#teach dem

[jahbillah]

Cutty Ranks in Rub A Dub style

#cuttyranksOriginal Stopper Cutter Bomber inna lively performance for Teach Dem!

[theknightlywolfe]

Something we talk about in regards to pet training and child rearing but need to apply to more things, like politics, is behaviour rewarded is behaviour repeated.

Biden went left and then the Democratic party lost this election, in general. And Trump and the GOP went even more right to facism and won this election, in general.

The lesson learned by both parties is that going right is the path to victory.

So, guess what they're going to do.

[iwatcheditbegin]

Green Party as a whole pisses me off. At this point You can’t tell me those people aren’t just folks who want to vote trump without the backlash from those around them.

They just complain, and claim to be about holding politicians accountable (which isn’t wrong) but they only seem to ever call out dems. And they don’t even have tangible solutions.

You want radical change you need to take radical action. Abstaining from voting or voting third party and falsely equivalating Harris to Trump has no net positive. All it does is punish US citizens, there is no meaningful result for the people of Palestine.

*this is not referring to Muslim voters who rightfully might be feeling conflicted

[jarojam]

All yall r getting after all this art silence r some luficitos. . .

[drbtinglecannon]

Not my manager starting the shift telling us it's our fault if we don't succeed and that they're looking to lay people off lol

[thealogie]

He’s truly like the gay poet version of Neil in his online existence

[fanboy-feminist]

There’s something ironic (and very funny) about how what constitutes “guy-talk” in my brain is me and my older friend meeting for drinks & dinner, so he and I can complain about our gender studies undergrad seminars.

[holisticfansstuff]

That about sums it up really

FUCK THIS COUNTRY

[slutty-cthulhu]

no actually theres no difference between the democrat and republican party and voting at all ever is anti-leftist, actually um you should go tweet about firebombing a walmart and make a rael difference for once like i do

[delilahsturniolo]

⋆˙⟡ THE ULTIMATE STURNIOLO FANFIC RECOMMENDATION GUIDE (aka lilah’s all time favorite fics within her 8 months of being on sturn tumblr)

ever wonder what the delilahsturniolo reads late at night when she should be sleeping? scroll to find out!

buckle up cause this list boutta be long af

𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒘 𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐 ୨ৎ

motherly instincts — @sturniqlo

promise — @mattscoquette

diet pepsi — @mattscoquette

always care — @bernardsbendystraws

a home for the holidays — @vanteguccir

please — @evie-sturns

swallow it — @mattsstarlet

talking to the moon — @55sturn

squeeze — @sluts4matt

matt the munch — @guiltyc0nscience

there for you — @mattscoquette

a lesson learned — @luvs4matt

laser tag — @dwntwn-strnlo

a day to forget — @vanteguccir

state fair — @sluts4matt

kissing matt under the mistletoe — @strnilolover

squirt tutorial — @issysh3ll

where dem cherries at? — @sosasturns

what argument? — @sosasturns

pornstar!matt catches camgirl!reader getting herself off in his bed. — @mattsstarlet

matt adores using his tongue on you — @v6nillaa

this is (not) easy — @sturnioz

drivers pleasure — @sturnioz

priority — @chestersturniolo

the other side of the door — @alyrasturnz

miniskirt — @mattsdolll

𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒑𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐 ୨ৎ

brat — @evie-sturns

sweeter than candy — @sturnsdoll

wisdom teeth — @freshxsturniolo

say sorry — @chaossturns

victoria’s secret — @luvmila444

bsf!chris teaching inexperienced!reader how to finger herself, but he can't seem to hold back. — @st7rnioioss

little lacy set — @chrattho1

healthy healing — @bernardsbendystraws

teach me — @sturnsrecord

chris loves when you pull his hair — @wildfluer

keep cryin’ baby — @phone4pills

shower sex with chris — @mattsleftball

is it casual now? — @55sturn

pornstar!chris never learned shame — @cvnntagious

heaven and back — @sweetangelgirl7

𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒍𝒂𝒔 𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐 ୨ৎ

jealous 2 — @thenickgirl

bsf!nick hc’s — @sturnshood

𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒕 ୨ৎ

pornstar!matt x chris x camgirl!reader — @mattsstarlet

three is not a crowd — @junovrsmp4

eiffel tower — @whor3ing

naughty or nice 2 — @sturnsdoll

birthday sex — @sweetshuga

15 minutes — @whor3ing

espresso — @bernardsbendystraws

the final girl — @y3sterdaysproblem

i’m probably forgetting so much but yeah this is it

[jirai-girl]

