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erictmason · 7 years

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Top 10 Disney Cartoon Shows

Turns out that last list didn't quite get all the Disney out of my system, so I'm at it again. Only this time, it's about Disney's efforts on the small screen. It's actually kind of hard to overstate the significance of Disney's choice to get into the television animation game back in the 80's. Before then, whatever else one could say about its merits, animation on TV meant one thing: cheap (well, OK, that and "short films imported from a radically different era", but let's not split hairs here). That isn't to say quality animation could not be found on television pre-Disney, but rather that said quality (both in the visual and writing departments) was rarely if ever the priority. But when Disney came along, with a mission statement of bringing with it the level of craft that had defined their theatrical films (though naturally they were never really aiming that high), that changed, and animation studios of all stripes suddenly had a reason to pour a lot more effort into their animated TV shows. I don't think it's unfair to say we're still living in the world Disney helped create, in fact, whether it's the overt influence many of Disney's shows have had on the newest generation of animators or else by virtue of the space they helped to make where such shows can exist and thrive. So, with the reboot of "Ducktales", the Disney TV animation studio's first breakout success, having recently launched, I thought it would be an appropriate time to look back at that vast, storied history of Disney TV cartoons and pick out my personal picks for the best of the bunch. As usual, there are a few provisos, a couple of quid pro quos if you will. 1.) It has to be a show made by a division of Disney Television Animation, not just airing on a Disney-owned channel. That means no Lucasfilms, no Marvel, and no imports from, say, Canada or Japan. 2.) TV shows only, no shorts or compilation shows. So much as I adore them, the current run of "Mickey Mouse" shorts will not be on here, sorry. 3.) It has to have aired in its entirety. I feel like it's unfair to judge a TV show on a list like this without being able to see it as a whole, so as intriguing as, say, "Star VS. The Forces of Evil" is, it isn't eligible since it's still producing new episodes. With the rules established? Let's make some magic!

10.) Aladdin: The Series (1994-1995): Here's a bit of irony for you: half the reason Disney ventured into television animation in the first place is that, at the time, the future of their theatrical animation division seemed in doubt. Not long after, however, along came "The Little Mermaid" and the Disney Renaissance, and suddenly it was the television side looking to the theatrical side for source material. Quite a few Renaissance pics got the TV show treatment as a result, but for my money the best of the bunch remains "Aladdin: The Series", mainly because it's the one that feels most of a piece with the original movie. Part of that, of course, is that "Aladdin" was already a bit more suited to the adventure-a-week formula, since that's kind of where the roots of the original story already run. But part of it is also that the ways in which the show expanded on the original's world were genuinely clever. Pulling not only from Arabian mythology, but Greco-Roman, Aztec, Egyptian, and beyond, the show managed to deliver remarkably-solid adventure stories, few of which ever continued from the other but all of which worked surprisingly well together to create a world that felt remarkably alive and vibrant. Sure, Aladdin himself remains a fairly uninteresting protagonist, Dan Castellanata can't hope to replace Robin Williams as The Genie, and Iago is a lot less fun when he's asked to be a constant lead presence rather than a humorous diversion. But even so, "Aladdin: The Series" succeeded at taking the original's lead, running with it, and in the process delivering a show that felt exciting and interesting to watch week from week just to see what new corner of its world it would uncover.

9.) Phineas and Ferb (2007-2015): OK, confession time? I actually don't like this show very much. I hardly dislike it or anything, but I was never able to really get into it the same way I could other entries in the remarkably-specific sub-genre of "TV Cartoons Aimed At Kids Which Manage To Also Garner A Sizable Teen/Adult Audience" like, say, "Steven Universe" or another show that's probably on this list. Nonetheless, I can't deny this thing is maybe the success story of modern-day Disney television animation, lasting longer by far than any other show on the list. Nor am I unaware of what made it so popular: the strong, heavily-geometric character designs, the charming musical numbers, and the mad-cap, self-aware comedy. It's that last piece I find most interesting, because I think it speaks most strongly to what helped "Phineas and Ferb" stand out from the pack: it's kind of like the kid-friendly version of "Family Guy", at least in the sense that it derives its humor less from the story or characters, who are deliberately archetypal, and more from its ability to use those archetypal characters as delivery machines for rapid-fire punchlines predicated on equal parts dry wit and pop-cultural reference. In other words, it never becomes itself an "adult" series, indeed its whole perspective is an exaggerated version of childhood, but it does use an "adult"-oriented style of comedy most other kid's shows didn't really utilize back when it started. That kind of unique creative choice can often do a lot of help a show stand out from the crowd, and, with four seasons, seven years, and over 200 episodes (to say nothing of TV specials and movies), I think it's safe to say that's exactly what this show did.

8.) Fillmore! (2002-2004): Man, why don't more people remember this show? Following up on the renewed popularity of crime procedurals thanks to both the "Law and Order" and "CSI" franchises being at their peak, it takes the structure and tone of a 70's/80's-style crime drama and refits it into the world of Middle School. Cops become Hallway Monitors, overzealous politicians become overbearing teachers, and Grand Theft Auto becomes bicycle theft. It's that last part that proves the most amusing; since murder is pretty obviously not going to fly on a kid's show, the crimes they do come up with display a remarkable breadth of creativity. Trying to chase down a graffiti vandal turns into a "Silence of the Lambs"-style criminal vs. criminal scenario, fandom obsession leads to dangerous sabotage, smuggling food into school is treated like something akin to drug-running, that sort of thing. And best of all, while the show is entirely aware of its own absurdity, its sense of humor is 100% deadpan, and the result is that it really does play like a "straight" Cop Drama despite its setting. It's a unique tone that is equal parts engaging and funny, and it creates this really interesting one-of-a-kind style that no other show has ever really tapped into, either before or since. Top it off with a great pair of lead characters-the titular Fillmore himself, a Good Guy With A Past played with a crisp cool to match the show's tone by Orlando Brown, and his reformed-ex-con partner Ingrid Third, another notch in veteran VA Tara Strong's belt, and you've got a great kid's show that's every bit as gripping as the shows it parodies, even as it also gets some solid laughs along the way too.

7.) TaleSpin (1990-1991): For the most part, it's easy to draw the lines that connect the Disney Afternoon's initial shows to the pre-existing Disney properties they're based on. "Goof Troop" is really just those old-school Goofy shorts about domestic life updated to match with 90's-style family sitcoms, "Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers" plugs the titular duo into kid-friendly adventure romps, and so on and so forth. But "TaleSpin" is just so weird in that respect: it may borrow three of its key characters from there, but it can't really be said to be based on Disney's 1967 version of "The Jungle Book". Instead, those characters-or rather heavily modified versions of those characters re-conceived to fit in to the show's new setting-are placed into an entirely new world, which itself is something like a steampunk fantasy version of 1920's America, guided by the spirit of old-school Adventure Serials. But the very oddity of its construction allows "TaleSpin" to feel at once familiar and new, able to ground itself by way of those "Jungle Book" characters you know and love (with the twists it puts on them being endearingly clever, like making Shere Khan a Lex Luthor-style corporate mogul) while also spring-boarding out into a wide variety of classic adventure stories. Daring duels with pirates, high-stakes air races, and even the occasional flight of overtly-magical fancy...there's a lot of Tales to Spin here, and the show consistently does so with an admirably clear-eyed sense of its own genre and how to best play with it. And again, it's all connected to a charming cast of characters. "TaleSpin" is a tricky little thing to pin down, then, but for that very reason it's way too memorable to overlook or ever forget.

6.) The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1988-1991): "Winnie the Pooh" stories are a tricky thing to do right. They'd been around for close to half-a-century even back when Disney first adapted the property into a trilogy of animated short films during the mid-to-late 60's, and that history, combined with the stories' enduring popularity, means we all have a fairly solid idea of what they "feel" like. Moreover, by their very nature, the best "Pooh" stories are short, simple things with only the barest hint of narrative intent or moral center. Which means trying to expand on them in any significant way runs the risk of stuffing them with more familiar story-telling tropes and styles that simply do not belong there. So "The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" deserves a lot of credit, if not for dodging that fact entirely (as was increasingly common in kid's TV shows of the time, it made sure to center a lot of its stories around "lessons" in a fashion much louder and more overt than the source material), then at least for managing to make a show that consistently felt like it captured and exemplified the right spirit even so. A lot of that, it should be said, comes down to the voice actors; not only did Paul Winchell (Tigger) and John Fiedler (Piglet) return to reprise their iconic roles after having sat out the previous "Pooh" TV show, "Welcome to Pooh Corner", but this also marks the first "Pooh" project where the title character is voiced by Jim Cummings, who has played the role in every other "Pooh" production to come out of Disney in the nearly-three decades since. Their performances aren't just consistently entertaining, they also lend a sense of spiritual continuity that benefits the show greatly. More to the point, though, the animation has an intriguing physicality to it that recognizes the stuffed-animal nature of its core cast, as well as a delightfully-poppy color scheme. The writing, meanwhile, uses a particular blend of sweetness and humor that feels at once akin to the original Disney short films, but also distinct and enjoyable unto itself. Wordplay, slapstick, and gentle philosophizing, hallmarks of a good "Pooh" story since the very beginning, all show up in "The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh", but the show always puts a just-so slightly-modern touch on each one. To be sure, "New Adventures" plays in the same ballpark as more typical Saturday Morning cartoon fare, but it does so with the invaluable lessons of Pooh himself pretty clearly having been taken to heart in the process, and the resulting show is simply delightful.

