign to keep people focused on the damage evil can do, have been targeted and suitably punished. Deborah Lipstadt, the American academic and historian, made sure that David Irving, in so many ways an apologist for Nazis and a holocaust denier as evidenced through his books, was penalised for his position on the issue. It was a long court battle Irving fought with Lipstadt and he lost it. Irving's legal defeat served a lesson to all who would deny history or engage in sophistry about the commission of evil --- that bad men indulging in crime do not deserve pity, that those who speak up for them need to be condemned.
Albert Speer, the Nazi minister of munitions, escaped the noose at Nuremberg but went through twenty years of imprisonment. He knew what Nazism was all about, though he was reluctant to condemn the system that had propelled him to the heights. The writer Gitta Sereny has in her exhaustive work on him captured the story of his participation in the Nazi regime and yet managing to keep himself free of the atrocities committed by the other Nazis around him. And, of course, the Rudolf Hess narrative is part of the world's inquiry into the crimes Hitler and his men shaped and committed in the years between 1933 and 1945.
Kristallnacht is lodged in the universal mind. The yellow star humiliating Jews was a shame perpetrated on all humanity. The screams of men, women and children made to march to the gas chambers still are heard in the cloud-filled skies of the minds in us. Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-infatuated documentaries are proof of how evil can appropriate talent and make it work for it.
Nazism was a degeneration of humanity and Yaroslav Hunka a carrier of that perverse specimen of life. That he has been identified, after a false start, is once more a necessary warning that wherever evil hides itself, it becomes the moral responsibility of the world to pull it out into the open, for good men and women to know that vigilance against people who cause terror to descend on the world is an absolute necessity.
Revulsion, against those who intend to cleanse the world of races and civilisations they are uncomfortable with, becomes a weapon against a recurrence of such evil.
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