I received the shocking news in September of last year: My best friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was dead within two months. It was a harsh blow, coming on the heels of the death of my beloved mother-in-law. My mother would also die several weeks later—from cancer as well. Unlike my mother and mother-in-law, however, who battled cancer over many torturous years, his death was quick, sudden and stunning.
A part of me died with him. I first met Prof. Gerry Kelebay in 1991. We were ideological soul mates, and formed a deep, lasting bond that would flourish into a special friendship. Gerry and I shared many similarities: We were Canadians of East European descent (he was Ukrainian; I’m Croatian); we were conservatives (a rare breed in Canada); and we were public intellectuals (an even rarer breed in Canada). We took ideas seriously, and for nearly twenty years, spent countless hours in restaurants, at my home and on the phone discussing them. That vital part of my life is now gone—dead and buried along with Gerry.
Gerry was a professor in the faculty of education at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was—by far—the most erudite man I have ever met: an embodiment of the Renaissance intellectual. He read widely and deeply on philosophy, history, politics, literature, current events, theology and science. He subscribed to over ten monthly journals and would tell me about the multiple books he was reading—at one time, he was engrossed in 24 books simultaneously. Gerry treated books as cultural gems, providing valuable insights and truths about the human condition. This is why he devoured them, as he always put it, “cover to cover.” He understood that books and periodicals were expressions of civilization, and that the post-modern decadent West was losing its historical, spiritual and cultural literacy. He often spent hours in his office at home reading and contemplating until the early morning. His intellectual stamina and curiosity was nearly boundless.
Facing discrimination
Like many conservatives in academia, Gerry faced social ostracism. He was a brave, lone voice speaking out on behalf of moral traditionalism, limited government and free-market capitalism. For this, he aroused the wrath of many of his leftist colleagues at McGill. They sought to smear his reputation and assassinate his character. They couldn’t defeat him on the intellectual merits of his arguments, so they resorted to the tried-and-true leftist tactic: demonizing him as a “fascist” and “right-wing reactionary.” He was nothing of the kind. In fact, Gerry was the very opposite of a fascist: He despised totalitarianism—red, black or brown. His political colors were dark blue. He was a Burkean Tory, who believed in God, country and family.
In this way, Gerry embodied the very best traditions of his Ukrainian heritage. He admired the great Ukrainian patriot, Stepan Bandera, whose Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) fought for an independent Ukraine. Bandera’s fighters ceaselessly resisted Nazi occupation and Soviet communism.
Trapped in the maelstrom of World War II, many Ukrainians sided with Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. Either way, it was a deal with the devil. Nazism considered Ukrainians—like all Slavs—to be “untermenschen” (subhuman), fit only for slave labor and serving their German masters. Millions of Ukrainians would perish in Nazi work camps. The Soviet Union had subjugated Ukraine, seeking to forge a multinational empire. Stalin’s goal was genocide: to obliterate the Ukrainian nation by smashing its peasant base. In 1932-1933, Stalin implemented a terror famine—known as the “Harvest of Sorrow”—in which over ten million Ukrainians were systematically starved to death.
Rather than succumb to certain death and destruction, Bandera and the OUN embraced the course of soaring heroism: They took to the forests to defend Ukraine’s freedom and national honor, waging partisan warfare first against the Wehrmacht and later the conquering Red Army. Gerry was a fierce Banderite. He adored Bandera for his courage, patriotism and Christian romanticism.
In fact, the first time I met Gerry—at a bar on Montreal’s Bishop Street where journalists and intellectuals used to hang out—I told him that “Bandera was a great man—one of the greatest of the 20th century.” His response was classic Gerry—warm, big-hearted and unpretentious: “How do you know about Stepan Bandera. You are a great man! What are you drinking? I want to buy you a drink.”
Gerry’s father was a Banderite, who lived through the horrors of the Second World War. A seminarian who studied to be a priest, Gerry’s father was a Catholic intellectual and staunch anti-Stalinist. He saw first hand the barbarism of Soviet imperialism and Nazi militarism. Many of his family members were murdered by Stalin’s henchmen. He was also severely beaten by German soldiers, his eye badly damaged, almost blinded. He sought to escape to the West, fleeing with his family alongside the retreating German army. Gerry was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, eventually finding refuge in Canada where his father and mother ran a small grocery store.
Gerry often told me stories of his conversations with his father. Gerry’s favorite question: Who was worse for Ukraine, Hitler or Stalin? Gerry said that he must have asked his father that question about 20 times. His dad’s answer changed depending upon his mood. Overall, though, Gerry’s father believed that Hitler was worse for Ukraine than the brutal Stalin. At least under Stalin, some Ukrainians, if they joined the Communist Party and were ruthless enough, could survive and climb to the upper echelons of power—Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev being a case in point. For Hitler, Ukrainians were racially inferior. They had to be eradicated. There could be no compromise.