5.) Adventures of the Gummi Bears (1985-1991): Technically speaking, the first Disney Television series is the short-lived plush-toy spin-off "The Wuzzles". Meanwhile, the first real breakout hit for the studio was unquestionably 1987's "Ducktales". But the one that first really established the studio, granting it the foothold from which it would build its future successes, is "The Adventures of the Gummi Bears". On paper, it sounds very much like a "Smurfs" wanna-be, centered as it is on a tribe of small, magically-inclined creatures with matching names set in a vaguely-Medieval England fantasy world. But in execution, it winds up weaving a remarkably-compelling tale with a surprisingly-dense internal mythology which it treats with an impressive degree of respect and earnestness. That isn't to say it's some Super Serious Epic (we'll need to go a bit up the list for that show), but even as it keeps things primarily centered on kid-friendly slapstick and gentle goofing off (and does a fine version of it in both cases too), there is nonetheless an underlying spine of genuinely weighty world-building to it that adds just the right amount of extra heft to even the lighter aspects of the series. The way our main characters, the Gummi Bears of the title, slowly but surely discover more and more aspects of their history and culture (much of it tangled up in an ugly war stemming from prejudice and distrust), all the while hoping for the day they'll be able to reunite with their own people, underlines almost every episode, pulling you in and often taking you by surprise. As well, while all clearly archetypal (in the old Seven Dwarves tradition of being named for their defining traits, even), those characters are all delightful to spend time with, again thanks to a strong cast of voice-acting veterans like Paul Winchell, June Foray, and Bill Scott, and a dynamic that feels warm and lived-in. Moreover, this is the show that Disney's TV animation really used to show off its skills, with some of the most fluid, engaging use of motion in any cartoon of the era; some episode are naturally stronger than others, but the best of them are genuinely gorgeous stuff. It is, in other words, a show with an intriguing story that feels very much like the best sort of Bed-Time Story, inviting and friendly on one level but with a deeper center just beneath the surface to pull you in and keep you coming back, and realized with a strong, compelling craft. So it's really no wonder that these "Gummi Bears" were, in their way, the ones to start the long-lived legacy of Disney's TV cartoons.

4.) Recess (1997-2003): There came an interesting point of transition for Disney's TV animation studios toward the end of the 90's. The Disney Afternoon block, long the most visible home for their shows, was finally shutting down after a solid seven-year run, and a new once-a-week block, fittingly named "1 Saturday Morning", was rising up to take its place. The block managed to last a decent five years, but very few of its shows managed to make much of an impact. But among the ones that did, the clear front-runner, to my mind at least, is "Recess", a love letter aimed not only at the nostalgia of the playground but also to the iconic TV comedy "Hogan's Heroes" (compare the theme songs to both shows, and then look at the mix of archetypes that comprises the core cast for each one). That mixture allows the show to present a vision of childhood that is simultaneously deliberately hyperbolic-the age-old notion of schoolyard hierarchies is here portrayed as a rich, thriving society unto itself, complete with its own king and economy-while still grounded in relatable ideas and characters, especially as regards the oftentimes contentious relationship between the students and teachers. That latter aspect especially speaks to why "Recess" is probably my pick for the best overall show of the "1 Saturday Morning" era, too; yes, as is typical of a show aimed at kids, it plays to their own feelings by painting the teachers as alternatively cruel and inept for the most part (while quite a few episodes focus on the difficulties the kids have with their parents, too), but it never forgets their own humanity in the process, and some of the show's best moments stem from that fact. Still, at the end of the day, it does really come down to that "Hogan's Heroes" influence I mentioned. No real kid has ever assembled the complex schemes and adventures that are "Recess"' primary source of stories, but I promise you every last kid has dreamed of it, and by placing those scenarios in the world it does, where the audience can at once recognize how much this is an exaggeration but still grasp what reality it draws from, it makes this really intriguing atmosphere that sparkles at once with a kid's sense of wonder and an adult's sense of humor (a lot of the best jokes stem from sharp wit that connects a young adult's perspective to adult concepts like a full-time job or balancing responsibilities). It's a style quite a few shows, cartoon or otherwise, have tried out over the years, but "Recess" is one of the very best examples of the form.

3a.) Gravity Falls (2012-2016): If you were paying close enough attention, you may have noticed something about the opening credits of animated television shows around the beginning of the '00's: series creators were being prominently credited. It was indicative of a larger amount of trust and control being placed in distinct creative voices as the industry slowly eased out (or tried to, anyway) of the merchandise-driven business model that had defined it for most of the 80's and 90's, and across the board it led to some very distinct visions making their way onto screens. For Disney, the example du jour is Alex Hirsch's "Gravity Falls", a show whose existence is all the more surprising when you consider just how very Not Disney its premise-kid-oriented "Twin Peaks" riff by way of "The X-Files"-really sounds. And yet here we are, with a show that is at once a razor-sharp comedy, a poignant examination of what it means to grow up and what we do and do not have to leave behind in the process, and a veritable parade of some of the most off-the-wall horror-sci-if-fantasy mash-ups of all time. And the thing of it is, the glue holding all of that together and keeping it coherent, allowing the show to build effortlessly both towards fantastic punchlines and deeply emotional culminations, stems from Hirsch: in interviews, he talked about how much of the show's premise stemmed from reflecting on the tourist-trap vacations he himself took as a child, and indeed, a lot of the series' best moments (an early episode centered on a haunted convenience store springs to mind in particular for me) succeed by tapping into that particular vein of childhood, where the simple change in environment that comes with vacation lends even the most mundane things an air of mystery. By the same token, so too do the characters feel keenly drawn from reality (even as they do still possess a cartoon's foibles and exaggerations); Dipper and Mabel are two of the most believable pre-teens I've ever seen on TV, both in their own way smart enough to no longer be children but struggling with the greater maturity necessary to really become grown-up, Grunkle Stan feels like every huckster you've ever seen on TV right down to the niggling sense that there is a tremendous amount more to him than what we see, and the change in perspective the show gives us on Wendy, initially kept at arm's length because of Dipper's crush on her only to emerge more fully as a person once he recognizes her own feelings on the matter. And then on top of all that, it's connected to a genuinely-compelling mystery that the show gradually teases out more and more, and those who are paying attention really do have an honest shot of piecing the puzzle together before the characters do, adding a new layer of visceral excitement to the experience. But the real strength of the show is that those twists and turns, as much as they might pull us deeper into the puzzle box, are really more about exploring and growing the characters first and foremost. That's the key to "Gravity Falls" above all, to my mind: yes, its internal mythology is uniquely well built, and yes, pushing the envelope on how genuinely scary/dangerous it's allowed to get is fascinating, but it never loses sight of how much its characters are the real heart of the story, and how much that fact helps this weird, wild mixture really come together.

3b.) Darkwing Duck (1991-1992): Yes, the #3 slot is a draw, because when it came right down to it I simply could not pick between the two shows I was considering for it. Leaving "Gravity Falls" off felt simply unacceptable to be, but neither could I find it in my heart to axe this, maybe my personal favorite of the entire Disney Afternoon era, from the list. Because the thing of it is, when you really think about it, "Darkwing Duck" shouldn't work at all. Superhero parodies were old hat even by the early 90's (indeed, at that point they probably outnumbered actual superhero shows), while spin-offs had long ago developed a reputation for being cheap-and-easy cash-ins (though the extent to which "Darkwing Duck" is, in fact, a spin-off of "Ducktales" is a touch debatable, I suppose, even as they share a handful of characters). But despite the odds against it, "Darkwing Duck" does indeed prove to be a consistently entertaining piece of work, and a lot of why boils down to the remarkably-multilayered construction of its title character. That isn't to say Darkwing is the only good thing about his own show; his rogue's gallery is an amusing assortment of pastiches of classic Villain archetypes-the plant-master, the crazy clown, the evil double, and so on-while the supporting cast, including "Ducktales" veteran Launchpad McQuack and excitable youngster Gosalyn Mallard (a character who, by rights, should be insufferable, but is instead genuinely endearing thanks in no small part to her voice actor, the late, great Christine Cavanaugh), is equally enjoyable. As well, the show's sense of humor has an ahead-of-its-time sardonic edge to it that was nowhere near as commonplace in kid's cartoons by that point, but which here provides just the right level of sharpness to the comedy. And the animation is fascinating, too, with a far more "Looney Tunes"-style sensibility to a lot of its best moments (which in turn informs the characters a lot; there's more than a touch of Daffy to Darkwing, but we'll get to that in a minute), while also showing just how far the iconic Disney "duck" design could be stretched while still being recognizable. But it really is Darkwing himself who makes the show, because despite the core conceit being fairly simple-poking fun at the inherent egomania of the superhero by portraying one as a glory hound interested more in publicity than actual heroism-there actually prove to be quite a few layers to him when you really get into it. For one thing, he's actually quite good at his job; for as many times as his inadequacy is the butt of the joke, "let's get dangerous" is more than just a catchphrase; it's a sign he's about to show you what he's really capable of. For another, his sincere affection for and protectiveness of Gosalyn shows there really is a heart underneath all that bluster, and that if he could just get out of his own way, Darkwing might well be capable of true greatness. But all too often he is, in fact, his own worst enemy (there's that Daffy Duck influence again). It's all played mostly for laughs, sure, but, especially thanks to Darkwing's VA Jim Cummings, who navigates each of those layers coherently and effectively, it comes through clearly even so. And it elevates the entire show to this unique, interesting place that has helped it stand the test of time.

