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MUTINY IN THE CANADIAN GENERAL STAFF – HOW POLITICAL AMBITION & UKRAINE-RUSSIA WAR AIMS ARE BEING COVERED UP IN OTTAWA



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with [1]

When it comes to bulldogs fighting under a rug Winston Churchill thought they were Russians. Little did he know about Canadians in Ottawa.

The chief dogs in this fight are Trevor Cadieu and Chrystia Freeland (lead image, right).  Cadieu is a lieutenant general who specialises in planning armoured operations against the Russian army in Europe; Freeland is the deputy prime minister, scion of Galicia in western Ukraine,  and candidate prime minister to replace Justin Trudeau, if she can.

As the Canadian politician most directly connected to the Ukraine by family and property, and the most active advocate of war against Russia, Freeland has promoted Canadian military strategy and plans to wage that war on Ukrainian territory and across the Ukrainian borders for many years [2].   

In Ottawa also, Cadieu has been director [3] of war plans since mid-2019.  No public record is known of his visits to the Ukraine in the following two years. His appointment as chief of Canada’s defence staff was announced in August 2021, then withdrawn in September following the start of an official investigation of sexual assault charges dating from his military cadet days. When the  investigation ended in an official indictment, Cadieu resigned. By April he was in the Ukraine again, working directly on coordinating the new supplies of tanks, armoured vehicles, howitzers,  and other artillery from NATO member states to the Ukraine.

Speaking through an Ottawa defence reporter named David Pugliese, Cadieu declared his innocence of the criminal charges and promised to return from the Ukraine to answer them. He then disappeared as the Russian forces intensified their targeting of Ukrainian and NATO general staff as they prepared operations to save Odessa in the southeast, and Lvov in the west.   

On Friday Pugliese reported Cadieu had surrendered to Canadian police and been released to appear in a local court in August. In the meantime Pugliese has reported an active online debate between supporters and critics of the sexual misconduct charges; these include a comment [4] in support of Cadieu from retired Brigadier-General James Cox claiming the charges against him amount to “sedition to undermine national leadership;”  by that he meant mutiny by the politicians against the generals.

As deputy prime minister with supervision over most government ministers and war plans for the Ukraine, Freeland has claimed to have known nothing of the sexual misconduct which was identified a year ago against General Jonathan Vance, chief of the defence staff between 2015 and 2021. At the time Freeland declared [5]: “No woman serving Canada should be sexually harassed while doing that, and I’m happy right now today to apologize to any woman who was sexually harassed while serving her country;”   by that she meant to condemn no one by name of anything.

Freeland is missing from the list of high officials contacted by former judge Louise Arbour  for her investigation of sexual violence in the Canadian military which began in May 2021 and concluded with the release of her 420-page report [6] last month.    Arbour is known in Europe as the NATO prosecutor of Yugoslav and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Arbour concluded her report on the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF): “Members of Indigenous and black communities, and other visible minorities and equity-seeking groups, have been largely absent, clearly not welcome. For years, women were simply shut out. When finally allowed to serve, women were made to feel they did not belong. They were denied opportunities to compete fairly and to thrive. They were harassed, humiliated, abused and assaulted, and, appallingly, many continue to be targeted today… One of the dangers of the model under which the CAF continues to operate is the high likelihood that some of its members are more at risk of harm, on a day to day basis, from their comrades than from the enemy.” By enemy, Arbour  meant what Cadieu and Freeland mean.  

There has been no disclosure, no indictment, no apology for the Canadian military role in the Ukraine, training and arming Ukrainians committed to reviving Nazi doctrine [7] from World War II.  Nor for the war crimes now alleged by eastern Ukrainians  to have been committed by western Ukrainians during the civil war which began in 2014. According to Arbour, “the very success of CAF operations, which I am not in a position to assess, reinforces its view that it is unique, and that CAF can do everything without the assistance of outsiders, as it always has.” By not to assess, Arbour meant not to doubt nor criticize.  