SHEN YENG URLS ARE MINE HEHEHE

[nuadaargetlamh]

One is a convicted criminal that wants to:

Institute a dictatorship “on day one only” (with majority support from his party!)

Give a greenlight to Project 2025

Use a weakened Schedule F to install THOUSANDS of cronies

Institute military tribunals for his political enemies (and allies!)

Gun down “enemies from within”

Support Russia in wiping Ukraine off the map

Use the combo of the removal of the Chevron deference/the Supreme Court allowing people to openly bribe them/Schedule F to extend the far-right’s reach into every government agency and deregulate everything to the benefit of his rich capitalist buddies

Has gotten total immunity for “official acts” (what counts as “official”? Whatever his Schedule F appointed judges choose of course.)

Already took away so many freedoms from racial minorities/queer people/women/anyone-that-isn’t-a-rich-white-man that it would take ages to list them all in this post

and so so so so SO MUCH MORE.

The other is a typical neoliberal politician.

Remember also, you’re not just choosing a president, you’re choosing their cabinet, potential Supreme Court justices, federal employees as well. With the above listed ALONE, Trump would do so much more damage than just what he can do himself. That’s not including everything else his Federalist Society Supreme Court would and have given him on a silver platter. Supreme Court Justices are for LIFE, and we’ve already seen the potentially irreparable damage this far-right activist court has done to the fabric of democracy.

Project 2025 really deserves a part to itself just to list some of what it includes: complete abortion/contraceptive ban (no exceptions), destroying worker’s unions and protections, remove Social Security/Medicare/Affordable Care Act, end civil rights protections in government, ban teaching the history of slavery, remove climate protections while gutting the EPA, end equal marriage and enforce the “traditional family ideal”, use the military to gun down protests, mass deportation of legal immigrants (especially Muslims), ending birthright citizenship, pack the lower courts, and plenty more. The far-right wasn’t able to take full advantage of Trump’s presidency the first time since it was so unexpected. They’re preparing so that they won’t make the same mistake again. THERE ARE OVER 900 PAGES OF POLICIES AND PLANS THAT THEY ABSOLUTELY WILL IMPLEMENT IF THEY WIN. READ IT. Anyone that says they won’t is either a liar or already drank the Kool-Aid. Isn’t it interesting that every politician that supports it, including his vice president, wants Trump to win?

Not to mention, if you care about Palestine (like I do, a lot), Trump would be MUCH WORSE for Palestine than the other candidate, supporting Bibi going “from the river to the sea” and already cut off millions in aid to Palestine in 2018 (which Dems reversed!). If you support a free Palestine and don’t vote blue, you have categorically hurt them more than if you did. Even Palestinians themselves want the Democrat candidate over Trump. There is no quick and bloodless peace deal that both Palestine and Israel would ever agree to. The road to an end of the Palestine-Israel conflict is going to be long and difficult, probably decades of dedicated de-radicalization in both states, and will involve far more than one person’s decisions in the end. Unless Trump takes power, and avoids all that by sending enough bombs to turn the Gaza Strip into dust.

There are a few reasons you would choose to vote third party in a FPTP system (support ranked choice voting btw) or not vote “in protest” while ignoring all the state and local elections that affect your area more than the president. Either you’re privileged enough to not be affected by what Trump would bring, you’re ignorant of the consequences, or you care more about doing nothing perfectly rather than doing something, anything that isn’t 100% ideologically “pure” to fight against the far-right fascist movement.