2.) Gargoyles (1994-1997): As established during our introduction, the entry of Disney into the world of television animation in the mid-80's was a real paradigm shift in the industry. But a few years later, in 1992, came another, arguably even more profound game-changer: "Batman: The Animated Series". Every last element of that show-its writing, its visual style, and especially its revolutionary craft-proved profoundly popular, not only with viewers but people inside the industry. Soon enough, almost every TV animation studio around mounted a response: for Marvel Television, it was the "X-Men" cartoon, for Hanna Barbera it was "SWAT Kats". But far and away the best answer came from Disney, in the form of Greg Weisman's fantasy epic, "Gargoyles". From stem to stern, this is maybe one of the richest, most satisfying stories Disney TV ever crafted, and in stark contrast to just about every other show on this list, that doesn't come with a "but it's not as serious as all that" caveat. There's comic relief, to be sure, but still, this is nonetheless an entirely-earnest Modern Fantasy Epic, comprised of equal parts deep-cut cultural/mythological references-everything from Shakespeare to Arthurian Lore to the tales of Anansi the Spider, all realized with a remarkable degree of understanding and specificity-and exceptionally well-structured characters. Stoic Goliath, striving at once to protect what little remains of his kind while also seeking to do good in a world he struggles to understand; Elisa Maza, a sharp-minded detective who is always determined to stay on top of the situation no matter how crazy it becomes; Demona, a tragic figure consumed with anger and grief who seeks greater and greater means of destruction; Xanatos, one of the greatest masterminds of all time, always one step ahead, always a new scheme at the ready. "Gargoyles", in other words, weaves an impressively intricate tale that inhabits a sprawling, detailed world with rich, compelling players, by way of some of the most impressively-intricate long-term story arcs I've ever seen in a cartoon show. Whether it's the gradual transformation of Xanatos from inscrutable antagonist to complex Family Man (even as the extent to which he can ever really be trusted remains in question) or the slow-burn, exceptionally rewarding progression of Goliath and Elisa's relationship, or even things like the young, impetuous Brooklyn slowly growing up into a possible leader, "Gargoyles" hones in with perfect precision on how best to expand these characters over time. Likewise, watching as the scope of the world, and our own understanding of it, expands to include concepts like aliens and mutants amongst its gods and monsters is impressive and fascinating. And the series paces itself equally perfectly. There is a genuinely organic quality to "Gargoyles"' arcs, both character and plot; it never feels static or overly obsessed with the Status Quo, but it also does not rush through anything. Each plot twist, each character epiphany, feels earned, and all the more powerful as a result. And, cherry on top, the animation is top-tier stuff; it is perhaps not as overtly stylized as "Batman: The Animated Series" (though its focus on night-time settings and a darker color palette feels evocative of that show), but the combination of a Disney-esque sense of character design with the show's strong narrative backbone leads to exceptional results even so. "Gargoyles" may have been made in "Batman"'s image, but it wound up being a one-of-a-kind classic in its own right.

1.) Ducktales (1987-1990): There are a number of reasons "Ducktales" more or less has to top this list. Its pedigree, for one thing; drawing a lot of its premise (and directly adapting several of its best episodes and story lines) from the famed Carl Barks "Uncle Scrooge" comics (though notoriously, Barks' most famous successor, Don Rosa, has a less-than-sunny attitude toward the show) provides the show an exceptionally well-built and endearing structure. Whether it's outer-space epics or intercontinental treasure hunts, espionage action or magical mayhem, there's no breed of adventure "Ducktales" cannot comfortably tap into. Another thing to consider is its place in history; almost every other show on this list owes its existence to one degree or another to this show, which proved to be exactly the sort of powerhouse success story the Disney TV studio needed in order to prove its chops, and that means "Ducktales" holds a special place in animation history too, given how much Disney TV has played a part in it as a whole. And naturally, there's the animation to consider too; it may seem a touch standard-issue today, but compare "Ducktales" to just about any other contemporary cartoon of its era, and you'll realize just how much care goes into keeping characters on model and letting them movie not just fluidly, but also in a way that's enjoyable to watch. And last but hardly least, there's the stellar cast of characters (and voice actors); Huey, Dewey, and Louie may all be interchangeable, but their dynamic is lively and enjoyable anyway. Webby, meanwhile, is a fantastic foil, not only for them, but for Uncle Scrooge. And naturally, Scrooge himself (given an iconic performance by the late, great Alan Young) is just fantastic, a multi-layered, larger-than-life character who is nonetheless so much fun to simply spend time with you never want to stop. But the thing of it is, "Ducktales"' real claim to #1 is a bit harder to quantify than all that, because even as it excels on just about every level, it doesn't have, say, the same depth of theme and character as "Gravity Falls", or "Gargoyles"' tapestry of plot lines and character arcs. Its animation is certainly high quality, especially for the time, but it's not that much better than "Adventures of the Gummi Bears". And yet, even so, "Ducktales" is the one everyone remembers, and I feel like that comes down to it adding up to something more than just the sum of its parts. There really is this unique, ineffable energy to "Ducktales" that is equal parts charming, endearing, exciting, and thrilling, and it enhances each and every one of the things the show already does so well to a special level all its own. Some of that can be chalked up to nostalgia, sure, but a lot of it, I think, can also be ascribed to the sheer sense of discovery innate to the show. Not simply in the various people and places our heroes encounter (though there's that too, naturally), but in the fact that this new effort on Disney's part was hitting its stride, and in so doing opening up a whole new world of possibilities, for the show itself and for the future. Which is maybe being a touch too grandiose about it, but even so, "Ducktales" has endured enough to make me think there may be something to it. And hey, if literally nothing else, it really does have one humdinger of a theme song.

#Disney #disney afternoon #television #ducktales #Countdown #ericthemason #My writing

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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Hardly six months into his tenure as the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky has already learned to temper his expectations. He does not expect his first round of peace talks with Russia, which are scheduled to take place in Paris on Dec. 9, to end the war that has been raging along their border for the past five years. Nor does he expect too much from his Western allies going into these negotiations, Zelensky said in a wide-ranging interview on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters from TIME and three of Europe’s leading publications, the President explained that, despite getting caught up in the impeachment inquiry now unfolding in Washington, D.C., Ukraine still needs the support of the United States.

Otherwise his country does not stand much of a chance, Zelensky said, in its effort to get back the territory Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, starting with the Crimean Peninsula. Nor can Ukraine rely on steady financial support from abroad if President Donald Trump and his allies continue to signal to the world that Ukraine is corrupt, Zelensky said. “When America says, for instance, that Ukraine is a corrupt country, that is the hardest of signals.”

During the interview in his office in Kyiv, the comedian-turned-president denied, as he has done in the past, that he and Trump ever discussed a decision to withhold American aid to Ukraine for nearly two months in the context of a quid pro quo involving political favors, which are now at the center of the impeachment inquiry in Congress.

But he also pushed back on Trump’s recent claims about corruption in Ukraine, and questioned the fairness of Trump’s decision to freeze American aid. “If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us,” he said. “I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo.”

Zelensky’s focus during the interview, as it has been throughout his time in office, was on the effort to end Ukraine’s war against Russia and its proxies, who still control two separatist strongholds in the region of Ukraine known as the Donbass. More than 13,000 Ukrainians have died as a result of that conflict, and more are killed or wounded every week. Yet the European attempts to mediate an end to the fighting have been stalled for over three years.

For the first time since the fall of 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that he will attend the talks under what’s known as the Normandy format, with the leaders of France and Germany acting as mediators. But without consistent pressure from the U.S., Zelensky is hardly sure the Europeans will deliver on their promises to defend his country’s land, its people and its economy.

What follows is a partial transcript of the hourlong interview, which was conducted jointly by TIME, Le Monde of France, Der Spiegel of Germany and Gazeta Wyborcza of Poland. It has been condensed and edited for clarity by TIME.

TIME: What are you expecting from the peace talks on Dec. 9?

Zelensky: Experience shows that these meetings go on for many hours. They vary. Often these meetings go in circles, with people repeating the same things to each other. Here’s what I know from studying them: people have come to these meetings intending for nothing to happen.

So in the past the negotiators were just pretending?

