The Trump/Vance Administration abandoned 80 years of protecting the world from totalitarian brutality in Munich earlier this month, just as Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler and Mussolini in 1938.

( Top Photo 1 (far left), Chamberlain signing the peace treaty of Munich with Hitler & Mussolini, in Munich, 1938; (middle photo), Trump capitulating to Putin on matters of US national security in Helsinki; (Photo 3, , Vice-President abandoning his own Christian values and the Democracies of Europe, at Munich, 2025.)

For years, I asked a question of my students in an Ethics Class I taught in Cornell University’s Labor Studies Program: “If you had the hard evidence that Hitler was slaughtering Jews, and had the opportunity to kill him, would you?

Shortly after the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine began three years ago, in an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky updated and broadened the moral question for us, and provided the world with an answer:

“All the (Ukrainian) people who die, will die because of you (NATO), your weakness. I remember, books about the Second World War, and about the devil in uniform, Adolf Hitler; Does the world carry responsibility for the Genocide? When you have the ability to close the sky — but whether the world is responsible for this — Yes, I believe so, I believe so. Stand in front of the mirror and ask yourself , “are you able to do something?” And ask, who are you?”

Zelensky, a lawyer by training, and the Ukrainian-born Jewish son of a computer scientist and an engineer, has been fearless — not only in standing up to the calculated, criminal and murderous methods of the world’s latest mass-murderer, Russian President Vladimir Putin — but in confronting Western leaders with uncomfortable moral & ethical questions.

“If you are the UN Security Council,” Zelensky asked the members of the UN, “where is the Security? Do you think that the time of International Law is gone?”

Now, as the Trump Administration is poised to abandon the 40+ million people of Ukraine, and throw open the borders of Europe by appeasing Putin for Trump’s personal purposes, and boosting Fascism over our Allies of 80 years, the liberal democracies of Europe & NATO, even more serious and seering questions need to be raised.

Does International Law exist any longer in the world, with a convicted felon serving as the American President, pardoning other violent convicted felons, and a War Criminal excused for the biggest land war in Europe since the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews, Russians, Europeans and American soldiers?

Similarly, Zelensky, who has offered to sacrifice his own democratically elected Presidency—and perhaps his life—to guarantee Ukraine the security and protection of NATO—has refused to sell-out the people of his own country, or to participate in Trump’s twisted rewriting of history which would transform Putin into a mass-murderer on the scale of Josef Stalin, who intentionally starved three million Ukrainians to death.

Zelensky has expressed skepticism about whether well-documented War Crimes charges against Putin for the intentional bombing of hospitals and schools—once lodged by the US and NATO members against the Russians, will ever be enforced, or adjudicated. Does any tribunal exist anymore to try such crimes, or are those monstrous crimes against humanity subject to “pardon” by the convicted felon, heading the world’s most powerful nation?

After all, the United States, Russia, China, India & Israel ( in the ultimate historic irony) — some of the world’s leading nuclear powers — have rejected the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the primary international body for prosecuting War Crimes. The irony for Israel, of course, is that it was the Nuremberg Trials which laid the foundation for the establishment of International Law, and the ICC, as an essential component of a just world order under law. Has that standard been suffocated by the Trump Administration, in it’s perverse push to appease Putin, and other totalitarians?

Zelensky knew from the beginning of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that the “War Crimes” war cry against Putin and Russia, was an empty threat, to take attention away from the early failure of the US & NATO to commit their own forces in direct military punishment of Putin, and to make the West feel better about not stopping the crimes while they are happening in real time, in full view of the entire world.

In a detailed New York Times analysis done the week the war in Ukraine began, entitled “War Crimes Often Avoid A Reckoning,” by Max Fisher, the Times reported that: “In 2016, the ICC opened an investigation into possible war crimes committed during Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia…Prosecutors requested the first arrest warrants only last month,” some 14 years after the alleged War Crimes occurred.

During World War II, the United States waited for two years to confront Hitler with direct military force, ignoring clear evidence of the madman’s widespread massacre of Jews across Europe & the Ukraine, and the Nazi’s brutal takeover of nations like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Despite, or maybe because of, the History Channel’s endless reruns of World War II, we appear to believe that the lessons of the past — of mass murder, genocide and the utter destruction of civilizations — are only made-for-television events. But, we are shown by the hour, as Zelensky emphasized in his first interview for CBS’ Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes: “This is not a movie; This is real life.”

