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Sol Littman   Letter 06   29-Sep-1999   I discover Sol Littman's Tryzub and Swastika speech
You have become known in recent days as a leading proponent of the need to rid the Internet of hate propaganda.  However � the above considerations suggest � your crusade may intend mainly to rid the Internet of views contrary to your own, and to permit you to continue publishing your own hate propaganda without contradiction.  Were you sincere about ridding the Internet of hate, the first thing you would do is to remove your Tryzub and Swastika speech.
Click here to access a transcript of Sol Littman's Tryzub and Swastika speech.
  September 29, 1999

Sol Littman
Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center
8 King Street East, Suite 710
Toronto, ON
CANADA,  M5C 1B5

Tel: (416) 864-9735
Fax: (416) 864-1083


Sol Littman:

You said that Jews are not particularly interested in Ukrainians.

The chief conclusion that you proposed to me in your telephone call of 13Sep99 was that Ukrainians are much more preoccupied with Jews than Jews are with Ukrainians.  I replied that Ukrainians, generally, and I in particular, were merely responding to Jewish calumniation, and that Ukrainians seemed preoccupied with Jews only because Jews so frequently calumniated them.

And in your letter to me of 21Sep99, you proposed a similar generalization � as captured in the following two excerpts � that Jews had not particularly targeted Ukrainians:

Finally, there is the repeated implication in your Internet communications that Ukrainians are somehow being especially singled out and victimized by organizations such as the OSI and the Wiesenthal Center.  I cannot speak for the OSI, but the feeling I have is that they have dealt just as frequently with Germans, Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians as Ukrainians.

As for myself, the list which I handed Deschênes included Frenchmen, Netherlanders, Slovaks, Germans, Austrians, Romanians, Hungarians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians.

However, you neglected to tell me about your Tryzub and Swastika speech.

Since receiving that telephone call and that letter, I have come across the audio file of a speech you gave at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles on 31Aug97, in which you summarize the contents of your "soon-to-be-published" book, The Tryzub and the Swastika:  http://www.broadcast.com/events/swc/safehaven/

And you neglected to tell me that in your Tryzub and Swastika speech, you talk of little else but Ukrainians.

Upon reviewing your speech, I conclude that you are not merely preoccupied with Ukrainians, but that you are obsessed with them.

More specifically, as the tryzub or trident is the national symbol of Ukraine, I take it that your book-in-progress features Ukrainians, and I note that a search for various strings in your speech turns up the following frequency counts:

Search String Frequency
UKRAIN 128
GERMAN  75
GALICIA or HALYCH  12
AUSTRIA   9
LITHUANIA   5
LATVIA   4
SLOVAK   3
FRANCE or FRENCH   2
HUNGAR   2
NETHERLAND or HOLLAND or DUTCH   2
ROMANIA   1
ESTONIA   0

Please note that each of the above search strings is selected so as to catch several variations of each stem, as for example, a search for UKRAIN will catch UKRAINIAN, UKRAINIANS, and UKRAINE; or GERMAN will catch GERMAN, GERMANS, and GERMANY.  The conclusion which the above frequency count reinforces is that Ukraine and Ukrainians are the primary focus of your address, and therefore of your book, the not very close second being Germany and Germans, whom it is hardly possible to avoid mentioning often in any discussion of the Second World War, even if it be one whose primary purpose is to smear Ukrainians.

And you neglected to tell me that in your Tryzub and Swastika speech, you revive the calumnies that you had long ago proposed to the Deschênes Commission.

And exactly what is it that you have to say about Ukraine and Ukrainians in your Tryzub and Swastika speech?  You hammer away at your monomanic theme of vast numbers of Ukrainian war criminals in Canada, in which your hyperbolic and inconsistent figures demonstrate that Judge Deschênes' reprimands of 1987 did not have the expected effect of disciplining your casual use of numbers.  Where another researcher would have taken Judge Deschênes' rebuke to heart and been guided by it toward responsibility ("The high level reached by some of those figures, together with the wide discrepancy between them, contributed to create both revulsion and interrogation"), you continue on as before, pulling big numbers off the top of your head, a different big number from one minute to the next:

Sol Littman Claim No. 1:
500 East European Nazi war criminals in Canada

The research done in the Canadian office has managed to identify in some detail some five hundred Nazi war criminals.  And most of them are not German, most of them are Eastern European.  And a large part of the information came from the archives of the various countries, from Poland, from Yugoslavia, from Latvia, and so on.  We've given all those names to the Canadian Government, and I can't really tell you in all honesty that I know exactly what the Government has done with all of them.  What the Government has done is they prioritize these five hundred cases.  In other words, they feel that the evidence is strong in some of them, and more difficult to ascertain in others.  They feel that the crimes committed by some of them were bloody and vicious, and that the crimes committed by others were more bureaucratic than otherwise.  But, we've had no � we've had great success in identifying, and, war criminals, and gathering considerable evidence against them.