That is how I felt. Maybe they came with different goals. Each country has its position. And no doubt Germany and France both did a lot to make these [upcoming] talks happen. That’s already a victory. It’s a victory when the weapons fall silent and people speak up. That’s already the first step.

What are the next steps?

First is a prisoner exchange, a real exchange within a clear timeframe. Second is, I think, very difficult, and that’s a ceasefire. It was laid down in all the [previous agreements] as the priority, as the first point, in all the agreements and in all the statements. But we have to understand that, indeed, the shooting slowed down. That’s true. But it did not stop. So when we say ceasefire, that’s what we have to achieve. These first two points are related to the lives of people. That’s why, for me, those are the two most important points.

What about the need to hold elections in the regions held by pro-Russian separatists?

When we talk about elections, we have to understand the third point: before elections, we need a full withdrawal, a full disarming of all illegal formations, military formations, no matter the type, no matter the group, no matter the uniform, no matter what weapons. Resolving these three points will create an understanding that we want to end the war. We definitely want that. But that will create an understanding that Russia is also very strongly intent on this.

So Ukraine will not agree to hold elections in the occupied regions until the withdrawal of forces?

Of course not.

What about the border? When will Ukraine regain control of its border with Russia, including the sections now held by the separatist forces?

Yes, that’s the most difficult question. The most difficult. If we even get to it, it will be the most difficult question in these negotiations. But I’ll confess to you honestly, I don’t support the way this is spelled out in the [previous] agreements. [Under those agreements,] the elections are to happen, and then the control of the borders goes to Ukraine… I don’t agree with the sequence of these actions.

And what if the talks achieve nothing?

Look, we are at home here. It is a piece of our land that was taken away. I will not agree to go to war in the Donbass. I know there are a lot of hotheads, especially those who hold rallies and say, ‘Let’s go fight and win it all back!’ But at what price? What is the cost? It’s another story of lives and land. And I won’t do it. If that doesn’t satisfy society, then a new leader will come who will satisfy those demands. But I will never go for that, because my position in life is to be a human being above all. And I cannot send them there. How? How many of them will die? Hundreds of thousands, and then an all-out war will start, an all-out war in Ukraine, and then across Europe.

What are your impressions and expectations from Putin?

We’ve had three calls with the President of Russia. I think they were productive. We got our sailors back [in a prisoner exchange]. We got back our guys who wound up behind bars under tragic circumstances, our political prisoners. That’s very important.

Q: Do you have any trust in Putin going into these talks?

I don’t trust anyone at all. I’ll tell you honestly. Politics is not an exact science. That’s why in school I loved mathematics. Everything in mathematics was clear to me. You can solve an equation with a variable, with one variable. But here it’s only variables, including the politicians in our country. I don’t know these people. I can’t understand what dough they’re made of. That’s why I think nobody can have any trust. Everybody just has their interests.

Ukraine has long asked the U.S. to play a greater role in the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. That’s what Kurt Volker, the Trump Administration’s special envoy to the peace process , was trying to do…

He tried. He tried hard. That’s true. And I think he had a lot of success. I wasn’t a witness to everything he did, because I wasn’t President at the time. But I saw that in those moments when we met, he really was active in defending our position.

But in the context of the impeachment inquiry, Volker has left his post, as have other officials who supported Ukraine within the Trump Administration. In that context, how do you see the U.S. role in the peace process? How has it changed in the last few months, and how do you see it going forward?

First off, I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chess board of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain… As for the United States, I would really want – and we feel this, it’s true – for them to help us, to understand us, to see that we are a player in our own right, that they cannot make deals about us with anyone behind our backs. Of course they help us, and I’m not just talking about technical help, military aid, financial aid. These are important things, very important things, especially right now, when we are in such a difficult position.

The United States of America is a signal, for the world, for everyone. When America says, for instance, that Ukraine is a corrupt country, that is the hardest of signals. It might seem like an easy thing to say, that combination of words: Ukraine is a corrupt country. Just to say it and that’s it. But it doesn’t end there. Everyone hears that signal. Investments, banks, stakeholders, companies, American, European, companies that have international capital in Ukraine, it’s a signal to them that says, ‘Be careful, don’t invest.’ Or, ‘Get out of there.’ This is a hard signal. For me it’s very important for the United States, with all they can do for us, for them really to understand that we are a different country, that we are different people. It’s not that those things don’t exist. They do. All branches of government were corrupted over many years, and we are working to clean that up. But that signal from them is very important.

Yet last week President Trump said on live television that Ukrainians are corrupt, and they steal money. Do you have a plan for changing his mind?

I don’t need to change his mind. During my meeting with him, I said that I don’t want our country to have this image. For that, all he has to do is come and have a look at what’s happening, how we live, what kinds of people we are. I had the sense that he heard me. I had that sense. At least during the meeting, he said, ‘Yes, I see, you’re young, you’re new, and so on.’

What role do you see the U.S. playing in the peace process going forward?

America, first of all, has its direct relations with Russia. To influence Russia, to make everyone see that this [war] is a big tragedy, and that it must end, I think that Mr. Trump can speak directly, and I think they do talk about these things.

Trump and Putin?

Yes. I don’t like when others talk about us without us there, in the sense of some benefits for them. But if it’s a conversation along the lines of, ‘Look, let’s make this stop. Ukraine is different now. Ukraine wants to stop it. There is no radicalism. No one is killing and eating anyone in that country. See for yourself. Come on.’ Then the whole world would support Ukraine, and America is one of the keys to this happening.

President Emmanuel Macron of France recently said that NATO is experiencing brain death. What do you think about that? And what do you think about the reset of relations he wants with Russia, saying that Russia is part of Europe, and Russia is not a threat? Do you agree with it?

For us, look, it does sound strange. When it comes to Russia, it seems France has different relations now with Russia. I think some of these words are linked with the weakening of sanctions policy. That’s what I have seen more deeply now. I understand, because economically, [the sanctions policy] doesn’t benefit France and Germany. But when we’re talking about human beings, we shouldn’t consider benefits. And on this, the European leaders guaranteed to me that the sanctions policy would stay the same until we get all of our territory back.

Does that include Crimea?

That includes Crimea.

Heading into these peace talks, do you feel the right signals from Paris and Berlin? Or do you feel that you’ll be somewhat on your own with Putin there?

I’m the type of person who responds to facts. I believe that our European partners must support us, and if they must, then they will. But I will see this in the first half hour. If I see around the table that this is not the case, I will say so straight out. I would like to hope that everyone understands the problem is deeper than fixing economic problems within this or that country.

Even while acting as a mediator in these talks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed ahead with a new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, known as Nord Stream 2. That pipeline would bypass Ukraine, costing your government up to $3 billion per year in income from the transport of natural gas. Do you still see a chance of blocking that pipeline?

I want European leaders to settle on a different result when it comes to Nord Stream, and take different steps. I don’t know what else I can say about North Stream 2. We don’t have influence over the Europeans’ decision. We don’t have it, and that’s it. I don’t have any leverage. I can only count on the strong support that I see on this question from the United States of America.

Is that the only thing that can stop it?

That’s the only thing that can stop it. That’s it!

When did you first sense that there was a connection between Trump’s decision to block military aid to Ukraine this summer and the two investigations that Trump and his allies were asking for? Can you clarify this issue of the quid pro quo?

Look, I never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing. … I don’t want us to look like beggars. But you have to understand. We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us. I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo. It just goes without saying.

