As the fog of war sets in, the Ukrainian conflict heats up, and so does the propaganda war playing out on social media. Today, I talk about Putin's aggression, and the unbelievable propaganda that we are being inundated with from all sides.
00:21:06.640Many Western countries, including the UK, Germany and Belgium, have rather than sending in their own troops, they're sending weapons.
00:21:12.640They're sending lots and lots of weapons, automatic rifles to Ukraine, where they're apparently just handing it out willy nilly to anyone on the street.
00:21:19.640While we had a report over at True North, I spoke to sources, multiple sources, including people on the ground in Kiev who described the situation as chaos and anarchy.
00:21:28.640Sources saying armed bandits are looting and murdering with impunity.
00:21:32.640So I'll read from the piece that says the situation in Kiev is, quote, not as black and white as the media is portraying it, unquote.
00:21:38.640A source on the ground in Kiev who spoke to True North through a translator said on Sunday, people are more scared of the armed citizens than of the Russian military, said the source.
00:21:47.640So again, so the ones on the ground in Kiev are the civilians who have been given military weapons to defend their city, while some of them are engaging in bad behavior, looting and killing people, lots and lots of scary scenes.
00:21:59.640So the source was a senior who lives right in the center of Kiev.
00:22:02.640He and his wife said they're more scared right now of the looters with the guns.
00:22:06.640The old man has a military rifle out just in case.
00:22:09.640Now, the source sent several photos of both dead bodies on the side of a road in Kiev, noting that the picture depicts a family that got killed when they were mistaken for Russians.
00:22:18.640The source also sent two videos, which were also circulating on the messaging app Telegram, showing what was described as armed citizens.
00:22:25.640Now, just questioning anyone in one case, shooting people they deemed suspicious, very scary stuff.
00:22:30.640So again, there are unintended consequences when you just hand out weapons to tens of thousands of people.
00:22:36.640There was a report as well that they were letting people out of prison who had military experience.
00:22:40.640So Russia is so Ukraine is so desperate for manpower, so desperate for help in terms of people on the ground to fight this war.
00:22:47.640They are letting people out of jail, including bad guys, giving them guns and just hoping for the best, hoping nothing bad will happen.
00:22:54.640Well, there is definitely going to be unintended consequences.
00:22:57.640And the source also said that they just can't trust Western media, that the propaganda is out of control and that it's hard to get a clear picture of what is going on.
00:23:07.640Joe Warmington, my colleague over at the Toronto Sun, had a great piece today saying that it's not an easy time for Canadians with Russian roots.
00:23:14.640Joe went down to a Russian area in Toronto, spoke to members of the Russian diaspora, Canadians who are originally from Russia, who describe how difficult it is for them.
00:23:23.640So I'll read from Joe Warmington's piece.
00:23:25.640Joe Warmington writes, the truth is there are more than 100,000 people in the greater Toronto area of Russian background.
00:23:29.640No matter what President Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, each one of them is very much part of our community today as they were before.
00:23:35.640However, Russian Canadians I spoke to on Monday are worried that this could change.
00:23:38.640They won't let you write fair things about us, said Alex standing outside a Russian bakery in the area of Steeles and Bathurst.
00:23:44.640Tatiana, the owner of a nearby gift shop, echoed the sentiment.
00:23:49.640But you can see why Tatiana and Alex would feel otherwise when our governments have passed decrees cancelling Russian vodka, Russian airlines, Russian banking system.
00:23:57.640And there's even talk about banning Russian hockey players.
00:24:00.640And he writes this, leaders should also be reminded not to punish our Russian Canadian friends for the political decisions made in another country that they have no control over.
00:24:34.640Melanie Jolie, the foreign minister in Canada, condemns Russian invasion.
00:24:38.640She says Russia is solely responsible for this crisis.
00:24:41.640They have chosen deception, intimidation and manufactured a crisis based on lies and false flag operations.
00:24:47.640So again, making no distinction, making no effort to distinguish between Putin and the Russian people and just sort of throwing it out the Russians, the Russians, the Russians.
00:24:55.640Now, I want to focus back a little bit on Canada and what is happening, because I don't think Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau should get a free pass.
00:25:02.640I don't think that the way that they are handling this is very good.
00:25:05.640Now, you won't get this again from Legacy Media.
00:25:07.640Here's Andrew Coyne just really openly endorsing Chrystia Freeland.
00:25:11.640He writes this on Twitter, ringing lines from Freeland.
00:25:14.640She says this, quote, there are moments in history when the great struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to one fight in one place, which is waged for all humanity.
00:25:30.640So one week after Chrystia Freeland went on a rampage to freeze people's bank accounts without any due process, without a court order, without the rule of law, not based on the chart of rights and freedoms whatsoever.
00:25:41.640Now, all of a sudden, she's drawing a black and white line saying freedom versus tyranny or either with us against us.
00:25:47.640And apparently now Chrystia Freeland is on the side of freedom, not just on the side of freedom, but representative of that whole side of freedom.
00:25:53.640According to Andrew Coyne's ringing endorsement there, we've seen lots and lots of people praising Chrystia Freeland, hardly any trying to hold her to account.
00:26:02.640So here's another piece I had over at True North.
00:26:05.640Freeland posts and then deletes a photo of her holding a Bandera movement scarf from a pro Ukraine rally in Toronto on Sunday.
00:26:12.640So, yes, Freeland was caught holding a pro Nazi banner at a Ukraine protest.
00:26:17.640You will not see this being covered in the legacy media.
00:26:20.640Unfortunately, I want to go through this story in some depth because I think it is incredibly, incredibly important.
00:26:25.640So our finance minister, who also happens to be the deputy prime minister, she's a former minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland.