Sol Littman Claim No. 2:
2,000 Ukrainian Nazi war criminals in Canada

So we have two thousand of these people in Canada.  Most of them are now receiving German disability pensions.  They are still being paid by the German Government for the service that they offered.  And we are now trying to get the Canadian Government to investigate them all over again, to get the real goods on them, to really do a job of research, and we hope if time allows and we can out-race the biological clock, that some of them may yet be brought to justice.

Sol Littman Claim No. 3:
1,500 Nazi war criminals in Canada

The answer, the general answer is, that there are a lot of Nazis, a lot of war criminals, still living in the United States who have not been identified, or who have not been charged.  There are some fifteen hundred of them still alive in Canada.

With respect to your statements above, more than one observer of your work would like to see your substantiation for the claims of either 500 or 2,000 or 1,500 war criminals currently residing in Canada.  Of particular interest is the claim of 500, as this is not a statistical estimate of the number of war criminals, but rather a count of 500 individuals, along with the statement that your dossiers on these 500 have been sent to the Canadian government.  Also of great interest is your claim that 1,500 members of the Galicia Division currently reside in Canada and that most of them receive German pensions and that despite all Galicia Division members having been re-investigated and re-exonerated by the Deschênes Commission, that you are urging that the Canadian government re-investigate them yet again.  If you were able to produce substantiation for your many startling claims � or even for a few of them � this would be a step toward restoring your shattered credibility.

Within the next few days, you will be judged to fall into one of two categories.

Over the course of the Deschênes Commission, you and Simon Wiesenthal had ample opportunity to substantiate your accusations of large numbers of war criminals living in Canada � and you failed utterly.  Judge Jules Deschênes excoriated in particular Simon Wiesenthal and yourself for your irresponsibility in bringing forward your accusations, as I have already outlined in my letter to you of 25Sep99.  And yet ten years later, in your 1997 Tryzub and Swastika speech, you repeat those same accusations, and two years after that, in 1999, you continue to broadcast a recording of that 1997 Tryzub and Swastika speech over the Internet.  Your marvelous tenacity invites the world to place you into one of two categories:

First category: You finally managed to come up with the evidence.  Perhaps, then, it is the case that since the Deschênes Commission Report in 1987, you have been able to come up with the substantiation that you lacked then, and your seemingly-irresponsible remarks of yesteryear now stand revealed for the first time as justified and rational.

However, nowhere in your speech do you allude to what this new evidence is, or how you came across it only so recently, or where it has been made available for the inspection of others.  Therefore, your disclosing this long-awaited and pivotal evidence is what is wanted to place you in this first category, and to render you an intellectual hero of no small proportions.

Unfortunately, your eventually falling into this desirable category appears next to an impossibility, as it is contraindicated by other information in our possession, most notably that if in 1997 you already had forwarded dossiers on 500 war criminals to the Canadian government, and if some of these dossiers were convincingly inculpatory, then it is incongruous that only a handful of prosecutions have been conducted since that time, and all of these are struggling away in civil court because they fail to meet the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of a criminal court, and none depends on proving war criminality, but rather all hinge on either proving, or inferring, an immigration infraction.  Indications are, then, that you don't have the information today any more than you had it in 1987.

Second category: You still don't have the evidence.  If it should prove to be the case that following the humiliation inflicted upon you by the Deschênes Commission, you continued for the following twelve years to repeat the same accusations as before with no better evidence than before, then you might expect to be judged somewhat more harshly than before.  You might expect to be viewed as incapable of being deterred.  You might expect to appear to be inaccessible to reason.  You might expect to be seen as clinging to a belief which an impartial tribunal had scrutinized at length, and rejected.  You might expect to leave the impression that you are irrevocably committed to a life of inciting fear and spreading hatred.  You might expect to be judged as either a criminal or a lunatic.

There remains the question of your historical accuracy.

From listening to your Tryzub and Swastika speech so far, my impression is that it contains the most concentrated accumulation of misinformation and disinformation regarding Ukrainians that I have ever heard, or that I ever imagined existed.  In my future letters to you, I will offer you reasons for doubting a number of the statements in your Tryzub and Swastika speech, at which time I will ask you either to substantiate these statements or to withdraw them.

There remains also for you to take the first step toward ridding the Internet of hate propaganda.

You have become known in recent days as a leading proponent of the need to rid the Internet of hate propaganda.  However � the above considerations suggest � your crusade may intend mainly to rid the Internet of views contrary to your own, and to permit you to continue publishing your own hate propaganda without contradiction.  Were you sincere about ridding the Internet of hate, the first thing you would do is to remove your Tryzub and Swastika speech.



Lubomyr Prytulak
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