Fascism as socialism
This is why the Hitler-fascist-reactionary cheap shots of his critics never bothered Gerry: He understood the real evils of Nazism, and how depraved and dangerous it really was. Moreover, Gerry rightly argued that fascism was not an ideology of the right (as is commonly assumed); rather, it was a variant of socialism. He grasped that communism and Nazism were different sides of the same coin. Both were collectivist totalitarian ideologies that glorified the state and subordinated the individual. In fact, the real battle of the 20th century was a civil war between socialist internationalism and National Socialism: Stalin versus Hitler, Lenin versus Mussolini, and Castro versus Pinochet.
Gerry emphasized that fascism—with its tolerance for private property and stress on race, blood and soil—was a more potent force. Fascism is statism fused with xenophobic nationalism. Gerry despised the caricature of Hitler by the Western intelligentsia, which persists in distorting him as a crude mass hypnotist who cast a mesmerizing spell over the German people. As historian John Lukacs has pointed out, “Hitler was the greatest evil political genius of the 20th century.” The Nazi dictator was a formidable revolutionary, who tapped into totalitarian impulses bubbling underneath the surface of modern industrial society. Hitler skillfully used activist government, public works projects and sky-rocketing military and welfare spending to buy off key segments of the German electorate. His rise to power was propelled not only by the dire economic conditions of Weimar Germany, but by the mass fear of Bolshevism. The Soviet Union’s gulags, repressive police state, virulent atheism, aggressive imperialism, hatred of distinct nation-states and destruction of property rights frightened the middle-class bourgeoisie across Europe—especially, in Central and Eastern Europe. Hitler presented himself as the Continent’s stalwart anti-Stalinist—a strongman who would impose social order, ensure economic security and kick the Bolsheviks around. Nationalists and conservatives took the bait: Hitler’s blend of anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism, statism and anti-communism took Germany—and Europe—down the path to death, destruction and ruin.
Gerry’s point was as clear as it was obvious: Fascism revealed the disastrous consequences of radical socialism. Hitler’s legacy was the genocidal slaughter of 6 million Jews, 50 million dead and a continent in tatters. State power combined with social engineering leads to Auschwitz. The central lesson of the 20th century is that utopianism leads to totalitarianism; the road to Utopia goes through Golgotha.
Fighting communism
Gerry made the very same argument about communism. He denounced its bureaucratic sadism, economic and environmental degradation, enslavement of Eastern Europe, destruction of Christian civilization and—most of all—its assault on human freedom. Communism was the greatest system of mass murder in history. It has claimed over 100 million victims. Entire peoples—Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Slovaks, Croatians, Serbs, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tibetans, the Hmong—were caught in its iron grip. Yet, the West’s liberal elite deliberately downplayed or rationalized its legacy of totalitarian oppression and brutality. Enthralled by state socialism, its call for a workers paradise and radical egalitarianism, most leftists succumbed to the worst kind of moral corruption: The refusal to speak out against satanic evil.
This was not the case with Gerry. His family had born witness to communism’s crimes. He was determined to expose the truth about the Soviet regime—even at considerable personal and professional cost. Gerry immersed himself in the writings of the most brilliant anti-communists of the Cold War—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Whittaker Chambers, George Orwell. He spent decades in the classroom, in public policy conferences, in McGill faculty meetings, in radio studios, and in academic and mass publications articulating a principled defense of the West, advocating for the containment and roll back of the Soviet Union.
He also joined the OUN, where they held regular clandestine meetings across North America. Their goal: to topple Soviet communism and establish an independent Ukraine. Gerry wrote passionate, incisive articles that were distributed behind the Iron Curtain. He helped raise money to fund the Ukrainian opposition. He led protests commemorating the terror famine. He was a key leader, who inspired and organized the Ukrainian underground. His work with Ukrainian nationalists aroused the anger of Moscow. The KGB rightly feared the Ukrainian sword aimed at the heart of its rotting empire. Gerry and his OUN partners feared for their lives. The KGB sought to infiltrate their meetings. Hence, Gerry and other top leaders had to adopt code-names, meet in secret and keep a constant look-out for spies and traitors; the pressure was immense; and the stakes were high. They had pledged their lives and sacred honor to liberate their ancestral homeland.