A Canadian with NATO warfighting experience comments: “The contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau’s ‘communism’. They believe the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”

“The truth, that no one, including Pugliese and other reporters will admit, is that the Canadian military, not to mention large swathes of law enforcement, is not reliable in terms of defending the Canadian state if the ruling faction pursues policies contrary to the officers’ wishes.”

There is no mutiny, at least not against the war against Russia, responds a veteran Canadian politician. “I have seen no indication that senior officers in the Canadian military oppose Canada’s hyper-aggressive approach to the Ukraine war. My impression from day one has been that Canada’s military is as belligerent toward Russia as any in NATO.”

About dogs and rugs, what Churchill reportedly said was: “Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.” In fact, Churchill who hated the Russians and planned to continue World War II until the Kremlin was conquered, may never have said it at all [8].  

What the Canadian military have to say is clearer. General Rick Hillier, chief of the defence staff between 2005 and 2008 and now retired, declared in mutinous terms on March 19, 2022, following the speech of the Ukrainian president to the Canadian parliament.  “I was inspired by Zelenskyy, and embarrassed for my country.”

“If platitudes were air defence missiles, praise was anti-tank rockets, applause was fighters, and wishes and prayers were weapons, after this week’s address to Canada’s Parliament, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have been able to plan his country’s victory parade over Russia. Sadly, what was on display Tuesday [March 15] was Canada’s unrelenting drive to provide Zelenskyy and Ukraine with complete assistance short of real help… I had the privilege to be in the gallery at Parliament during President Zelenskyy’s address to, not just a joint session of Parliament, but indeed, all of Canada. I was much less privileged to be there for the words, fanfare and self-congratulations when our own elected politicians spoke… Canada does nothing [9].”  

General Rick Hillier displays his medals and decorations in a Toronto street rally in March. The decorations he is wearing around his neck appear not to be Canadian.

According to Pugliese in a June 24 report on Canadian commando and other operations in Ukraine, the Canadian objective is war against Russia – liquidation of President Vladimir Putin and “all members of his inner circle”; destruction of the Russian army “to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”; Canadian mobilization for “war-time production footing so more weapons can be acquired”; and “a coalition planning cell… provid[ing] intelligence and co-ordination for the flow of NATO weapons into Ukraine, allowing such convoys to avoid Russian attacks.”

Cadieu’s role in the Ukraine — before his resignation and after — has been to coordinate this weapons flow. For a current inventory of the US and NATO weapons promised and, according to Kiev, delivered across the border, click to read [10].

According to the Canadian military, however, this flow is not enough because the Ukrainians are losing the war. According to Hillier, “Canada does nothing”. By that he means nothing short of full-scale NATO war against Russia.

Below the Canadian general staff level, Canadian troops fighting in Ukraine report they are united ideologically but divided over weapons supply and by command and deployment quarrels [11].  The numbers they report corroborate the Russian Defense Ministry’s report earlier this month of 601 Canadian “mercenaries [12]”.  Of that total, the Russian report claims 162 killed; 169 fled; 270 remaining. For more on the infighting among these Canadians soldiers, read this [13].  

In the Canadian military, from foot soldier to general, the reaction to the sexual assault indictments of Cadieu,  other high ranking officers charged before him,  and the Arbour report on the armed forces as a whole,  is that this a diversion, a plot, a conspiracy by their political and ideological opponents in Ottawa.  

Follow the time line [14], the names and ranks of those targeted to date, and the coverup of the allegations and investigations by the senior Canadian politicians in charge.

Left to right: General Jonathan Vance; Admiral Art McDonald; Major-General Dany Fortin;  Lieutenant-General Trevor Cadieu. Last week Cadieu was permitted to surrender to police for his formal arrest without press photographs.