00:26:31.640She was photographed on Sunday with a scarf that promotes a far right Ukrainian national movement linked to Nazis, neo-Nazis and extremism.
00:26:40.640So remarkably, Chrystia Freeland posted the photo herself on her own social media accounts, apparently ignorant of the radical far right movement the scarf represents.
00:26:50.640So here is that image. She shows a picture of her and she's clearly holding up this scarf, this black and red scarf.
00:26:56.640You can see her hand on it right there.
00:26:58.640She is smiling while she obviously realized that that was a very bad idea because of what the scarf represents.
00:27:03.640So that tweet was quickly deleted. The Instagram post was deleted and she posted the exact same message.
00:27:08.640We stand united. We stand with Ukraine. She rewrote it in French.
00:27:11.640And then again in Ukrainian at the bottom, but she found a different version of the picture where she was not carrying the scarf,
00:27:17.640which again is sort of a tacit acknowledgement that she should not have been posting that photo with the scarf.
00:27:22.640So let me tell you a little bit about the scarf.
00:27:24.640The red and black flag, the red and black on the scarf has historically represented the Bandera movement in Ukraine.
00:27:29.640So what is the Bandera movement? Well, it is named after Stefan Mandera, who was a nationalist Ukrainian politician during the Second World War.
00:27:36.640He is accused of war crimes and leading atrocities against Jewish and Polish people in Ukraine during the Second World War.
00:27:42.640He was a collaborator with the Nazis. He sided with the Nazis.
00:27:45.640Let me note that he is an incredibly polarizing figure in Ukraine because some love him.
00:27:50.640Some people in Ukraine love him. They view him as a national hero who fought and helped achieve Ukrainian independence,
00:27:56.640whereas other people, again, see him as a Nazi collaborator, a war criminal and a Nazi, someone who led war crimes and atrocities.
00:28:05.640So back in April 2021, Euronews described Bandera and the UPA movement as Nazi collaborators and war criminals.
00:28:12.640Let me read from that. It says Bandera and the UPA are controversial for several reasons.
00:28:16.640Critics point to the mass killings of up to one hundred thousand Jews and Poles
00:28:20.640and the fact that the UPA cooperated with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War Two.
00:28:25.640Now, many on social media are saying, well, Chrystia Freeland didn't know that.
00:28:28.640How would she know that she was holding this scarf and what it meant?
00:28:31.640Let me just remind you that Chrystia Freeland is Ukrainian.
00:28:34.640She's a Ukrainian Canadian. That's how she describes herself.
00:28:36.640She speaks Ukrainian. She's fluent in that language.
00:28:38.640As you can see, she posts in the Ukrainian language.
00:28:40.640She presents herself as being incredibly politically savvy, this international player.
00:28:44.640She went to Harvard. She worked for Bloomberg.
00:28:46.640She's traveled all over the world. She's lived all over the world.
00:28:49.640She was considered persona non grata by the Russians because of her involvement in Ukraine political scene.
00:28:55.640So she's incredibly well versed in Ukrainian politics and culture.
00:29:00.640And yet you're telling me that she didn't realize what she was holding.
00:29:03.640She didn't realize what this banner represents.
00:29:06.640Chrystia Freeland is either very, very stupid or more likely she thinks you're very, very stupid
00:29:11.640and that she can get away with holding up a banner that may be popular among a certain segment of the diaspora of the Ukrainian diaspora
00:29:17.640and get away with it knowing that no one in the media will hold her to account.
00:29:21.640Well, that's pretty much exactly right because no one in the legacy media is covering this aside from True North, aside from a couple of people on social media.
00:29:29.640And again, just to underscore how prominent the idea of the Bandera movement is very, very well known for people who follow Russia and Ukrainian politics.
00:29:36.640So back in 2017, there was a sort of glowing profile on Chrystia Freeland in iPolitics, in the political journal iPolitics, talking about how she'd become Canada's foreign affairs minister.
00:29:48.640And the Bandera movement is specifically mentioned in this piece because at the time, powerful Russian interests were accusing Chrystia Freeland of being pro Bandera movement.
00:29:57.640So I'll read you a bit from this iPolitics piece.
00:29:59.640It says some voices close to the Kremlin will predictably disparage Freeland's appointment.
00:30:04.640In addition to being a critic of the current Russian government, she's also of Ukrainian heritage.
00:30:08.640Some Russian voices like to accuse Canada's government of being enthralled to a powerful Ukrainian diaspora.
00:30:13.640In 2015, a spokesman for the Russian government owned oil company Rosneft claimed that Canadian sanctions against Russia's energy sector were inspired by pro Bandera lobbyist.
00:30:24.640Stefan Bandera was an anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisan who was allied with Nazi Germany for some time during the Second World War.
00:30:31.640Of course, it doesn't help that Chrystia Freeland's own grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.
00:30:36.640This is reported by the Ottawa Citizen back in 2017, back before they got the $600 million grant from the Trudeau government and they used to do actual journalism.
00:32:57.640And that is what Chrystia Freeland just fell into.
00:32:59.640So when a prominent Western leader is photographed with a banner that represents a Nazi movement, she is naively playing into Vladimir Putin's hands.
00:33:08.640So Chrystia Freeland can scrub her own social media to her heart's content.
00:33:11.640But the reality is a photo of her carrying the black and white scarf.
00:33:15.640The bandera scarf is making the rounds on social media and is being used on other news sites.
00:33:20.640Here it is being used on an NPR affiliate showing Chrystia Freeland with that flag.
00:33:24.640This is a significant misstep by Chrystia Freeland.
00:33:27.640And if we had a free press, they would be covering this.
00:33:59.640We need to remain vigilant, remain skeptical, try to verify, try to vet every single thing that you're seeing because there is a heck of a lot of fake news out there.
00:34:08.640I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:34:10.640I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.