Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: Happy Shoppers and True Nazis

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

In July of 1941, Latvia became a part of Nazi Germany as German troops moved in to occupy the country. (Photo above captures scene at Riga)

Anyone who opposed the German occupation , as well as those who had cooperated with the previous Soviet Union, were killed or sent to concentration camps.

But the Jewish and Gypsy population was also exterminated by Latvian Nazi collaborators.

The Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, between 1941 and 1943, murdered most of Latvia’s 70'000 Jews and thousands more who had been deported from other parts of Europe. (1)

The most predominant group the Arājs Commando, alone killed about 26,000 Jews.

According to Wikipedia, the extermination included:

About 66,000 Latvian Jews, 19,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews, unknown numbers of Lithuanian and Hungarian Jews; unknown but substantial number of Gypsies, Communists, and mentally-disabled persons; unknown number of non-Jewish Latvians shot or imprisoned in reprisals and so-called "anti-partisan" activities. (2)

Into this atmosphere, Armand Siksna was born.

Born in 1944 in Riga, Latvia, Siksna was raised by parents he described as "anti-communist conservatives". His father owned two turpentine refineries and supplied the Germans during the war; Siksna's uncle had a stake in two banks and belonged "to a right-wing fascist-inclined organization"... (3)

Was this organization the Arājs Commando?

A True Nazi

In the year of Armand's birth, the Soviets would once again occupy Latvia, after driving out the Germans, and most resistance groups were forced underground. After the war a massive influx of labourers, administrators, military personnel and their dependents from Russia and other Soviet republics began. The ethnic Latvian population felt threatened as a programme to impose bilingualism was initiated.

Many fled the country, including Armand's family, who arrived in Canada in 1957. To a thirteen-year-old boy, whose opinions were already formed, not even Canada was safe from Soviet expansion.

When an adult, calling himself a "true Nazi", he joined the Edmund Burke Society and later the Western Guard, where he would influence, and be influenced by people like Alex McQuirter, Wolfgang Droege and Don Andrews.

A confirmed anti-communist, he joined the Progressive Conservative party but soon found it "was not really right-wing enough for me." He eventually joined the Edmund Burke Society and then the Guard when he "started to realize the importance of racism — the preservation of our race." Siksna recalls: "I had come to the conclusion that I am a true Nazi — and that is the most beautiful and the most noble philosophy of all the political philosophies that have ever existed on this earth."- Siksna was on the executive of the Western Guard and he ran in several municipal and provincial elections. His main contribution seemed to be constant run-ins with the law. As a Guard member, he faced charges for the defacement of property by affixing hate posters. He was accused of the theft of a typewriter when he worked as a security guard at a warehouse, and when police raided his apartment for evidence he was charged with violating the propaganda law because Nazi and Klan material was found there. (3)

The cache included: "swastika flags, boxes of KKK propaganda and several copies of Mein Kampf." (4)

Siksna would spend a great deal of time behind bars for a variety of crimes, including the plot to kill a fellow Klansman, but his most comical, if we can find anything humorous about his activities, took place in 1980, when he was convicted of the fraudulent misuse of a credit card. Apparently he found the credit card on the floor of a store and attempted to use it. Unfortunately for him the card was a demo made out to "Mrs. Happy Shopper". (3)

On February 22, the Toronto Sun reported that Armand Siksna had joined the Reform Party. As always, Preston Manning revoked the membership, but only after media exposure. However, though not following the violence of the Klan and other hate groups, Manning's Reform Party ideology was not unlike theirs. Pro-Anglo, anti-immigration, anti-gay, anti-feminism, the list goes on. The only difference was that they were legitimate.

Aftermath

According to Michael Faulkner in Letters from the UK, the British Tory Party, is becoming friendly with the old Latvian anti-Communist movement, now headed by Roberts Zile.