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teeky185 · 5 years

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This is an excerpt from episode 172 of The Editors podcast.Rich: Without further ado, let’s get into the week’s news. Jim Geraghty, the news that dominated this week was the testimony from acting Ukrainian ambassador William Taylor behind closed doors, although we’ve seen his 15-page opening statement, which, if you’re into these sort of things, is gripping reading. Seems more detailed and credible than the opening statements of Kurt Volker and then Sondland, whose first name, I must confess, I don’t know, the EU ambassador, both of whom were okay for Trump, and this was not. It strongly suggests that there was a quid pro quo, at least the intention of a quid pro quo, a lot of maneuvering around a quid pro quo, and an irregular Ukrainian policy channel that was running outside of the normal channels, where everyone thought pressuring the Ukrainians on these investigations was not a very good idea. What did you make of it?Jim: It was pretty darn bad, Rich, from the administration’s perspective. Bill Taylor is clearly a guy who, the suspicion is, takes copious notes after every single conversation, who clearly was intent upon establishing a paper trail. He clearly had doubts when he stepped into the position. He had been a U.S. ambassador to Ukraine ’06 to ’09, so he knew the region, well-respected, knew what he was getting into, and had to be talked into taking the job by Mike Pompeo. Apparently, Mrs. Taylor thought this was a terrible idea. Life lesson, always listen to your wife.Because it sounds like once he got there, he found that there were two channels between the Ukrainian government and the U.S. government, one through the official channels and then this second one through Giuliani. Now, a lot of people were . . . There was a huge brouhaha over this around the middle of the week. I think what jumped out to me and just struck me as the most mind-boggling aspect, and one of the reasons . . . an aspect that should be fairly easy to either confirm or deny or conflict pretty easily.At one point, Taylor describes, and this is I guess technically secondhand, but that there was sufficient concern amongst Secretary of Defense Esper, Secretary of State Pompeo, CIA director Gina Haspel, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. All four of them felt that this was a serious problem about withholding aim to Ukraine, that they opposed it, they didn’t understand the reasoning behind it, but that none of them could get a meeting with the president. If those four people can’t get a meeting with the president . . . What is he, hiding? This is a matter . . .First of all, if you’re president of the United States, and all four of those people think you’re making a mistake, at minimum, you should listen to them. You should think about “Okay, these are all people I picked. These are all people I entrusted with these duties. All of them are telling me this is a terrible decision and I shouldn’t do it.” I think, at very least, you got to hear them out. If you really disagree with them, they either have the option of resigning or you can fire them, but you can’t just totally ignore them, or apparently just be too busy to meet with these four positions. It’s baffling. Also, we know from precedent things like Tenet used to go into the morning briefing with President George W. Bush all the time. You can’t quite understand why these people would have such a hard time having a meeting with the president.If that doesn’t check out, then Taylor has actually done the cause of impeachment some damage, and it means that his account of things is exaggerated or the worst possible spin is put on it and stuff like that. But if it checks out, you can’t have a president who’s hiding from four of his top advisors on national security and refuses to meet with them. That’s just too dysfunctional to go forward, and you’ve got to end it. You can’t deal with a president who simply won’t meet when his top advisors say, “No, you’re about to make a terrible mistake here, Mr. President.”Rich: MBD, there’s a direct contradiction here between Taylor and Sondland. I guess Sondland is trying to reposition what he said, but Sondland is like, “Oh, this is all above board. There was no quid pro quo. We’re just pressuring them on corruption.” Then you have Taylor basically saying, “No, Sondland was the guy, a major player who was doing it. I had these conversations with him. Sondland might say the president says there’s not a quid pro quo, but they’ve got to do these things to get the money. There’s not a quid pro quo, but the president is a businessman. He wants you to provide the deliverables before he signs the check.” It seems to me before all is said and done on this impeachment process in the House, you’ve got to have these guys, Taylor and Sondland, at a witness table together hashing this out.Michael: Yeah. I found Taylor’s testimony pretty compelling. I thought the really troubling thing was that . . . I always thought from the beginning that the nature of the conversation was quid pro quo, that this is just the nature of foreign relations when you are a patron state like the United States and you’re dealing with a client state like Ukraine. When the patron starts asking for things and you are dependent on them, you have to think that the strings are going to be pulled if you don’t deliver.What was troubling was Taylor was describing that, in a sense, the administration just wanted the announcement of investigations. They just wanted the PR rather than the reality. That really drains the case out of those who say, “Okay, maybe there was quid pro quo here, but the U.S. has a legitimate interest in the corruption,” the Luke Thompson argument that I was open to.Rich: Hi, Luke.Michael: Taylor sort of pulls me . . . The testimony pulls me away from it because it looks like, if Taylor’s testimony checks out, this is just what he wanted. He wanted the announcement. In effect, he wanted the political effect.Rich: Is that the case, or is it when a foreign government or a politician here in the United States has actually committed to something publicly, then they’re more committed to it than if they’re saying, “Yes, yes,” in private?Michael: Of course, but it just . . . The policymaking hash that was laid out and described just did not seem inconsistent with any notion of statesmanship or even, really, political savvy. It was very blunt, very direct, very ham-handed. The fact that it also goes along with this weird . . . As you look deeper, I think a lot of people glossed over the CrowdStrike elements. I know that didn’t feature as tightly in Taylor. But when you start scratching the surface of that, it’s like this was a conspiracy theory that the president and Giuliani were chasing-Rich: It’s bonkers.Michael: . . . themselves into a rabbit hole here. Yeah, I think Taylor’s good reputation and the events he described, for me, the takeaway was I felt Democrats are now . . . Yuval Levin has written about this on our website, that once you get the process going towards impeachment inquiry, there’s a momentum that gathers, and I saw a lot of momentum there. It will be very difficult, I think, for Democrats to put that out in public, a very easy story of abuse of power for personal political benefit, I think it’s going to be very hard for them not to impeach him.Rich: Charlie Cooke?Charlie: Well, the question now is whether this is impeachable and not whether it happened. The question is not whether there was a quid pro quo. The question is not whether there was inappropriate behavior or wrongdoing. The question is whether the Congress wants to impeach the president, whether it’s a good idea to do so as we enter an election year, whether the public thinks this is sufficiently serious to warrant removal, whether the Democrats can keep the momentum up, whether Republicans think that there’s a double standard here, that we know of wrongdoing by other presidents that didn’t lead to impeachment or to removal.I don’t think there’s an argument that nothing happened. Alan Dershowitz, this morning, argues that this is not an impeachable offense. Others have argued persuasively that it is. That question is, of course, an entirely political one, but the case that we are talking about a nothing or that this is a witch hunt or that this is peripheral, marginal, simply cannot be made now, in my view.We will watch as it plays out. We will watch as Republicans such as Matt Gaetz get more and more ridiculous in their antics. We will watch as the language that was deployed by Democrats in defense of Bill Clinton is picked up by Republicans. Whether there’ll be an impeachment, I don’t know. I suspect not. But there is certainly—Rich: You mean a removal?Charlie: No, I mean an impeachment.Rich: You don’t think he’ll get impeached by the House?Charlie: I think he probably will. I think there’s a chance still that he won’t. Depends how quickly they can do it. If they can move quickly, he will be. If it drags out for whatever reason — I can’t imagine why it would — if it does, I think the chances of the House pursuing it long into an election year are less. But let’s not pretend that we’re not now talking about an actual scandal and an actual subject for impeachment.Michael: Hey, Charlie, President Zelensky is a consenting adult. I don’t know what language will be used by Republicans picked up from the 1990s. I think the question you raise, though, is—Charlie: They used lynching, and we had this whole silly debate about this.Michael: That’s true.Charlie: It turns out, of course, that that word was used over and over and over again in 1998, including by Joe Biden. That’s how this goes. We live in a partisan nation. Congress is far more likely to vote along ideological or partisan lines than it is to protect its prerogatives, and so there is an interest for the party that shares the president’s label to cast any attempts to investigate his behavior as the Salem witch trials. It’s going to be funny watching Republicans adopt the same language Democrats did, and Democrats adopt the same language Republicans did, and Adam Schiff become Ken Starr.Michael: My question for you, though, is do you think that there’s so much public fatigue with Democrats and the Russia collusion story and so on that, in a sense, the Democrats have already spent too much of their credibility to carry this off without damaging themselves?Charlie: I don’t know. I would’ve thought that more likely before I saw the polling. The reality is this could go both ways, couldn’t it? You could have the voters, after an initial spasm of excitement, saying, “I’ve been hearing about this from day one, from before Trump was even president. Enough. Let’s have the election next year.” Or the Russia scandal — or non-scandal as it turned out — could serve as a backdrop that makes it seem to those who don’t pay close attention as if Trump has got worse and worse, has been embroiled in scandal since day one, and that it’s about time there was an impeachment drive.I don’t know which one is more likely. I do know that Democrats will have to move quickly if they’re going to get this done, because I think the closer we get to Election Day, the less useful a process impeachment looks and the stronger the argument, whether it’s made