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder has worked mightily to teach us that sobering lesson as well. Most well-known for his best-selling, small but powerful book, “On Tyranny — published during the first year of the Trump Administration, as a warning against the weakening of democracy in America — Snyder has authored 13 other books, and is one of the world’s foremost experts on authoritarianism. Snyder has repeatedly warned us that the Holocaust could happen again if we are not assiduous in defending democracy and the rights of individuals. Or, as Zelensky has said recently, “Never again, is happening again,” underscoring the emptiness of words without immediate and direct military intervention to stop another Holocaust in progress.

Professor Snyder’s book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books/Division of Penguin Random House, NY., 2015) is both a detailed and riveting examination of how the Nazi Holocaust happened, and an alarm for spotting the scorched-earth, inhumane tactics Vladimir Putin and Russia practiced in Ukraine. Eerily, the term “Black Earth,” defines Ukraine — a land always known for its fertile, rich soil and as the “breadbasket of Europe”, and now seen as a wasteland of charred hospitals and apartment buildings, bombed out train stations and community centers, and half-buried bodies with frozen limbs emerging from unmarked graves.

The conquest of Ukraine (then part of Russia), was a central element of Hitler’s plan for Lebensraum, or land on which the Third Reich could grow and become a global empire. “I need the Ukraine, “ Hitler said, “in order that no one is able to starve us out again, like in the last war.” In Putin’s case, the conquest of Ukraine was essential to restore Russia to its glory days of Soviet Empire, his own version of Lebensraum.

Now, in a further maccabre murdering of history, the Trump Administration is, once again, trying to blackmail Ukraine for the treasures that lie beneath it’s “Black Earth,”—the billions of dollars in rare minerals needed to power the American high tech industry. Again this time, like Hitler aligning himself with wealthy German industrialists, Trump is doing the bidding of US billionaires like Elon Musk, who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, in order to secure hundreds of billions of dollars of business for themselves.

Brutal authoritarians like Putin, Hitler and Stalin borrow tactics of mass slaughter from each other, especially when they are not forcibly prevented from doing so by the world’s democracies. It was the USSR’s own Joseph Stalin, another one of Putin’s heroes, who inspired Hitler to use mass starvation — much as Putin used it in Mariupol — as an illegal tool of war, by using it against his own people, the Ukrainians, whether they were Russian-speakers or not. In Black Earth, Professor Snyder writes:

“Stalin wished to apply to his own subjects (Ukrainians) the policies that he believed imperialists applied to native peoples…Soviet policy brought massive resistance and massive starvation…in the second half of 1933, Stalin treated the starvation region in Ukraine as a political problem, blamed the Ukrainians themselves, and claimed the whole crisis was the result of Polish intelligence work….About 3.3 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died horrible and unnecessary deaths of starvation and disease in 1932 and 1933….thousands of peasants fled Soviet Ukraine across the Polish border, entire villages at a time, begging for a war of liberation. The summary report of the Polish border guards assigned to interview the Ukrainian refugees read as follows: “The population longs for armed intervention from Europe.”

Zelensky and millions Ukrainian refugees have been pleading for “armed intervention from Europe,” and the US, since the very outset of the Russian invasion. Forgetting history, we immediately ruled out a direct military confrontation with Russia, citing a fear of triggering “Nuclear War,” — precisely the talking point which Putin wanted the West to parrot. Our reluctance to immediately confront Putin’s immoral and illegitimate use of force in Ukraine with the defensive, legitimate and superior force of NATO nations, sent the message to Russia — as the British and French sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich did to Hitler in 1938 — that 40+ million Ukrainians were expendable, as long as Western soil was left untouched.

When Putin ordered the attack on the refugee-full train station in Kramatorsk, turning Kramatorsk into a crematoria for all the world to see, Zelensky — fresh from witnessing the barbarism by the Russian soldiers in Bucha — frankly framed what faced us: “This is an evil that has no limits.” Unspoken was the phrase, “unless the overwhelming power of NATO and the U.S. are immediately and equally engaged to limit such evil.” Now, with the installation of a Putin appeaser in the White House, and Fascist fan-boys running the Trump Administration, even the significant, yet limited, American support for Ukraine’s freedom and right to life, appears to be gone.

