Ukraine, Neo-Nazi Symbols and How Politicians Are Getting It Wrong

If you want to see just how ill-informed politicians and former politicians are regarding the current events in Ukraine, one need look no further than Canada's own Catherine McKenna, the Trudeau government's former Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister of Infrastructure and Communities.

  

Here is a tweet from Ms. McKenna dated March 8, 2022 at 9:33 am:

 

Let's take a closer look at the picture in the top right hand corner of the tweet:

 

You'll notice that the girl standing to the right has a small black and white emblem on her vest.  Here is a picture of that emblem:

 

The sunwheel or sonnenrad is a traditional symbol or rune adopted by Old Norse and Celtic cultures and has a wide number of variations.  It was appropriated for use by the Nazi Party in their attempt to link their culture to Aryan/Norse heritage.  The Sturmabteilung or SA, Hitler's brownshirt stormtroopers used a symbol that was derived from the sunwheel as did the Shutzstaffel or SS whose well-known double lightning bolts were also sourced from the same rune.

  

Here is a quote about the sonnenrad from the Anti-Defamation League website:

 

"The sonnenrad or sunwheel is one of a number of ancient European symbols appropriated by the Nazis in their attempt to invent an idealized "Aryan/Norse" heritage. The sonnenrad appears in the traditional symbology of many countries and cultures, including Old Norse and Celtic cultures. It has countless variations; the swastika and similar rounded variants are actually sonnenrad forms, as are certain versions of the Celtic Cross. In Nazi Germany, the Nazi Party, the SA and the SS all used sonnenrad symbology at times, which has led neo-Nazis and other modern white supremacists to adopt such images. One sonnenrad version in particular is popular among white supremacists: two concentric circles with crooked rays emanating from the inner circle to the outer circle. Often white supremacists will put another hate symbol such as a swastika in the center of the inner circle.

Because sonnenrad imagery is used by many cultures around the world, one should not assume that most sonnenrad-like images necessarily denote racism or white supremacy; rather, they should be analyzed carefully in the context in which they appear."

 

While I rarely quote from the mainstream media, here is a 2020 article from The Guardian on the use of this neo-Nazi symbo that helps put this posting into perspective:

...and a quote:

"The symbol Evans deployed was the sonnenrad, the “sunwheel swastika”, or black sun. It has its origins as a pictographic representation of the sun in ancient Norse paganism.

 

Similar symbols can be found in other cultures, ancient and modern. Certain versions of the Celtic cross contain similar pictographs. The swastika itself arose independently in a range of cultures, and in some also represents the sun. In modern times, pagans with no connection to neo-Nazism – who may not have any particular secular political engagement at all – may employ the sunwheel or other ancient symbols in a benign manner….

 

Nevertheless the sunwheel, with the swastika, is one of a number of ancient symbols that were appropriated by the Nazis in the interwar period to signal their belief that they were destroying the German and European status quo in order to facilitate the glorious rebirth of Aryan civilisation which they thought had been corrupted and stymied by its racial enemies.

 

But as with everything the Nazis did, the emphasis in reviving these symbols was less on faithful historical accuracy and more on facilitating further racist myth-making.

 

When Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler’s SS, ordered a sonnenrad floor mosaic to be installed in the castle at Wewelsburg when he was remodelling it to serve as an organisational and spiritual headquarters of the Nazi paramilitary group, he and the craftsman involved may have taken some Merovingian coins as a model.

 

But they were careful to include the so-called “Sig” rune as the rays of the sun, thus reproducing the SS’s existing insignia in a symbol intended to create a false ethnic continuity between modern Germans and the ancient Norse, the prospect of racial revival through cleansing violence, and also to invoke the occult in a way that nazism adopted from long-standing German “volkisch” racial cults.

 

After the Nazis brought Germany to ruin, the remnant true believers incorporated the “black sun” and eventually the sonnenrad symbol into a loose assortment of occult beliefs that, together, must rate as one of the most elaborate coping strategies in modern history.

 

A former SS man Wilhelm Landig coined the occult idea of a “black sun” that supposedly gave its energy to the ancient Aryans when they inhabited “Hyperborea” in the polar regions. “Esoteric nazism”, which gathered pace in the far right in the last quarter of the 20th century, incorporated a grab bag of nonsense from earlier European esoteric traditions (including specifically racialist groups like the Thule and Vril societies), and sometimes posited outlandish theories of extraterrestrial origins for the supposed Aryan race, Nazi UFOs, or a hollow earth.

 

According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book Black Sun offers an authoritative history of esoteric nazism, the first connection between the occult “black sun” concept and the symbology of the Wewelsburg mosaic happened in 1991, in a pseudonymously written pulp thriller. Thus transformed into a symbol of a (false) history of a mythical Aryan race, and a future racial renewal, it has been “an esoteric symbol among younger neo-Nazis … since the 1990s”, according to Clarke.

 

Part of its attraction was that while displaying the Nazi swastika is taboo, or even illegal in some territories, the sonnenrad is not so instantly recognisable as a hate symbol. But in Australia, in particular, it should be more widely reviled."

Here is a photograph of the sonnenrad on the floor of the castle at Wewelsburg:

 

Let's close with this posting with a quote from another mainstream media source about the use of photographs with the sonnenrad on display:

"An official of the U.S.-led NATO alliance has told Newsweek that the coalition did not notice what appeared to be a symbol associated with Nazism on the uniform of a Ukrainian soldier featured in a since-deleted photo on NATO's official Twitter account.

The image, posted Tuesday to commemorate International Women's Day, contained four images related to the current crisis in Ukraine, where a Russian military incursion was set to enter its third week.

 

"All women and girls must live free and equal. This international women's day we think of the remarkable women of #Ukraine," NATO tweeted alongside a Ukrainian flag emoji. "Their strength, bravery and resilience are symbolic of the spirit of their nation #IWD2022."

 

The first of the four images included what appeared to be a Ukrainian servicemember bearing a "Black Sun" on the chest area of her military fatigues. The symbol, also known in German as "Schwarze Sonne" or "Sonnenrad," is rooted in Nazi occultism and has been brandished by far-right elements across the globe, including in Ukraine, where it is featured on the official logo of the National Guard's Azov Regiment.

 

The image first appeared to be shared on social media on February 14 by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and was later syndicated by a number of outlets and agencies, and was featured prominently on the front page of The Guardian the following day. The symbol itself, however, is not readily visible, as it is nearly the same color as the green camouflage of the soldier's uniform.

 

Shortly after NATO shared the image, the symbol was noted by a number of social media users and then taken down swiftly." 

Here is the NATO tweet:

Here is the photograph in question:

...and here is a closeup showing the brown coloured Sonnenrad on the female soldier's chest:

 

So, in conclusion, apparently even politically well-connected and supposedly well-informed individuals  in the West simply don't understand the complexity of the situation in Ukraine and have chosen to blindly accept the anti-Russia narrative without putting much thought or research into the matter.  In the case of Catherine McKenna, I would bet money that she took her cues from one of her former peers in the Trudeau cabinet, Chrystia Freeland, a Ukrainian-Canadian with a very strong anti-Russia stance that has resulted in her being banned from travelling to Russia:

Either that or Ms. McKenna is doing her best to curry favour with Chrystia Freeland now should Freeland become the leader of Canada's Liberal Party at some point in the future.