in good or bad faith, that they’re trying to preempt a vote.Rich: Jim, I think sadly, from my point of view, it looks like Pelosi judged this whole thing very shrewdly, because for a couple years, or since the election at least, the midterms, she’s like, “Nope, we’re not doing it. Nope, that’s not what this is about. No, we’re not doing it.” Then she sees the window opening here on Ukraine, says, “Yeah, actually, we are doing it.”The polling so far has showed a window did open. It’s not just Democrats who have swung in favor of impeachment, the ones that were still holdouts. You’ve seen the numbers swinging in some polls among independents a little bit, among Republicans in some polls as well. There’s no downside that’s evident at the moment. Maybe we’ll see that down the road, but I’ve begun to think actually the equities have switched here.Trump, who’s not being served well in this chapter of his presidency . . . The facts haven’t gotten better the way they did in the Russia probe, even though the media was hysterical throughout the duration. They’ve gotten worse, probably will continue to get worse. And his reaction has been pretty terrible. The human scum thing was disgraceful. The only way he’s going to turn the page on this is to get impeached and, almost certainly, acquitted by the Senate. When that happens, then, two weeks later, we’ll be like, “Whoa, impeachment happened? Wow, I can’t even remember that. Seems like it was a decade ago.”Whereas for Democrats, there’s no downside evident, again, at the moment. It’s a plus 50 percent issue in some polls. It’s more popular than probably some of the other things they would want to do, and they’re getting this drip, drip of revelations that are helpful for them. I take Charlie’s point. You don’t want to push it into April 2020. But I don’t see a major downside if it slides into the new year, which it looks, by the way, whatever they ideally want to do, it looks like it probably will.Jim: Yeah. I was going to say, in normal circumstances, if you were going to get impeached, nobody likes getting impeached, nobody wants . . . Trump, I guess, famously said, “You don’t want that on your resume.” You’d want it done as quickly as possible, get it into the rear-view mirror, and let it just become a chapter in the book of your presidency and not something . . . I actually think the longer this drags on, the better it is for Trump for the 2020 election.I think, also, probably the strongest argument Republicans have right now is: “We’re so close to the 2020 general election. Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to take away . . . Why would you try to have a Senate decision on whether Trump should continue as president right before the American public gets to have its say on whether Trump should continue as president?” I can think of easily four or five Democratic senators who would be saying, “Yes, let’s get this done as quickly as possible.” Their names are Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and all these people who’d much rather spend January in Iowa and New Hampshire than stuck in Washington listening to hearings all day.In terms of the merits, it’s very tough to say, A, this is no big deal, this is private matters, this is normal. None of this stuff is going to fly. I think you see it in the poll numbers.The other thing was that, from the very beginning of the Russia stuff, I’ve counted myself on the skeptical side of it because I just figured at some point you’d have to have either audio tape or written messages or emails, something indicating Trump and Putin cackling together. That would just be . . . The idea that the Russian government and FSB, the successor to the KGB, would manage to get their claws into an American presidential candidate and turn him into the Manchurian candidate, and that all of this would escape the attention of the NSA, all of this would escape the attention of the CIA, FBI, all of our vast intelligence-gathering apparatuses would completely miss all of this, just never passed the smell test. I’m pretty sure we have a lot of people who try to keep an eye on what Vladimir Putin is doing on a day-to-day basis.In this case, all the information is from the American side. We’re getting some stuff from Ukraine, but the issue isn’t really how Ukraine responded. In fact, Ukraine seems to have done something semi-honorable by saying, “Look, we want to play ball here, but we’re not going to claim that somebody is under investigation when they’re not. And we’re not going to investigate someone if there isn’t real evidence of a crime here.” I wrote that long timeline saying Hunter Biden stinks to high heaven, and it’s probably very unethical, at the very minimum, a giant, glaring appearance of conflict of interest, but there’s no evidence a crime was committed either here in the United States or over in Ukraine. You don’t get to say, “Hey, let’s dig into this guy,” just for the sake of placating the American president.It’s pretty darn bad. I suppose the longer this drags on, eventually the exhaustion factor could start playing in the president’s advantage.Rich: Well, Michael, I think the—Charlie: Even then, Jim—Rich: Go ahead, Charlie.Charlie: Even then, Republicans have a rhetorical problem because they’ll have to make one of two arguments. The first is “We’re too close to an election. Let’s judge the president at the polls.” The second is “This is bad, but it’s not an impeachable offense. It’s the sort of judgment call which the president should be held accountable for by voters.” Then they’ll have to stand next to him in their home state and say, “We need to reelect President Donald J. Trump.”It’s easy for Republicans to push this away by acknowledging there’s something there and pointing at November of next year as the obvious end point . . . until they are asked to campaign for him, which they��re going to have to do. There is a problem here for Republicans in the long run because there’s no escaping it, unless they take the view “Look, the whole thing is a scam. The whole thing is made up,” but that’s now an untenable position.Jim: The only other thing I’d throw in there is that under a normal presidency, you could say, “You know what, let’s do a resolution of censure. Let’s all go on record expressing our disapproval. Bad, president, bad. Don’t do that again,” slap him on the wrist, and everybody moves on and there’s no risk of his presidency coming to a premature end. Then when you get asked about it on the trail, “Look, I expressed my disapproval of the president. He shouldn’t have done it, but now it’s time to focus on the real issues,” blah blah blah blah blah.But you can’t do that with this president. Trump would then take the name of any Republican who voted on that resolution of censure and probably campaign for the Democrat against them. He doesn’t take any of this stuff lying down, or relaxed or laid back about any of this. He really boxes them in. He gives them very limited options.Rich: Michael, one, on the question of whether he should be impeached and removed or whether this is a best matter to be adjudicated in an election, I think that’s the strongest ground for the president and for Republicans to argue. There was a Marist poll the other day; I think it had support for the impeachment inquiry above 50. But far down in the questions they asked, they asked, “Do you want him to be impeached, or do you prefer that there be an election?” and like 57-38, people wanted the election. I think that’s the strongest ground.To Jim’s point, contrition is such a powerful force when properly mustered in our politics, and clearly the play here, and a lot of Trump people might say, “Oh, that’s too conventional. He’s never going to do it,” certainly never going to do it is true, but I think the obvious play would’ve been to say, “Yeah, I see how this looks now. I shouldn’t have done it. I really think Hunter Biden is corrupt. I let that take too much control over my actions, and I was pressuring them. I realize how it looks. I shouldn’t have done it. And by the way, here are all the facts right here in one day,” go to it, and you wouldn’t have the drip, drip now. And you’d have, as Jim points out, Republicans be able to say, “Well, let’s put it behind us. He said he’s regretted it. We think it’s wrong.” Instead, they’ve been dragged into this position where everyone has to say the letter is perfect.As you were saying, the letter wasn’t perfect. You were saying there was implicit quid pro quo there all along. But they’ve also made quid pro quo the trip wire, which wasn’t necessary. It seems to me the best defense is not impeach and remove twelve months from an election, and ultimately release the money. This was a terrible process, shouldn’t have happened, but end of the day, no harm, no foul.Michael: They could try it. I think there’s probably growing resentment among elected Republicans that they laid out this “no quid pro quo” trip wire and then were immediately pushed backward over their heels over it.We have to remember the base of the Republican party was still with Nixon when elected Republicans abandoned Nixon. I’d be careful about . . . The elected officials, how they respond to this still matters if they really tire of him. It could matter to the president ahead of the time that we see a big collapse in support in his polling. I think there’s a lot that’s still uncertain here about how people will react, and also just how Trump is going to react if he feels cornered and politically abandoned.Rich: Just seems to me if Trump were removed by the Senate, it would split the party asunder. It would hand whoever the Democratic nominee is the election. I wrote this in a column today. Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988. How are they possibly going to win with any significant division? Trump obviously is not—Charlie: They won in 2004.Rich: What’s that? Once, yeah.Charlie: They won the popular vote in 2004.Rich: Yeah, once since 1988.Michael: Did they win a majority?Rich: If I said never, I misspoke. Yeah, once since 1988. So how are they possibly going to win an election when they have any significant division? Anyway, we should move on.Rich: Exit question to you, Jim Geraghty. William Taylor’s testimony will be remembered as an inflection point in the impeachment drama, yes or no?Jim: You mean the written testimony or if he does it before the cameras in some future hearing?Rich: I should say his opening statement that we’ve seen.Jim: Okay. I think the televised . . . When he does it on camera, it’ll be a bigger deal.Rich: MBD? Inflection point, yes or no?Michael: No, I think this is still all downstream of the transcript release, the own goal.Rich: Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I think it’s an inflection point, yes, because it represents the moment at which it became impossible to insist that nothing had happened here and that there was no grounds for an impeachment drive.Rich: I agree with Charlie. I think it’s a minor inflection point. I take MBD and Jim’s points there will be bigger things to come, just from Taylor alone, the rest of the deposition, and I think which has to be public testimony. I think Democrats would want that. He will likely be one of their star witnesses. But it is, at least, a minor inflection point in that it knocked the “no quid pro quo” argument back on its heels.