US & NATO officials patted ourselves on the back for agreeing to more tough economic sanctions against Russia, and continuing the steady flow of weapons to Ukraine — as long as the Ukrainians, not Americans nor Europeans, faced Putin directly — even when a NATO aerial attack on clearly visible, miles-long Russian supply caravans — outside of Kyiv and now in Eastern Ukraine — could have stopped the slaughter. Elon Musk, who controls Starlink Satellite Services, LLC—a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX—admitted to shutting down Ukraine’s Starlink service when the Ukrainians had a credible change to destroy Russian ships stationed off Crimea in the Black Sea. Now, Musk’s paid-for mouthpiece, Trump, is proposing to extort Ukraine, by suspending Starlink Satellite again if Ukraine doesn’t agree to unilaterally turn over 50% of its rare minerals to the United States.

Ukrainian lives, once again, are not being valued as much as American or European lives, or the profits of American billionaires, It was not lost on Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians that a similar catastrophic conclusion — for far more twisted, sinister and evil purposes — was made by both Hitler and Stalin decades earlier. It’s a dehumanizing distinction which is being dangerously repeated around the world.

CBS’ 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley asked Ukrainian President Zelensky what he wanted the world to understand:

“We are defending the ability of a person to live in the modern world. We are defending the right to live,” Zelensky said. “I never thought this right was so costly. These are human values. So that Russia doesn’t choose what we should do and how I’m exercising my rights. That right was given to me by God and my parents.”

Frighteningly, it’s no longer Russia choosing “what we should do and how I’m exercising my rights.” It’s a new American government, in love with the appeasement and the tactics of authoritarians, and abandoning any pretense to advancing human and democratic rights, in exchange for cash, or any other currency, at the expense of the law, fundamental decency and morality.

It will stand strong–long after Trump is sentenced to a legacy of infamy– and teach future generations where the fight for LGBTQ+ Equality began.

(The next, proud generation of the Villano Family at the site of the Stonewall Rebellion for LGBTQ+ equality.)

When we took our three granddaughters to visit New York City three years ago, our oldest granddaughter, now almost 16 years old, wanted to see the Stonewall National Monument.

She is a remarkable human being, incredibly intelligent and compassionate, and acutely aware of what’s going on in the world around her. An out and very proud Lesbian, our oldest granddaughter is already a strong, clear voice for equality, human rights, and personal honesty. She has taken her father’s mantra, “putting humanity first,” to heart, and it guides every single thing she does.

I thought I already knew a lot about the LGBTQ+ community, having been part of it for many years, and having raised tens of millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS education, treatment and care, and secured a few billion dollars of pro-bono TV time to fight anti-HIV stigma and discrimination and violence against the entire community. My decade as CEO of Cable Positive —theAIDS action organization of the Cable Television industry—introduced me to every sexuality and gender under our big, welcoming umbrella of love.

Then, my granddaughter began educating me.

She meticulously drew every multi-colored flag representing each segment of the Queer community. Her father, who welcomes diversity with a Pride Progress flag proudly flapping in the breeze in front of his house, was delighted to hang her hand-done flags as a valance over the patio doors in his kitchen. My granddaughter never tired of explaining the difference to me between each flag, and each community.

Patiently she told me about some of the definitions describing the newer nuances of gender, and she never once tired of her “boomer” Grampy asking question after question. If only every family could have a caring, nurturing teacher like my sweet Sage I thought; the world would be a far, far better place.

I sent my granddaughter an Instagram photo of this weekend’s demonstration at the Stonewall Monument, protesting the mean-spirited Trump Administration’s removal of the “T” from the National Parks Monument to Stonewall, on Christopher Street in NYC. Driven by the shrivel-souled Fundamentalist religious fanatics behind Project 2025, on a jihad against “Transgender ideology,” Trump signed an Executive Order demanding that any reference to “trans” or “gender” be scrubbed from all national sites, websites, and documents.

The National Women’s Law Center has been sounding the alarm about these totalitarian actions, which, are ripped right from the playbook of Nazi Party in 1930’s Germany:

“For the architects of Project 2025, few things are more terrifying than LGBTQI+ people.. . . on page after page, they weaponize that fear to try to demonize, dehumanize, and destroy LGBTQI+ people.

Right out of the gate, Project 2025 bemoans “transgender ideology”—a phrase that suggests that trans people are not actual humans as much as embodiments of malignant propaganda. For Project 2025’s authors, the “ideology” of trans existence and LGBTQI+ equality has seeped into every crevice of the federal government, and it’s their mission to eradicate it.

For starters, Project 2025 calls for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” This erasure isn’t symbolic—it’s part of a systematic effort to strip LGBTQI+ people of all legal protection from persecution, discrimination, and violence.”