Too good for McGill
Meanwhile, the New Left rode to power throughout North America’s academic institutions. Marxism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, post-modernism, anti-Americanism—these fashionable ideologies triumphed on campuses everywhere, including McGill. Gerry found himself isolated, often the target of insults and professional retaliation. He had given so much to the anti-communist cause. Instead of recognizing his courage and intellectual brilliance, his colleagues did what leftists typically do: they scoffed and jeered, substituting vicious putdowns for serious, rational debate. Gerry was denied academic advancement, and in later years faced harassment from his superiors who sought to push him into early retirement. This was done despite the fact that he was one of the most eloquent and popular lecturers at McGill. Gerry was a superb public-speaker—articulate, witty, funny and immensely knowledgeable. He was born to teach. And his students adored him. He was generous with his time and his vast learning, a consummate professional devoted to his students and to the mission of the university.
This did not matter. His colleagues were incapable of appreciating what they had. Gerry was demonized as a right-wing Neanderthal, who refused to buckle to the ideological dogmas of his time. Truth be told, he was too good for them—too smart, too learned, too principled, too honest. While they boasted about battling fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia (pick your trendy cause), Gerry was on the frontlines waging war against real-life murderers and fanatics, advancing democracy, national self-determination and human rights against communist tyranny. They talked the talk; Gerry walked the walk. One of his last great acts was to serve as an advisor to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, helping Ukraine in its famous “Orange Revolution” fight off Russian imperialism and embrace a Western-style democracy.
Increasingly, Gerry held his colleagues in contempt. He saw them as nothing more than frauds and cowards, who refused to defend academic freedom and the Western curriculum. He understood that the West has achieved the most prosperous, open, tolerant and successful civilization in history. It is not equal, but superior to other cultures—which is why millions from all over the world immigrate to Europe and North America every year. Rather than studying the reasons for the West’s rise, and passing on its rich heritage to the next generation of students, the university has become a stronghold for leftist propagandists, radical ideologues and spineless, smug apparatchiks. His colleagues no longer pursued the good, the true and the beautiful—in fact, they no longer believed such things even exist. They were teaching the very opposite: relativism, multiculturalism and the hatred of Western civilization. They no longer put the students or the university first; they cared only for self-advancement and self-expression. Gerry rejected such ideological conformity, censorship and self-absorbed narcissism.
He loved McGill’s glorious pedigree and tradition of excellence. But he realized the institution was living on past capital. It had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. For all their arrogance and progressive pose, his colleagues were cultural barbarians. They were not only lazy, superficial and mendacious, but had destroyed McGill’s academic mission and assaulted its moral and intellectual foundations. Gerry embodied the rational civility, open-spirit of inquiry and commitment to truth that historically lay at the core of the university. He would gladly entertain any idea or notion—no matter how insensitive, radical or offensive it might be—as long as it was subjected to rigorous scrutiny, logical criticism and empirical evidence and debated within an open, honest environment. Gerry admired the ancient Greeks, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The university’s hostility to intellectual freedom, its slavish adherence to neo-Marxist fads and its pervasive dogmatism—all of it repelled and depressed him. At Gerry’s funeral, very few colleagues showed up to honor his memory (revealing again their barbarism). They must have thought they were kicking him one last time before he went into the grave; however, they were doing him a favor: He no longer cared for their company or their respect. He had lost all regard for them.
I used to teach American history at McGill. I saw first-hand the betrayal of the students, the lack of commitment to serious, substantive teaching (or scholarship), the third-rate professors and the moral and intellectual rot. Privately, some of my colleagues agreed with me: McGill had declined—and badly in some departments in the humanities. When I wrote an Op-Ed in The Montreal Gazette, “Crisis at McGill,” exposing the university’s shortcomings and failures, there was only one person who publicly backed me: Gerry. He wrote a letter to the paper, emphasizing how McGill no longer focused on excellence in the classroom; it was all about obscure, specialized and meaningless research and pursuing grant funding. I received many private phone calls from McGill professors thanking me for the piece. Yet, no one, with the exception of Gerry, was willing to put their necks on the line. He was that kind of man—old school, who cherished principle and honor, friendship and loyalty, truth and justice, above career advancement and the esteem of the bien-pensants.
A Catholic conservative
He founded a conservative think tank, the St. Lawrence Institute, prior to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election. It was one of the very few Reaganite policy institutes in Canada. He helped cobble together Montreal’s ragtag band of free-market capitalists, libertarians and Cold Warriors. Although they managed to produce a quarterly publication for several years and hold some conferences, the institute never took off. For too many of them, it was a debating society more than a professional think tank; an excuse to get drunk on Friday nights and whine about Canada’s relentless shift to the left. Gerry was of very different stock. He was serious about politics (and life), and wanted to build something that endured and had impact. He excoriated the institute’s board members for their ineffectiveness, lack of organization and discipline, and overall puerile nature. They never understood Gerry’s anger—nor really cared, since, like many modern intellectuals, they are too self-absorbed and self-indulgent to realize how trivial and inconsequential they are. Under the advice of his wife, Diana, and I, Gerry broke ranks with them.
