Deputy PM says former Speaker Anthony Rota made a ‘grave error,’ but asserts that the Russian President was exploiting his mistake for propaganda purposes
But she accused the Russian President of exploiting the error by the former Speaker, who had apologized and resigned after the incident, for propaganda purposes.
“We can’t change the fact that he made that mistake. We can, though, all of us decide how effective Vladimir Putin is at weaponizing that mistake,” she said. “And I would really urge all of us to understand that Russian propaganda is real.”
Yes, the thing we did BY MISTAKE supports the claims made by our adversary, BUT its up to all of us to be dismissive of these claims, because they make my Uncles very upset
every single time something like this happens, the response is "Yes, we might have done the exact thing that Russian propaganda accuses us of doing - but that doesn't mean that the propaganda is correct. It is still disinformation."
Freeland's maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak, had been a journalist before World War II. During the war in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Nazi-occupied Austria he was chief editor of the Ukrainian daily newspaper Krakivs'ki Visti (Kraków News) for the Nazi regime. After Chomiak's death in 1984, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who was Chomiak's son-in-law (and also Freeland's uncle by marriage), used Chomiak's records, including old issues of the newspaper, as the basis of several scholarly papers focused on the coverage of Soviet mass murders of Ukrainian civilians. These papers also examined the use of these massacres as Nazi propaganda against Jews. In 2017, when Russian-affiliated websites, e.g. Russia Insider and New Cold War, further publicized Chomiak's connection to Nazism, Freeland and her spokespeople responded by claiming that this was a Russian disinformation campaign during her appointment to the position of minister of foreign affairs. Her office later denied Chomiak ever collaborated with Nazi Germany. However, reporting by The Globe and Mail showed that Freeland had known of her grandfather's Nazi ties since at least 1996, when she helped edit a scholarly article by Himka for the Journal of Ukrainian Studies
Freeland even sounds like some lebensraum shit. It's just poland...it's free real estate. Good way to remember her connection when she defends her family/nazis
this is 100% like when Clinton accused Putin of "weaponizing intelligence" when the Nuland phone call audio was leaked.
it's so brazenly self-serving and disingenuous, it makes me angry that it's deployed as damage control, let alone that the piss-drinking hogs accept it.
What I don't get is, either it was a mistake and these people are really that incompetent or it wasn't a mistake and they somehow thought they'd get away with it. Which is it?
How easily could we see this coming. Just for context, her grandfather is Mikhail Chomiak who was head of Nazi propaganda for Eastern Europe and reported directly to Joseph Goebbels. She was on record saying that her grandfather inspired her to get into politics and her politics were inspired by his. Which became a controversy in 2016/2017 when it became public knowledge that her grandfather was a Nazi. She refused to apologize or even give a disingenuous denouncement of her grandfather. Instead the issue is that, even though she praised her Nazi grandfather, said her politics was informed by his, and refuse to denounce him, the fact that you know about her Nazi grandfather is due to Russian Disinformatzia. So even though it is all true, if your opinion of Chrystia Freeland is negatively impacted or you continue remembering this, or continue reporting on it, you are helping Putin!
I am certain that Trudeau, after sort of, half-heartedly, apologizing for praising a Nazi, saying that the real issue is Russian Disinformatzia causing you to think less of the Canadian government or Canadian liberals, due to this, was due to Chrystia Freeland.