Am I a socialist? Yes. Am I a realist? Also yes. In every single down-ballot race, and through my activism, I will fight for the rights of the oppressed and working-class. But the Presidency isn’t fucking winnable right now, and probably won’t be for decades. Pro-corporatist/anti-worker sentiment is baked into the fucking bones of this country and its people. A majority of eligible voters wouldn’t vote for Bernie, and he’s barely center-left. Voting for anything other than one of the two big parties is a useless feel-good gesture at the moment. Or you’re a dumbass accelerationist, and if you are, honestly go fuck yourself.

Let’s say you want a socialist revolution, full-tilt government takeover. I want that too, in my wildest dreams! We’re on the same page there. So how are you going to do it. How? HOW? What pro-worker activist groups are you working with? Are you encouraging your workplace to form a union? Volunteering for/donating to your local farmers’ co-op? Canvassing for pro-worker legislation? Hell, even something as small as distributing free copies of high-school/college textbooks, so that those of poorer means have a better chance at affording advanced education? Are you doing anything to help? Any praxis at all, rather than typing wishful thoughts of revolution alongside insults to people who aren’t as “correct” as you on the internet?

Every voter that still supports Trump is energized by every cruelty he enacts, while millions of Democrats and third-partyists care more about purity tests and manifesting socialist revolution tulpas than avoiding a fascist dictatorship.

Have a brain, touch grass, and vote blue all the way down that fucking ballot.

[wild-aspen]

As someone who has ACTIVELY been calling for peace and for the end of the war in Gaza, urging people to vote against Trump, posting links to actual orgs that can help Palestinians, and being called a Zionist monster the whole time for my efforts…

I’m furious at every single person who said “genocide Joe”, discouraged others from voting, who didn’t vote to “teach the Dems a lesson”.

You are directly responsible for this happening.

You claim your movement was pro-Palestine.

We can all see now you lied.

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

Here is what I don't get

Why is it fine that most other countries are allowed to have Tariffs on the US, but we are not allowed to have Tariffs on them?

I didn't even KNOW that Canada had a lot of Tariffs against us until Dems started complaining about Trump's Tariff plan, and conservative CANADIANS came out and were like, "Yeah that makes sense. Especially considering that we have a lot of Tariffs on you guys. Honestly it's only fair".

The US education system, if I'm being blunt at this point, doesn't teach us jack shit. And it shows. I'm lucky I learned as much as I did from the few teachers that cared enough to teach me. And I'm glad I had a well rounded family (extended etc) who could teach me a lot of stuff outside of school.

And it's actually a fucking chore to find the list of everything that had tariffs. Because media likes to bury the lead by flooding the zone.

But again I ask you this. WHY is it fair that our goods are taxed and other countries goods are not? Sounds to me that "Liberals" think that it's fine that we get fist fucked by the other countries around the globe, but if we DARE inconvenience another country (unless we are forcing neo progressive cultural standards on the country) that it's bad? You can't make it make sense. Because it doesn't. Also while not a full list I did find a few things:

[askshivanulegacy]

This.

It was the non-voters, plain and simple.

I STILL sometimes see people argue that Trump's victory is the fault of Democrats for not being good enough at messaging, and not making it clear enough to Americans all the good Biden was doing.

I knew. Lots of people I know knew. I don't have a secret line to the white house. I'm around average intelligence. I'm not excessively seeking out news, constantly getting news updates. And yet I knew. And so did many others. The information was there for you to get at any time. It found its way to me without my actively seeking it out. Kamala Harris cannot personally come to your house and slap the tiktok out of your hands. You have to take a crumb of responsibility here.

[mariacallous]

The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens'kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.

I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him.

Jerzy survived the Holocaust because his mother Wanda, a literary translator, refused to go with her children to the Warsaw ghetto. Thanks to her courage and ingenuity, and to others who helped her, he and his brother survived. Jerzy's father was murdered, like more than three million other Jews in Poland. The family history emerged bit by bit, as we became friends, as some of his own colleagues wrote memoirs of childhood survival, as my own interests turned towards the war. During my research, I found a recollection, by his mother, of their time in hiding in Warsaw. It turned out that he had helped her to write it.

In post-communist Poland, in the 1990s and 2000s, Jerzy was an activist against antisemitism and xenophobia, and I attended at his urging some of the meetings of the association he helped direct. The entire time, I think, he was trying to train my eye.