More alarming is the alliance the Tories have struck in the EU with some of Europe’s most unsavory people – Polish and Latvian ultra-nationalist parties with strong anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations. And perhaps most alarming of all is the fact that the Tories and many others seem to find this quite acceptable. Where one might have expected outrage, instead there have been indignant attacks on critics of the ultra-nationalists, who are accused of maligning honorable men and repeating “Soviet era” slanders against them. At the centre of this controversy are two parties belonging to the new right-wing grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists, with which the Tories have chosen to ally themselves. They are The Polish Law and Justice Party and the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom party. (1)

And in Canada there is some concern with Jason Kenney's plan to build a monument to the victims of communism:

According to an Oct. 14 commentary by Efraim Zuroff in The Guardian newspaper, "if anyone needed additional proof of the unsuitability of the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom party as a partner for the British Conservatives, their response to a ceremony held yesterday in Riga to honour the Soviet soldiers who liberated the city in 1944 should be a stark reminder of the lack of shared values between the two parties." For Fatherland and Freedom condemned Riga mayor Nils Usakovs for placing a wreath at the Victory Monument which commemorates the liberation of Riga from Nazi occupation, and for taking part in a rally to mark the event. The party called Usakovs' presence at these events "an insult to the victims of Communist terror and a glorification of the Soviet troops." However, For Fatherland and Freedom is well known for honouring Latvia's Waffen-SS veterans who fought for Third Reich and Nazi domination of Europe. As Usakovs stated, "had Riga not been liberated from the Nazis in 1944, there would be no independent Latvia today [and therefore] it is our duty to thank those who fought against the Nazis." In Zuroff's view, the positions taken by the Fatherland and Freedom leader Roberts Zile and other ultra-right politicians "are hardly exceptional in their home countries...

... By joining forces with Fatherland and Freedom and Poland's Law and Justice, says Zuroff, "the Conservatives are granting important legitimacy to a false narrative that seeks to whitewash war crimes and erase the heroic victory of those who saved the world from Hitler and the Nazis." The UK-Latvia link is not an isolated phenomenon in Europe, where right-wing forces in many countries are pressing for bans against Communist political activity.

Here in Canada, the federal Conservatives have hitched their wagon to a similar attempt to falsify history. Stephen Harper and Tory cabinet minister Jason Kenney have both encouraged the groups which initiated the proposal for a "monument to the victims of communism" on the grounds of the National Capital Commission. (5)

We have got to start paying attention.

Continued: Odonists and the Western Guard

Sources:

1. ULTRA-NATIONALISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES: The Tories’ Latvian and Polish Friends,
By Michael Faulkner, TPJ Magazine, November 08, 2009

2. The Holocaust in Latvia, Wikipedia

3. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 83-84

4. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 215

5. UK TORIES LINKED TO LATVIAN FASCISTS, The People's Voice, November 2009

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: From Partisans to Pioneers

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

He liked greenhouses. So he built himself a greenhouse. He used to rest there, among the poinsettias and the cactuses, like an old lizard in the sun. Now they have buried him in the greenhouse, in front of his residence in Belgrade. There is a large white marble slab, with bronze lettering which reads Josip Broz Tito, 1892-1980.

No one much visits any more, and the place is neglected. On the day I visit it is raining, and rain is dripping from a broken skylight on to the Marshal's grave. Nobody cares. On his birthday in 1945, some teenagers ran a relay race from Kragujevac to Belgrade and presented him with a baton. Every year of his reign, the 'youth' of Yugoslavia repeated that race, and at the end of it they presented the old dictator with the relay batons. His birthday became 'Youth Day'. Twenty thousand batons are kept in the museum next to his grave. Nobody visits the batons any more.

How quickly the legitimacy of power drains away. The batons were not ridiculous twenty years ago. The relay race meant something to people. Now it seems to belong to the rites of some vanished tribe. (1)

Many of those youth so devoted to Tito, belonged to the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia. Like the Hitler Youth before them, they wore uniforms, but if Tito himself was paying a visit they dressed in traditional costume.

And one of "Tito's Pioneers" was a young man named Vilim Zlomislic. His father had been one of 'Partisans', the resistance fighters led by Tito himself. But he was killed fighting against the German occupation and Vilim's mother Rose was captured and transported to Germany in 1943 to work as slave labour for the Nazis, while young Vilim was placed in an orphanage.