He threw himself into his books, reading at a rate that would knock most people out. The last 15 years of his life saw his intellect and knowledge soar; he would dazzle me with his range and depth of learning. He became a Catholic intellectual, devouring every encyclical written by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. He studied the Church’s vast theological architecture and philosophical underpinnings. Gerry admired the Church’s staunch defense of the culture of life—its opposition to abortion, gay marriage, pornography, euthanasia, materialism, hedonism and consumerism. He believed that militant secularism was a cancer, slowly eating away at the West. He rightly argued that liberals have forgotten the fundamental truth of the human condition: the transcendental nature of man. Gerry, echoing the late John Paul II and Pope Benedict, stressed that human beings are created in God’s image, and that they are meant to adhere to His eternal moral laws and precepts. The crisis of the West is a crisis of faith and identity—stripped of its Christian roots, the Western world is embracing radical individualism, sexual liberation and moral anarchy. The result has been cultural collapse, the degradation of the individual and a loss of social authority. Gerry believed that the West is dying. And unless there is a Christian reawakening and moral renewal, it is destined for the dust bin of history.
As Gerry grew older, his disillusionment took an emotional toll on him. Part of it was simply Slavic melancholy: The Slavs, not just Ukrainians but Russians, Poles, Croatians, Serbs and Bulgarians, are a romantic people, prone to being emotionally volatile and bouts of deep sadness (and nostalgia). But, for Gerry, it was much more than that. At his core, he was a man of the West. He did not fit into our world of Blockbuster Video and Burger King, Madonna and Britney Spears, CNN and The New York Times. His world was something higher and nobler. The moral relativism, cheap commercialism, suffocating statism, shameless libertinism, godless humanism and post-national multiculturalism of our age struck him as civilizational suicide—a feckless betrayal of centuries of sacrifice, achievement and progress. The West was going out not with a bang, but with a whimper. Gerry called it “social masturbation.” His university, his country, his civilization—they had degenerated into something unrecognizable, a modern-day Caliban.
The death blow, however, was the reality of post-communist Ukraine. He had spent most of his life in the anti-communist struggle. Yet, the reality of independence angered and profoundly disillusioned him. Unlike Cold War triumphalists, who quickly forgot about Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gerry continued to closely follow events in the hopes of successfully influencing Ukraine’s transition to nationhood and freedom. What he realized shook him to his very soul: The communists had not been defeated. They had only changed their ideological coat, abandoning the Red Star for the blue-and-yellow coat of arms.
Underneath, the same gangsters remained in power, plundering Ukraine’s public assets and enriching themselves through shady privatization deals. The rampant corruption, political gangsterism, killing of journalists, lack of national pride, refusal to confront the crimes of Stalinism (even to acknowledge the Harvest of Sorrow as state-sanctioned genocide), and the entrenchment of communist social immorality drove Gerry to despair. I sympathized. I saw the very same thing happen in Croatia. The psychological effects were devastating. All of Gerry’s hopes, struggles, efforts and dreams had been betrayed. Communism had unalterably transformed Ukraine, creating a moral and spiritual wasteland. It was not the country he had read about, his parents had nurtured him on or was embodied in the traditional Ukrainian Diaspora. It had become Sovietized, Russified and pulverized. It had become a mutant, something that no longer seduced but repelled him. Near the end of his life, he confessed to me that he felt like he had been duped: He had given his services to a people and a nation he no longer understood or recognized.
Yet, he battled on. He was Ukrainian to his core—stoic, passionate and determined. He never gave up. Deep down, however, he psychologically retreated, embracing his faith and his wonderful family. He talked more about the afterlife, the meaning of existence and the importance of virtue, children and marriage. He repeatedly said that Diana had saved him from chaos and misery following the break-up of his first marriage. She gave him hearth and home. He loved her dearly not only for her character, patience and immense devotion, but because she gave him the two best things in his life: His daughters, Alexandra and Katie. Gerry’s love for them was boundless. He spoke about them often, in meticulous detail and with a father’s concern and loving heart.
Gerry is the kind of man you are lucky to encounter in life. He was a force of nature, and a rare and dying breed. He was a Ukrainian patriot, a brilliant conservative, a dedicated teacher, an inspiring mentor, a learned scholar, a committed Christian, a loving family man and—above all—a true and devoted friend. Words cannot express the depths of my loss or the sadness in my heart. There will never be anyone like him. I miss him. I honor him. I will never forget him. May God bless you, Gerry—now and forever. Gerry Kelebay, R.I.P.
-Jeffrey T. Kuhner is president of the Edmund Burke Institute and a columnist at The Washington Times.