Some forms of what he defined as antisemitism had to do with his memories of occupation. Jews had to show deference. Germans mocked the ways Jews dressed. That was before they were sent to the ghetto and murdered. Jews were scapegoated, made responsible for what the Germans wished to do anyway.

Some characteristics of antisemitism as he described it were more abstract. Jewish achievement was portrayed as illegitimate. Jews only gained success, antisemites say, by lying and propaganda. If a Jew was prominent, that only proved the existence of a Jewish conspiracy, and thereby the illegitimacy of the institution where the success was achieved. A prominent Jew was always, went the antisemitic assumption, motivated by money.

Some of what Jerzy said had to do with his experience after the war. Non-Jews will deny the courage and suffering of Jews. They will claim all heroism and martyrdom as their own. He kept a photo of his mother in a locket. It was important to him that she had been courageous. There was a legend in communist Poland, which still survives, which suppressed Jewish courage and claimed all resistance for non-Jewish Poles. And there was after the war a Soviet antisemitism, with a broader and longer heritage, that claimed that Jews had somehow all remained at the rear while others fought and died. The facts were no defense.

The elements that emerged in conversation with Jerzy over the years -- the mockery of Jewish appearances, the need for Jewish submissiveness, the claims about dishonesty, greed, cowardice, and corrupt conspiracies -- figure in the scholarly literature on the subject. And the scholarship is very important, as are the testimonies, and is the teaching in schools. But all of this should help us to see antisemitism in real life. Some cases are so overwhelming in scale that we find them difficult to confront and name. As Orwell noted, it can be hard to see what is right in front of your face.

Much has been said about the evils of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Its antisemitic element, however, has been underestimated. Russia's major war aim was fascist regime change, the overturning of a democratically-elected president in favor of some sort of collaborator. The premise is absurd: that Ukrainians do not really exist as a nation, and in fact would prefer a Russian. But it was also antisemitic: that it is unnatural that a Jew could hold an important office. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, the Ukrainian president, is of Jewish origin. Members of his family fought in the Red Army against the Germans. Others were murdered in the Holocaust. Although his Jewishness is not very relevant in Ukrainian politics, it is highly salient to Russian (and other) antisemites.

Ukraine, says Putin, does not really exist. But another theme of the propaganda is that Zelens'kyi is not actually the president of Ukraine. These two bizarre ideas work together: Ukraine is artificial and can exist thanks to the Jewish international conspiracy. The fact that a Jew leads the country confirms — for Russian fascists — both the unreality of Ukraine and the reality of a conspiracy. This Russian regime perspective is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) antisemitic. Russian propaganda treats Zelens'kyi as obsessed with money and as subhuman. Zelens'kyi was elected on a peace platform in 2019, but Putin did not want to talk to him, in part because he did not think that Zelens'kyi showed him enough deference. The Russian regime that ordered the invasion is itself obviously fascist, on any definition of fascism you care to choose.

Last Friday I happened to start watching the discussion at the White House between Zelens'kyi, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Brian Glenn towards the end, when Vance was already yelling at the Ukrainian president: "you're wrong!" I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reactions was: these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. A roomful against one. An antisemitic scene.

And the more I listened to the words, the more that reaction was confirmed. I won't speak for how Zelens'kyi regards himself. Ukrainian, of course. Beyond that I don't know. These things are complex, and personal.

But not for the antisemite.

It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. There was no acknowledgement of Zelens'kyi's bravery in remaining in Kyiv. The Americans portrayed themselves as the real heroes because they provided some of the weapons. The suffering of Ukrainians went unmentioned. An attempt to refer to it was cruelly and falsely reduced to a "propaganda tours" led by Zelens'kyi. The Americans portrayed themselves as the real victims of the because they paid for some of the weapons. It was all, bizarrely, about money. There is this odd Trumpian notion, unique to Ukraine, that aid should be paid back as if it were a loan, with Trump himself just making up the amount owed. Zelens'kyi was portrayed as someone who was taking our cash, giving is nothing in return, ripping us off. He was also mocked for not knowing how to dress for the space, as not belonging. And his deference was demanded: "Have you said thank you once?" "Offer some words of appreciation." And then was thrown out of the White House. And told to resign his office as president of Ukraine.