The fact that it was Barack Obama in 2016 who designated that a National Monument be built at the site of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion—the first LGBTQIA+ visitors center within the National Parks System—must have given Trump a sick sense of joy when he signed his flagrantly prejudiced fatwa into effect.

I went to the National Parks Website, for the Stonewall Monument, and discovered that the “T” had indeed been torn down by the troglodytes, with the National Park site identified as an historic site for the “LGB” community. How lame.

Fortunately, on the website of the Stonewall National Visitor Center—a NYC visitor’s center on the location of the original Christopher Street uprising—the full LGBTQIA+ designation waves proudly in almost each paragraph. And, nothing prevents the City or State of New York from building a massive monument honoring the Transgender community on City property smack in front of the National Park sign.

I thought of the small, gnarly and gnome-like worldview of the people who wrote Project 2025, and of Trump, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller and the sewer full of red-fanged rat-faced functionaries who take delight in cruelty to one individual or to a group of people.

Then, I thought of my beautiful, loving granddaughter, and her full, bright smile and wonderful, unbridled laugh, and knew that no amount of smallness or meanness or narrow-minded fear, could ever hold back the world that she and her contemporaries are demanding for themselves, with all of us who love them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them fighting for equality and a better life.

Abe Lincoln initially wanted to ship the Black population to another country, until he saw how they sacrificed their lives to save the American union from Apartheid. THIS is no time to whine.

(From the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Steve Villano)

Yes, Abe Lincoln freed the slaves.

But, as un-whitewashed history teaches us, not without giving far more progressive abolitionists, and Black folks, lots of aggravation and agita. Lincoln spent much of his life advocating an even more extreme White Supremacist view of the United States than present day dunces of the Confederacy, Donald Trump and Elon Musk—two wealthy, spoiled white boys who made their careers spewing racist and exclusionary bile—are pedaling right now.

If you’re tired of Lincoln’s legend being sanitized, or the story of Black Americans being bleached by a coordinated campaign to ban Black History in schools, pull down references to Black History Month on Google, or rip down “End Racism” signs at the NFL’s Superbowl, than it’s time to turn to the brilliant 1619 Project: A New Origin Story created by Nikole Hannah Jones for the New York Times & Random House (copyright 2021, New York Times Publishing Company).

In her watershed work, the truth-telling journalist Jones points us toward the insightful writings of Frederick Douglass, a powerful voice for equality who knew Lincoln well, and understood what crumbs of freedom White American public officials would risk offering to millions of Black Americans, who were enslaved. Lincoln, much as we would like to believe otherwise, was no exception.

Douglass, a former slave, ardent abolitionist, great orator, and one of the most consequential writers, thinkers and leaders in American History — wrote three separate autobiographies from 1845 through 1892. He is the Douglass whose name should be immediately paired with Lincoln’s, rather than that of US Senator Stephen Douglas, who debated Lincoln about slavery, beat him for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858, and tried to broker a wishy-washy State sovereignty deal on slavery to avert Civil War.

In the 1619 Project, the Lincoln/Frederick Douglass story is meticulously told. I have excerpted some key portions of that story here:

“In our national story, we crown Lincoln the Great Emancipator, the president who ended slavery, demolished the racist South, and ushered in the free nation our founders set forth.

But this narrative, like so many others, requires more nuance. Frederick Douglass would never forget that the president initially suggested that the only solution, after abolishing enslavement that had lasted for centuries, was for Black Americans to leave the country they helped to build.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Abe Lincoln, considered by many to be the greatest of all American presidents, first favored the deportation of all Black Americans. It was a position he had favored for years.

More than a decade after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Douglass was asked to eulogize the assassinated President.

“ The abolitionist (Frederick Douglass), whose mother had been sold away from him when he was a young child, had met Lincoln a few times during his presidency and had repeatedly prodded Lincoln in his writings and speeches to emancipate the enslaved.”

“At first, Douglass praised Lincoln as “a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity.”

But, as Jones writes in 1619 Project, Douglass was determined to make clear that he hadn’t simply come to praise Lincoln and “promote the narrative of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator who set his people free.”

Frederick Douglass: “Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man, or our model…He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of white people in this country. YOU are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are, at best, only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”

Douglass was not just referring to Lincoln’s longstanding advocacy of Colonization — relocating American Blacks to either the West Indies or to Africa. He was directly referencing the North’s necessity of freeing the slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the union. Whether by design or default, freeing the slaves had become an essential military tactic for the North to win the War. Following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of freed black, enslaved persons left Southern plantations, and reinforced battered Union troops.