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clobov · 5 years

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This is an excerpt from episode 172 of The Editors podcast.Rich: Without further ado, let’s get into the week’s news. Jim Geraghty, the news that dominated this week was the testimony from acting Ukrainian ambassador William Taylor behind closed doors, although we’ve seen his 15-page opening statement, which, if you’re into these sort of things, is gripping reading. Seems more detailed and credible than the opening statements of Kurt Volker and then Sondland, whose first name, I must confess, I don’t know, the EU ambassador, both of whom were okay for Trump, and this was not. It strongly suggests that there was a quid pro quo, at least the intention of a quid pro quo, a lot of maneuvering around a quid pro quo, and an irregular Ukrainian policy channel that was running outside of the normal channels, where everyone thought pressuring the Ukrainians on these investigations was not a very good idea. What did you make of it?Jim: It was pretty darn bad, Rich, from the administration’s perspective. Bill Taylor is clearly a guy who, the suspicion is, takes copious notes after every single conversation, who clearly was intent upon establishing a paper trail. He clearly had doubts when he stepped into the position. He had been a U.S. ambassador to Ukraine ’06 to ’09, so he knew the region, well-respected, knew what he was getting into, and had to be talked into taking the job by Mike Pompeo. Apparently, Mrs. Taylor thought this was a terrible idea. Life lesson, always listen to your wife.Because it sounds like once he got there, he found that there were two channels between the Ukrainian government and the U.S. government, one through the official channels and then this second one through Giuliani. Now, a lot of people were . . . There was a huge brouhaha over this around the middle of the week. I think what jumped out to me and just struck me as the most mind-boggling aspect, and one of the reasons . . . an aspect that should be fairly easy to either confirm or deny or conflict pretty easily.At one point, Taylor describes, and this is I guess technically secondhand, but that there was sufficient concern amongst Secretary of Defense Esper, Secretary of State Pompeo, CIA director Gina Haspel, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. All four of them felt that this was a serious problem about withholding aim to Ukraine, that they opposed it, they didn’t understand the reasoning behind it, but that none of them could get a meeting with the president. If those four people can’t get a meeting with the president . . . What is he, hiding? This is a matter . . .First of all, if you’re president of the United States, and all four of those people think you’re making a mistake, at minimum, you should listen to them. You should think about “Okay, these are all people I picked. These are all people I entrusted with these duties. All of them are telling me this is a terrible decision and I shouldn’t do it.” I think, at very least, you got to hear them out. If you really disagree with them, they either have the option of resigning or you can fire them, but you can’t just totally ignore them, or apparently just be too busy to meet with these four positions. It’s baffling. Also, we know from precedent things like Tenet used to go into the morning briefing with President George W. Bush all the time. You can’t quite understand why these people would have such a hard time having a meeting with the president.If that doesn’t check out, then Taylor has actually done the cause of impeachment some damage, and it means that his account of things is exaggerated or the worst possible spin is put on it and stuff like that. But if it checks out, you can’t have a president who’s hiding from four of his top advisors on national security and refuses to meet with them. That’s just too dysfunctional to go forward, and you’ve got to end it. You can’t deal with a president who simply won’t meet when his top advisors say, “No, you’re about to make a terrible mistake here, Mr. President.”Rich: MBD, there’s a direct contradiction here between Taylor and Sondland. I guess Sondland is trying to reposition what he said, but Sondland is like, “Oh, this is all above board. There was no quid pro quo. We’re just pressuring them on corruption.” Then you have Taylor basically saying, “No, Sondland was the guy, a major player who was doing it. I had these conversations with him. Sondland might say the president says there’s not a quid pro quo, but they’ve got to do these things to get the money. There’s not a quid pro quo, but the president is a businessman. He wants you to provide the deliverables before he signs the check.” It seems to me before all is said and done on this impeachment process in the House, you’ve got to have these guys, Taylor and Sondland, at a witness table together hashing this out.Michael: Yeah. I found Taylor’s testimony pretty compelling. I thought the really troubling thing was that . . . I always thought from the beginning that the nature of the conversation was quid pro quo, that this is just the nature of foreign relations when you are a patron state like the United States and you’re dealing with a client state like Ukraine. When the patron starts asking for things and you are dependent on them, you have to think that the strings are going to be pulled if you don’t deliver.What was troubling was Taylor was describing that, in a sense, the administration just wanted the announcement of investigations. They just wanted the PR rather than the reality. That really drains the case out of those who say, “Okay, maybe there was quid pro quo here, but the U.S. has a legitimate interest in the corruption,” the Luke Thompson argument that I was open to.Rich: Hi, Luke.Michael: Taylor sort of pulls me . . . The testimony pulls me away from it because it looks like, if Taylor’s testimony checks out, this is just what he wanted. He wanted the announcement. In effect, he wanted the political effect.Rich: Is that the case, or is it when a foreign government or a politician here in the United States has actually committed to something publicly, then they’re more committed to it than if they’re saying, “Yes, yes,” in private?Michael: Of course, but it just . . . The policymaking hash that was laid out and described just did not seem inconsistent with any notion of statesmanship or even, really, political savvy. It was very blunt, very direct, very ham-handed. The fact that it also goes along with this weird . . . As you look deeper, I think a lot of people glossed over the CrowdStrike elements. I know that didn’t feature as tightly in Taylor. But when you start scratching the surface of that, it’s like this was a conspiracy theory that the president and Giuliani were chasing-Rich: It’s bonkers.Michael: . . . themselves into a rabbit hole here. Yeah, I think Taylor’s good reputation and the events he described, for me, the takeaway was I felt Democrats are now . . . Yuval Levin has written about this on our website, that once you get the process going towards impeachment inquiry, there’s a momentum that gathers, and I saw a lot of momentum there. It will be very difficult, I think, for Democrats to put that out in public, a very easy story of abuse of power for personal political benefit, I think it’s going to be very hard for them not to impeach him.Rich: Charlie Cooke?Charlie: Well, the question now is whether this is impeachable and not whether it happened. The question is not whether there was a quid pro quo. The question is not whether there was inappropriate behavior or wrongdoing. The question is whether the Congress wants to impeach the president, whether it’s a good idea to do so as we enter an election year, whether the public thinks this is sufficiently serious to warrant removal, whether the Democrats can keep the momentum up, whether Republicans think that there’s a double standard here, that we know of wrongdoing by other presidents that didn’t lead to impeachment or to removal.I don’t think there’s an argument that nothing happened. Alan Dershowitz, this morning, argues that this is not an impeachable offense. Others have argued persuasively that it is. That question is, of course, an entirely political one, but the case that we are talking about a nothing or that this is a witch hunt or that this is peripheral, marginal, simply cannot be made now, in my view.We will watch as it plays out. We will watch as Republicans such as Matt Gaetz get more and more ridiculous in their antics. We will watch as the language that was deployed by Democrats in defense of Bill Clinton is picked up by Republicans. Whether there’ll be an impeachment, I don’t know. I suspect not. But there is certainly—Rich: You mean a removal?Charlie: No, I mean an impeachment.Rich: You don’t think he’ll get impeached by the House?Charlie: I think he probably will. I think there’s a chance still that he won’t. Depends how quickly they can do it. If they can move quickly, he will be. If it drags out for whatever reason — I can’t imagine why it would — if it does, I think the chances of the House pursuing it long into an election year are less. But let’s not pretend that we’re not now talking about an actual scandal and an actual subject for impeachment.Michael: Hey, Charlie, President Zelensky is a consenting adult. I don’t know what language will be used by Republicans picked up from the 1990s. I think the question you raise, though, is—Charlie: They used lynching, and we had this whole silly debate about this.Michael: That’s true.Charlie: It turns out, of course, that that word was used over and over and over again in 1998, including by Joe Biden. That’s how this goes. We live in a partisan nation. Congress is far more likely to vote along ideological or partisan lines than it is to protect its prerogatives, and so there is an interest for the party that shares the president’s label to cast any attempts to investigate his behavior as the Salem witch trials. It’s going to be funny watching Republicans adopt the same language Democrats did, and Democrats adopt the same language Republicans did, and Adam Schiff become Ken Starr.Michael: My question for you, though, is do you think that there’s so much public fatigue with Democrats and the Russia collusion story and so on that, in a sense, the Democrats have already spent too much of their credibility to carry this off without damaging themselves?Charlie: I don’t know. I would’ve thought that more likely before I saw the polling. The reality is this could go both ways, couldn’t it? You could have the voters, after an initial spasm of excitement, saying, “I’ve been hearing about this from day one, from before Trump was even president. Enough. Let’s have the election next year.” Or the Russia scandal — or non-scandal as it turned out — could serve as a backdrop that makes it seem to those who don’t pay close attention as if Trump has got worse and worse, has been embroiled in scandal since day one, and that it’s about time there was an impeachment drive.I don’t know which one is more likely. I do know that Democrats will have to move quickly if they’re going to get this done, because I think the closer we get to Election Day, the less useful a process impeachment looks and the stronger the argument, whether it’s made in good or bad faith, that they’re trying to preempt a vote.Rich: Jim, I think sadly, from my point of view, it looks like Pelosi judged this whole thing very shrewdly, because for a couple years, or since the election at least, the midterms, she’s like, “Nope, we’re not doing it. Nope, that’s not what this is about. No, we’re not doing it.” Then she sees the window opening here on Ukraine, says, “Yeah, actually, we are doing it.”The polling so far has showed a window did open. It’s not just Democrats who have swung in favor of impeachment, the ones that were still holdouts. You’ve seen the numbers swinging in some polls among independents a little bit, among Republicans in some polls as well. There’s no downside that’s evident at the moment. Maybe we’ll see that down the road, but I’ve begun to think actually the equities have switched here.Trump, who’s not being served well in this chapter of his presidency . . . The facts haven’t gotten better the way they did in the Russia probe, even though the media was hysterical throughout the duration. They’ve gotten worse, probably will continue to get worse. And his reaction has been pretty terrible. The human scum thing was disgraceful. The only way he’s going to turn the page on this is to get impeached and, almost certainly, acquitted by the Senate. When that happens, then, two weeks later, we’ll be like, “Whoa, impeachment happened? Wow, I can’t even remember that. Seems like it was a decade ago.”Whereas for Democrats, there’s no downside evident, again, at the moment. It’s a plus 50 percent issue in some polls. It’s more popular than probably some of the other things they would want to do, and they’re getting this drip, drip of revelations that are helpful for them. I take Charlie’s point. You don’t want to push it into April 2020. But I don’t see a major downside if it slides into the new year, which it looks, by the way, whatever they ideally want to do, it looks like it probably will.Jim: Yeah. I was going to say, in normal circumstances, if you were going to get impeached, nobody likes getting impeached, nobody wants . . . Trump, I guess, famously said, “You don’t want that on your resume.” You’d want it done as quickly as possible, get it into the rear-view mirror, and let it just become a chapter in the book of your presidency and not something . . . I actually think the longer this drags on, the better it is for Trump for the 2020 election.I think, also, probably the strongest argument Republicans have right now is: “We’re so close to the 2020 general election. Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to take away . . . Why would you try to have a Senate decision on whether Trump should continue as president right before the American public gets to have its say on whether Trump should continue as president?” I can think of easily four or five Democratic senators who would be saying, “Yes, let’s get this done as quickly as possible.” Their names are Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and all these people who’d much rather spend January in Iowa and New Hampshire than stuck in Washington listening to hearings all day.In terms of the merits, it’s very tough to say, A, this is no big deal, this is private matters, this is normal. None of this stuff is going to fly. I think you see it in the poll numbers.The other thing was that, from the very beginning of the Russia stuff, I’ve counted myself on the skeptical side of it because I just figured at some point you’d have to have either audio tape or written messages or emails, something indicating Trump and Putin cackling together. That would just be . . . The idea that the Russian government and FSB, the successor to the KGB, would manage to get their claws into an American presidential candidate and turn him into the Manchurian candidate, and that all of this would escape the attention of the NSA, all of this would escape the attention of the CIA, FBI, all of our vast intelligence-gathering apparatuses would completely miss all of this, just never passed the smell test. I’m pretty sure we have a lot of people who try to keep an eye on what Vladimir Putin is doing on a day-to-day basis.In this case, all the information is from the American side. We’re getting some stuff from Ukraine, but the issue isn’t really how Ukraine responded. In fact, Ukraine seems to have done something semi-honorable by saying, “Look, we want to play ball here, but we’re not going to claim that somebody is under investigation when they’re not. And we’re not going to investigate someone if there isn’t real evidence of a crime here.” I wrote that long timeline saying Hunter Biden stinks to high heaven, and it’s probably very unethical, at the very minimum, a giant, glaring appearance of conflict of interest, but there’s no evidence a crime was committed either here in the United States or over in Ukraine. You don’t get to say, “Hey, let’s dig into this guy,” just for the sake of placating the American president.It’s pretty darn bad. I suppose the longer this drags on, eventually the exhaustion factor could start playing in the president’s advantage.Rich: Well, Michael, I think the—Charlie: Even then, Jim—Rich: Go ahead, Charlie.Charlie: Even then, Republicans have a rhetorical problem because they’ll have to make one of two arguments. The first is “We’re too close to an election. Let’s judge the president at the polls.” The second is “This is bad, but it’s not an impeachable offense. It’s the sort of judgment call which the president should be held accountable for by voters.” Then they’ll have to stand next to him in their home state and say, “We need to reelect President Donald J. Trump.”It’s easy for Republicans to push this away by acknowledging there’s something there and pointing at November of next year as the obvious end point . . . until they are asked to campaign for him, which they’re going to have to do. There is a problem here for Republicans in the long run because there’s no escaping it, unless they take the view “Look, the whole thing is a scam. The whole thing is made up,” but that’s now an untenable position.Jim: The only other thing I’d throw in there is that under a normal presidency, you could say, “You know what, let’s do a resolution of censure. Let’s all go on record expressing our disapproval. Bad, president, bad. Don’t do that again,” slap him on the wrist, and everybody moves on and there’s no risk of his presidency coming to a premature end. Then when you get asked about it on the trail, “Look, I expressed my disapproval of the president. He shouldn’t have done it, but now it’s time to focus on the real issues,” blah blah blah blah blah.But you can’t do that with this president. Trump would then take the name of any Republican who voted on that resolution of censure and probably campaign for the Democrat against them. He doesn’t take any of this stuff lying down, or relaxed or laid back about any of this. He really boxes them in. He gives them very limited options.Rich: Michael, one, on the question of whether he should be impeached and removed or whether this is a best matter to be adjudicated in an election, I think that’s the strongest ground for the president and for Republicans to argue. There was a Marist poll the other day; I think it had support for the impeachment inquiry above 50. But far down in the questions they asked, they asked, “Do you want him to be impeached, or do you prefer that there be an election?” and like 57-38, people wanted the election. I think that’s the strongest ground.To Jim’s point, contrition is such a powerful force when properly mustered in our politics, and clearly the play here, and a lot of Trump people might say, “Oh, that’s too conventional. He’s never going to do it,” certainly never going to do it is true, but I think the obvious play would’ve been to say, “Yeah, I see how this looks now. I shouldn’t have done it. I really think Hunter Biden is corrupt. I let that take too much control over my actions, and I was pressuring them. I realize how it looks. I shouldn’t have done it. And by the way, here are all the facts right here in one day,” go to it, and you wouldn’t have the drip, drip now. And you’d have, as Jim points out, Republicans be able to say, “Well, let’s put it behind us. He said he’s regretted it. We think it’s wrong.” Instead, they’ve been dragged into this position where everyone has to say the letter is perfect.As you were saying, the letter wasn’t perfect. You were saying there was implicit quid pro quo there all along. But they’ve also made quid pro quo the trip wire, which wasn’t necessary. It seems to me the best defense is not impeach and remove twelve months from an election, and ultimately release the money. This was a terrible process, shouldn’t have happened, but end of the day, no harm, no foul.Michael: They could try it. I think there’s probably growing resentment among elected Republicans that they laid out this “no quid pro quo” trip wire and then were immediately pushed backward over their heels over it.We have to remember the base of the Republican party was still with Nixon when elected Republicans abandoned Nixon. I’d be careful about . . . The elected officials, how they respond to this still matters if they really tire of him. It could matter to the president ahead of the time that we see a big collapse in support in his polling. I think there’s a lot that’s still uncertain here about how people will react, and also just how Trump is going to react if he feels cornered and politically abandoned.Rich: Just seems to me if Trump were removed by the Senate, it would split the party asunder. It would hand whoever the Democratic nominee is the election. I wrote this in a column today. Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988. How are they possibly going to win with any significant division? Trump obviously is not—Charlie: They won in 2004.Rich: What’s that? Once, yeah.Charlie: They won the popular vote in 2004.Rich: Yeah, once since 1988.Michael: Did they win a majority?Rich: If I said never, I misspoke. Yeah, once since 1988. So how are they possibly going to win an election when they have any significant division? Anyway, we should move on.Rich: Exit question to you, Jim Geraghty. William Taylor’s testimony will be remembered as an inflection point in the impeachment drama, yes or no?Jim: You mean the written testimony or if he does it before the cameras in some future hearing?Rich: I should say his opening statement that we’ve seen.Jim: Okay. I think the televised . . . When he does it on camera, it’ll be a bigger deal.Rich: MBD? Inflection point, yes or no?Michael: No, I think this is still all downstream of the transcript release, the own goal.Rich: Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I think it’s an inflection point, yes, because it represents the moment at which it became impossible to insist that nothing had happened here and that there was no grounds for an impeachment drive.Rich: I agree with Charlie. I think it’s a minor inflection point. I take MBD and Jim’s points there will be bigger things to come, just from Taylor alone, the rest of the deposition, and I think which has to be public testimony. I think Democrats would want that. He will likely be one of their star witnesses. But it is, at least, a minor inflection point in that it knocked the “no quid pro quo” argument back on its heels.

