Among its most egregious false characterizations was the suggestion that Tribute to Liberty supported a ‘Buy a Brick for Nazis’ campaign.
The proposed Wall of Remembrance was intended to include names submitted by individual donors. Those submissions were subject to review, including by Canadian Heritage. A name submitted by a donor was not equivalent to that individual being selected, endorsed or approved by Tribute to Liberty for commemoration.
“Tribute to Liberty has never supported the commemoration of Nazis, Nazi collaborators or perpetrators of atrocities” said board member, Christine Chi-Dang, a leader in the Canadian Vietnamese community. She added that “recent irresponsible and politically motivated articles have caused serious harm to all of the communities represented by the Memorial, including my own.”
Within hours of the publication of the Jacobin article, Tribute to Liberty and its chairman, Ludwik Klimkowski, whose grandfather was murdered by German Nazis, began receiving a series of threatening and abusive emails that closely echoed the article’s central accusations.
The sender accused Tribute to Liberty of wanting to honour people who “worked for Hitler,” repeatedly called Mr. Klimkowski a “fascist,” an “SS man” and twice urged him to kill himself.
Mr Klimkowski notes that the “similarity between the article’s allegations and the language used in these messages is deeply troubling.”
The threats were reported to York Regional Police. Police investigated, identified the individual responsible and warned that further threatening communications with Tribute to Liberty could result in more serious legal consequences.
This episode illustrates the real-world risks that can follow when inflammatory and irresponsible accusations falsely portraying individuals or organizations as sympathetic to Nazism circulate publicly. The timing of these threats, and their striking similarity to allegations published only hours earlier, are deeply concerning.
For years, commentary surrounding the Memorial and the commemoration of victims of Soviet communism has repeatedly sought to portray Central and Eastern European communities as Nazi sympathizers, collaborators or defenders of fascism. Such sweeping accusations distort history and demean Canadians whose families experienced both Nazi German and Soviet Russian occupation, deportation, imprisonment, execution and other forms of political repression.
The use of ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ labels to delegitimize Central and Eastern European émigrés also has a longstanding historical and troubling precedent. Soviet authorities routinely attempted to discredit émigrés from Central and Eastern Europe by portraying anti-Soviet activists and diaspora organizations as fascists and Nazi collaborators. Similar narratives remain a feature of contemporary Russian information operations aimed at delegitimizing communities that challenge Moscow’s historical narratives.
On March 5, 2022, Ms. Chi-Dang, Mr. Klimkowski and other members of the Tribute to Liberty Board were among the first non-elected Canadians added to the Russian government’s sanctions blacklist (following Paul Grod’s listing in 2014); a punitive response to their work commemorating the victims of communism and challenging Moscow’s historical narratives.
Canadians whose families fled Soviet occupation and communist repression – alongside Vietnamese, Hong Kong, Uyghur, Tibetan, Cuban and other communities that experienced communist authoritarianism – have the same right as all Canadians to commemorate their victims without being collectively smeared as Nazis or fascists.
As witnessed by this incident, such irresponsible and hateful content does have real world consequences.
Tribute to Liberty and its board members are grateful to York Region Police for investigating the threatening emails and for warning the sender of them.
We unequivocally condemn these threats and call on journalists, publishers and public commentators to recognize the consequences and the normalization of violent speech that can result when such false accusations are made.