As always with antisemitism, facts are no defense. Zelens'kyi consistently thanks Americans, as can be easily verified. He is the elected president of a country that is a democratic republic under a constitution. Zelens'kyi won the last election with 73% and his approval rating is now 68%; if there were another election, he would win. By the terms of the constitution, the next election will be held when the war is over and martial law can be lifted. It is the general opinion in Ukraine, shared by Zelens'kyi's opponents in parliament, that elections cannot be held while Russia is invading, holding swathes of Ukrainian territory, and coercing Ukrainian citizens. Zelens'kyi has been personally courageous. He stayed in Kyiv when everyone expected him to flee. He visits the front on a regular basis. Ukrainian suffering, sadly, is all too real, from the torture chambers through the executions through the kidnapped children and destroyed cities. It is quite true that the anti-tank weapons Trump authorized during his first term were very important during the first few weeks of the war. But it was the astonishing fact of successful Ukrainian resistance that led to the delivery of further weapons. The arms allocations to Ukraine were aid, and aid is not a lone. They are an essentially invisible portion of the U.S. budget, a penny on the dollar. Most of that penny on the dollar remains in the U.S., restarting assembly lines that had gone cold. Much of what the U.S. has given Ukraine were obsolescent weapons that would have been otherwise been thrown away. As everyone in the room in fact knew, what Zelens'kyi was wearing was meant as an expression of solidarity with a people at war. It was not so unlike what Churchill wore in the White House in 1942.

To conclude that the scene in the White House was antisemitic, one does not need to know anything further. It's all right there: the demand for deference, the obsession with money, the claims of corruption and dishonesty, the encirclement, the loud voices, the bizarre grievances, the underlying sense that a Jewish person does not fit and must be expelled. The context was evocative enough, and nothing more is really needed: those historical markers of antisemitism; Zelens'kyi's Jewish origins; the particular way he was treated by non-Jews.

If we consider for a moment the men who tried to humiliate him, however, the picture only sharpens and clarifies. The man who asked him about his clothes, Brian Glenn, is a conspiracy-theorizing far-right journalist. It is not clear why he was in the Oval Office; but he does seem to know Marjorie Taylor-Greene, she of the Jewish space lasers and the determined defense of Russian propaganda. The man who demanded deference and spoke of "propaganda tours," JD Vance, had just returned from Germany, where he made a point of publicly supporting the German far right. Vance presents Zelens'kyi as a corrupt liar, with no evidence beyond what was brought to him by an internet which has, apparently, found his vulnerabilities. The man who insisted that the Americans (and indeed he himself personally) were the real heroes, Donald Trump, told Jews last fall they would be held responsible if he lost the election -- among many other things. And the man behind them all, Elon Musk, supports the extreme right in several countries, adapts his social media platform to support fascists, and is notorious around the world for his Hitlergrüß. Musk's idea that Zelens'kyi is a grifter could hardly be more antisemitic.

And what have the Americans done since last Friday? They have scapegoated Zelens'kyi. They have doubled down on lies that, sadly, only make sense in an antisemitic worldview. They have blamed him, over and over again, for the things that they wanted to do anyway. It is somehow his fault, rather than their choice, that they are denying weapons to Ukraine and supporting Russia; that they are denying Ukraine necessary intelligence and thereby making it easier for Russia to kill Ukrainians in missile and drone strikes. The scapegoating is antisemitic in form, relying on preposterous notions that American strategic choices can and should be shaped by an ally's dress and demeanor. And it is antisemitic in content, shifting all responsibility from oneself to the Jewish person who must take the blame for everything. The Americans continue to encircle Zelens'kyi, on media, denying his legitimacy as president, calling for his resignation. Musk piles on, calling Zelens'kyi names, and demanding that he be replaced and removed from his country.