Historian Bruce Levine, in his book The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Random House, NY, 2013), drove home the crucial role newly freed slaves had in the Union’s victory over the South:

“By early 1864, the steady erosion of slavery throughout the loyal border states was as difficult to miss as it was in Union-occupied portions of the confederacy…By mid-September 1864, the Union had enlisted 14,000 Black soldiers (from border states, with another six thousand expected by the end of October…General Lorenzo Thomas praised the new Black regiments as filling up with “the very best class of men.”

What became clearer each succeeding day, was that while Lincoln “freed the slaves,” the newly freed Black men, fighting alongside Union Troops, were critically important in the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War. Once freed, former enslaved people fought fiercely to preserve — and extend — their liberty. There was no going back.

In his eulogy, “Douglass launched into a breathtaking litany of Lincoln’s shortcomings, referring in part to their White House meeting with Black leaders in August 1862, just a little over four months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued:

“Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost…when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born.”

However, as Jones writes in The 1619 Project, “though the Union was worth more to Lincoln than enslaved people’s freedoms, Douglass said: ‘under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.”

“Douglass understood that Lincoln’s ideas about Black people changed during the course of the War. The president had been deeply moved by the valor of the Black men who’d help save the Union, and had been influenced by Black men such as Douglass, whom he held in high esteem. Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated Colonization (resettlements of the Black population), by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. In his final speech before his assassination, Lincoln expressed an openness to enfranchising a limited number of Black men — particularly educated men and those who’d fought in the War.”

Historian Christopher James Bonner, author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, offered his perspective to The 1619 Project:

“ That last speech calling for partial inclusion of Black Americans, that’s an evolution, and among the many tragedies of Lincoln’s death is that he did change so much in such a short period of time,” Bonner said. “Still, the final stage of Lincoln is still a person who only believes in partial Black inclusion and who is only advocating for certain Black people on certain terms. It’s valid to expect that he would have continued to evolve, but what we do know is that in the unfortunately short period of his presidency, Lincoln wasn’t an advocate for full equality.”

Formerly enslaved Black Americans were not interested in any half-way solutions. Jones writes in The 1619 Project, that when the Civil War ended “suddenly freeing four million Black Americans, few were interested in leaving the country.

“Instead, most would have fervently supported the sentiment of a resolution against Black colonization put forward at a convention of Black leaders in New York, some decades before:

“This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers…Here we were born, and here we will die.”

Racial hatred across continents and generations can have sinister, cruel and inhuman consequences when coupled with money, power and lack of conscience.

(“Below the Bread Line,No. 4”, photo by Ernest Cole, taken in 1960, during South African Apartheid).

“Make Apartheid Great Again,”

Musk murmured in Trump’s ear;

Our mass murder of Blacks backfired—

So, let’s try it again, right here.”

Musk pointed to a map,

Circling nations, primarily Black;

“Let’s starve them; kill them by disease.

Our rich, white friends will be so pleased.”

“I like the sound of that,” burped Trump,

Who’d locked “those” people out of his dumps.

“Ignoring the law’s so effective, a low blow,

It’s a lesson Roy Cohn taught me long ago.”

“Make Apartheid Great Again,”

Musk belted out his song,

From Africa to Mississippi,

No one will ever think anything’s wrong.

Trump beamed, Musk preened—

Mushy white gut bulging out;

“We’ll keep those Darkies on the run,

They’ll have no breath left to shout.”

Musk raised his arm in sharp salute,

Sure to arouse a furor;

“We are the masters, the very best,

There are no others purer!”

As if on cue, a balding flunker

Arose from out his psychotic bunker;

“No Citizenship! That’s the killer,”

Ranted the soulless, eyeless Stephen Miller.

“Apartheid lovers gave their lives,

Crushed by Amendment 14;

Let’s just declare it null and void,

Since we have superior genes.”

“Just wipe them out,” Elon shrieked,

“We almost did in Capetown!”

“I tried it with the Central Park 5,” said Trump,

‘Til facts and science beat me down.”

“ Let’s Make Apartheid Great Again!”

The crapulent White Men bleated,

“And once we’ve wiped away that stain,

The Palestinians can be excreted.”

Then Musk gave Trump

A belly bump; And,

Pulling his pants below his naval,

He swaggered across the Oval room,

Carving a Swastika into the Resolute table.