Arbour’s report ignores the way they think – and also why they think that way. Although Arbour acknowledges that  sexual violence in the forces is directly connected to racism, gender bias, and the doctrine of White Supremacy, her report makes no reference to psychopathology, sadism, sadomasochism, or the varieties of sexual orientation, preference, and gender bias. The Arbour report makes just one reference to “psychology”: “Sexual assault and intimate partner violence are similar in many ways and often overlap. They are predominantly gender-based crimes against women. They are both power-based, and the psychology of both domestic and sexual violence perpetrators are closely related.” Arbour sees no connexion between the psychology and ideology inside the Canadian armed forces and inside Canada’s prison populations.

The Arbour report also sidesteps the conclusion of the parallel investigation released just weeks earlier; that is, the Final Report of the Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination [15].   “Racism in Canada”, the report concluded about the military forces, “is not a glitch in the system; it is the system.”, reads the report [16] by the Defence Advisory Panel.   That report acknowledges that the doctrine of White Supremacy is part of the pervasive racism of the Canadian forces.

But that report does not mention the words NATO, Ukraine or Azov. The only reference to neo-Nazism appears to make it the enemy of Canadian defence and military policy: “White supremacy, terrorism, neo-Nazism and all forms of IMVE are complex and fast evolving.” IMVE is defined in the report as “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism — Is often driven by a range of grievances and ideas from across the traditional ideological spectrum. The resulting worldview consists of a personalized narrative which centres on an extremist’s willingness to incite, enable and or mobilize to violence. Extremists draw inspiration from a variety of sources including books, images, lectures, music, online discussions, videos and conversations.”

Both the Arbour report and the Defence Advisory Panel report agree on the latter’s conclusion: “The need for education and training for leaders at all levels of the Defence Team [the armed forces] was highlighted repeatedly during the Advisory Panel’s consultations. Funding, expertise, and human resources are currently not adequate to address the imperative that every leader become the first line of defence in ensuring that members of these groups stay out of or leave the Defence Team… In addition to sexual misconduct and domestic violence, hate crimes, extremist behaviours and affiliations to white supremacy groups are growing at an alarming rate in both Canada and its Defence Team. This, too, requires new investigative tools for the Military Police to better identify the activities of white supremacists.”

The point on which the reports agree is also the point they both miss: Arbour, the Defence Advisory Panel, and everyone they have talked to accept the Canadian strategy of war against Russia in the Ukraine, and the Canadian training and armaments programmes for those directing the regime in Kiev and Lvov. The point they miss is that their war is explicitly motivated by race hatred towards Russians, Slavs.

This is the doctrine which the Canadian women officers and troops share with the men they accuse of sexually abusing them or of covering it up.

“Freeland is not acting alone,” comments the Canadian source. “She’s tried hard to bring everyone into her project [to succeed to the prime ministry], but she can’t get the neo-Confederates to settle down and wait for the project to come to fruition , with her at helm, of course.  They’re impatient for the Great White Reset; she needs the Galician dream fulfilled… The military is fine with Canadians, including active and retired service members fighting over there. They are not even pitching a fit about Canadian weapons stocks being emptied in order to be sent over there.”

“If you talk to any of them, they all pretty much have the same mentality. Whatever the West, as they define it, says — white, Christian, capitalist, Anglo, pro-US — goes. The can only see themselves, their career advancement, their ideas of what the country is fighting for within that framework. So they are increasingly upset by even the shallowest semblance of ‘multi-culturalism’ as represented in Ottawa by [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and to a degree, Freeland.”

“From what I’ve seen, the evidence of mutiny became apparent when the ‘trucker protest/ freedom convoy’ came up against the government’s activation of the Emergencies Act [17] this winter.  From what I’ve heard, the military chiefs flat-out refused to back [Minister of Public Safety Marco] Mendicino, [Justice Minister and Attorney-General David]  Lametti, and [Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill] Blair, and Freeland, while active and retired  officers openly sided with the  neo-Confederates who were getting support from the US. It seems that the contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as Trudeau’s ‘communism’, and believe that the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”

“This is deeply concerning as there can be no doubt that these people know, or strongly believe, that they have the full backing of at least some elements of the US security state, not to mention ‘thin blue line’ law enforcement, militia groups, etc. It’s fascism versus fascism.”