Underlying this all is an assumption that can only really be understood as both antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian: that if Zelens'kyi were to resign, the war would somehow end, because he, and not Putin and the Russians, is somehow its instigator. And that is profoundly and weirdly wrong: Zelens'kyi is not some master conspirator who is somehow getting Ukrainians to do something that they would not otherwise do. Ukrainians are actors in all this. Ukrainians have been attacked and who are defending themselves. Their president is, in his own words, just one grain of sand in the hourglass. If Zelens'kyi were assassinated, an outcome that the American abuse has made more likely, Ukraine would continue to fight.

The American antisemitism now merges with the Russian antisemitism and reinforces it. The idea that Zelens'kyi is not a real president, and that his government is therefore not a real government, has been a very specific Russian antisemitic trope from the beginning. And the Russian approval for the American behavior in the White House since Friday could hardly have been more explicit. A spokesman for Putin expressed his pleasure that policies were aligning. A spokeswoman for the Russian foreign minister compared Ukrainians to pedophiles and thieves. The foreign minister himself said that Zelens'kyi was "hardly human." A former Russian president called Zelens'kyi a swine and cheered on Trump. Russian television has celebrated Trump as a Russian ally all week. During this chorus of Russian praise, the White House halted military aid and limited intelligence assistance to Ukraine. And so the United States is now aiding the fascist invasion, and legitimating the attempt at fascist regime change.

It is harder in the 2020s to call things by name than it was, perhaps, in the last century. Actual fascists now call other people "fascists" to make the word meaningless, and so they themselves cannot be seen for what they are. This is the normal Russian practice, now picked up by American fascists. Antisemites likewise can call other people "antisemites." When Russians say that they had to invaded Ukraine because of someone else’s antisemitism rather than their own, they are just trying to make the term meaningless. When Americans claim that antisemitism means that universities must be harassed, they are doing much the same thing. The fact that someone wants to ban protests does not mean that they oppose antisemitism. History would suggest rather the contrary. A concerted effort is being made to train us to think that antisemitism is something besides traditionally hostile ways that non-Jews regard and treat Jews. The result of these semantic abuses is a trivialization of antisemitism — a concept we all need to be able to take seriously, a phenomenon we all need to recognize.

In addition to abusing the word, antisemites can react with manufactured outrage when called out. They can try to hide behind Israel, or by pointing to Jews in their vicinity. So when confronted by actions that appear antisemitic, you have to consider what you see for yourself. The moral and political implications are of the greatest significance. I had a strong personal reaction to that scene in the Oval Office, and I checked it for a week with friends and colleagues, who confessed that they had had the same reaction. I reconsidered what I had learned as a historian. I looked at the scholarly definitions. Everything, sadly, lines up.

The negative reactions to the Oval Office scene can of course take other forms. The antisemitic element of the confrontation, though important, was not the only dynamic. Ukrainians and Europeans, understandably, took the attempt to humiliate Zelens’kyi as a prompt to begin discussions of a security order that accounts for an unreliable United States. Moral assessments along other lines also came in, including from former dissidents in eastern Europe. On Monday, thirty onetime Polish anti-communist oppositionists signed a letter to Donald Trump. They expressed their repugnance at how Zelens'kyi had been treated in the White House. They pointed out that no monetary currency can be equivalent to that of blood shed for freedom. They compared the atmosphere in the Oval Office during that confrontation on Friday to that of a communist interrogation or communist trial, in which the person who had taken the risk to do right was told that they held no cards, that might makes right.

My dissertation advisor, Jerzy Jedlicki, had been a dissident. Polish communists placed him in an internment camp. Perhaps Jerzy, were he still with us, would have signed that letter. As someone who has studied and written about communist terror, I can see the dissident perspective; and given their own personal experiences with interrogations and communist terror, it is one that must be taken seriously. What they failed to mention, though, is that communist interrogation techniques in the 1970s and 1980s were antisemitic: people of Jewish origin were presented as alien to the nation, and were subjected to special abuse. Multiple interrogators would encircle the dissident, and talk among themselves about his supposedly Jewish betrayals and failures. Encirclement, bullying, belittling.