Rose would survive the war and eventually marry a Canadian, Frederick Andrews, who was then working for a United Nations agency in a German displaced persons' camp. The couple moved to Toronto, but Rose never gave up looking for her son, even after she was told that he had been killed in an air raid.

Her perseverance paid off, and with the help of the Red Cross she was reunited with the ten-year-old Vilim, and immediately had him re-Christened, Donald Clarke Andrews, leaving their past behind for good. "As a youth, he was an excellent student who liked to read. He attended Ryerson Polytechnical Institute under a scholarship and, in his spare time, volunteered with various social democrat groups". (2)
But by the late 1960's he began to grow alarmed by Soviet expansionism, and became a dedicated anti-Communist and his life would change forever.

Don Andrews, through the Edmund Burke Society and the Western Guard, dominated the extreme right-wing stage in Toronto for most of the decade and became a sort of godfather to many of the present-day organizers of the Klan. "Many of them were my lieutenants in the Guard," he boasted ...

"I'm not upset if you call me a fascist," he once told a reporter. He worked in the Scarborough public health department and later at Toronto East General Hospital. Andrews, by his own admission, received money from right-wing sympathizers in the Serbian and other Eastern European immigrant communities. Neatly attired in business suits, Andrews was intelligent, well-read and eloquent.

In his six years as Guard leader, his penchant for violence seemed to be matched only by his political and organizational cunning. As a candidate in Toronto's mayoralty race in 1972, he polled 1,916 votes. Running again in 1974 on a white power ticket with his name on posters plastered across the city, he came in second in a field of eleven, with close to 6,000 votes. Andrews's political career did not come to an end when he was sentenced in 1978 to a brief jail term and forbidden to associate with the Guard. (3)

And of course that was the same Western Guard to which Alex McQuirter and Wolfgang Droege belonged.

Andrews and another Western Guard member, David (Tarzan) Zarytshansky, dreamt up a plot to launch a terrorist bomb attack on the Israeli soccer team during an exhibition match at Varsity Stadium.

Hearing this, Droege, who had been chafing under Andrews's dictatorial leadership style, was unimpressed. "By this time," he says, "I was getting pretty fed up, because I was starting to see what Andrews was all about. So I just conveniently left town because I didn't want to be any part of it. So I went fishing that weekend."

When he returned, Droege spotted the handcuffed Andrews and Zarytshansky on the evening news, being led away to the Don Jail by RCMP officers. The pair had been turned in by a paid informer. At his trial in late 1977, Andrews testified that non-whites were "human and organic garbage" and added, for good measure, that he possessed "a general dislike of Jews." He received two years in a federal penitentiary, while Zarytshansky received an I8-moth sentence in a provincial facility.

"After he was arrested," Droege says-of Andrews, "he was not allowed to be involved in the Western Guard any more. So he was gone for two years." (2)

It was at this time that Droege and McQuirter began to look into creating a KKK group in Canada. Andrews* would go on to found the Nationalist Party of Canada, which is still in existence. He also runs in every mayoral race in Toronto, including the last one.

My friend and I met him at his home. It was nice place around the Beach, and full of paintings (one was by a member of the Romanovs, he said.) There was also a
Swastika and a painting of SS soldiers on his wall. His teenage daughter was there too--a polite and kind looking girl.

"I'm running to give the white people an opportunity to express their views," he told me. The media "is always trying to shut you out; it's run by the Jews of course." I asked him whether he considers himself a Nazi, and he told me he's a racist first. "Call me what you want, just not late for dinner," he joked.

Andrews insisted he doesn't hate other ethnic groups, and said that "racism is for everyone." He expects people of different ethnicities to stay together. "It's about a sense of belonging," he concluded. (3)

Ah, yes. That's what it's about.

Footnotes:

*Andrews also endorsed Holocaust denier Jim Keegstra's bid to lead the Social Credit Party of Canada

Sources:

1. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, By Michael Ignatieff, Vintage Press, 1994, ISBN: 0-09-938951-7, Pg. 38

2. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 207

3. Toronto's Fringe Mayoral Candidates, By Guest Contributor, BlogTo, April 9, 2010