And so I can't escape that first reflexive response to that scene in the Oval Office: here is a person of Jewish origin being treated in a very particular and familiar way by non-Jews. I get the dissidents’ comparison to an interrogation or trial, and can imagine the cell or the courtroom. But what struck me was the circle of bullying gentiles -- as in Europe in the 1930s, and in other places and times, at the particular moment when the mob felt that power was shifting.

But is it? In writing about antisemitism here I am obviously making a moral point. I am asking us, Americans, to think seriously about what we are doing, about Russia's criminal war against Ukraine, in which we are now becoming complicit. That Russia's war is antisemitic is one of its many evils; taking Russia’s side in that war is wrong for many reasons, including that one. At a time when antisemitism is a growing problem around the world, I would like for us to be able to see the obvious examples, especially when we Americans are so closely involved in them. There is a certain mobbish mindlessness in the growing circle of American voices calling for Zelens'kyi to leave office, and I think it has a name and a history. I would like for us to recall that history and remember that the name can apply to us.

In writing about antisemitism I am also making a political claim. The antisemite really believes that the Jew must defer, that the Jew cannot fight, that a state led by a Jew must duly crumble. This was one of Putin's mistakes, two years ago. And now, I suspect, it is also Trump's, and Musk's. America does have the power, of course, to hurt Ukraine. Just as Russia does. The combination of American and Russian policy is killing Ukrainians right now. The costs of the emerging Russian-American axis will be terrible for Ukraine. But Ukraine will not immediately collapse, nor will the Ukrainian population turn against Zelens'kyi. What he will personally do I couldn't say and won't try to predict: and that, of course, is my point.

In the world of the antisemite, all is known in advance: the Jew is just a deceiver, concerned only with money, subject to exclusion, intimidated by force. As soon as he is humiliated and eliminated, everything else will fall into its proper place. Consider the smirks in the Oval Office last Friday: the antisemite thinks that he has understood everything. But in the actual world in which we actually live, Jews are humans, perilous and beautiful like the rest of us. The United States has never elected a Jewish president, and perhaps never will. But Ukraine has; and that president represents his people, facing challenges that those who mock him will never understand. Those Americans have chosen to add their own to the evil he must confront. But that does not mean that they will control what happens next.

In 1936, before the war, Wanda, Jerzy’s mother, translated a book entitled Oil Rules the World. We seem to be heedlessly returning to an era where resources demand violence. American foreign policy now seems to be all about mineral wealth: in Greenland, in Canada, and in Ukraine — where the pressure on Zelens’kyi is connected to an American desire to control Ukrainian minerals. This is worrying for a number of reasons.

In the antisemitic imagination, everything is for the taking. I used to talk with Jerzy Jedlicki about Mein Kampf, whether and how it should be censored, who read it in the twenty-first century. Our world, as Hitler described it in Mein Kampf, is just thin crust of land, to be defined by the fertility of the topsoil and the bounty of the minerals beneath. Only the Jews, he thought, stand in the way of its conquest by the strongest. Behind all of the calumnies about the lying and the stealing and the conspiracies was Hitler's true fear: the Jews, he thought, were the only source of human values, the reason why we might think that there is something in the world aside from power and the greed of the powerful, something beyond an endless war for topsoil and minerals. To extinguish virtue the Jew must be mocked, and then marginalized, and then murdered. And that, of course, worked as politics in Nazi Germany; not because the premise was true, but because Germans went along, killing their own virtue along the way. Never again means attending to the smaller aggressions that imply the greater ones to come.

The war that Hitler began, the Second World War, was about eliminating Jews and stealing resources. He was aiming above all for the fertile soil of Ukraine and the mineral wealth of the Caucasus: for what he called Lebensraum, living space. To get to Ukraine, Germans had to cross Poland, where they created ghettos, like the one in Warsaw where Wanda did not go; and then the death factories, like Treblinka, where the Jews of Warsaw were murdered. Jerzy escaped gassing at Treblinka; decades later on he tried to helped me to see, and to think. He was trying to help me to have the eye of a historian in the present, and perhaps he succeeded, a bit. About one thing I am certain. Our eyes have to be open to what we do not wish to see.