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Teaching the Holocaust in Germany as a Resurgent Far Right Questions It

ORANIENBURG, Germany—Pulling their scarves and jackets tighter against the chill of a gray winter morning, 38 high-school students walked the grounds of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, a former Nazi concentration camp just outside Berlin.

They had come here to learn about the horrors and crimes committed at Sachsenhausen, where tens of thousands of people were murdered: the prisoners’ cramped quarters in the extreme heat or cold, their starvation after crushing hours of hard labor, the brutal treatment at the hands of their guards.

Even as the students’ tour focused on helping them understand the history of this place, however, the politics of the day inevitably crept in.

At one point, the students’ teacher, Matthias Angelike, interjected to ask their guide about a recent incident involving lawmakers from the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a group of their constituents. While on a tour here last summer, several members of the group interrupted their host to cast doubt on the existence of Sachsenhausen’s gas chambers and diminish the crimes committed in Nazi death camps. “They questioned whether people were actually killed here,” Angelike said to his students. “They questioned the Holocaust.”

[Read: Elie Wiesel and the agony of bearing witness]

Institutions of memory such as Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland play an important, and unique, role in educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust and of the Nazi regime. For millions of visitors annually, these institutions bear witness to the unthinkable crimes that took place on their grounds and expose people to the visceral discomfort associated with being in a former concentration camp.

But although Sachsenhausen and other such sites seek to stay above the fray politically, in recent years they have been confronted with politics—as the AfD incident here showed, sometimes even within their own walls. The rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe, coupled with growing anti-Semitism, puts places such as Sachsenhausen in a new and difficult position. These places teach about the horrors of the Nazi era with a message of “Never again,” even as some in the AfD, the first far-right party since the Nazis to sit in Germany’s Parliament, downplay or question the very history of the Holocaust.

What’s more, groups such as the AfD are debating the experiences of Holocaust survivors and minimizing the crimes they lived through just as the last of these survivors, who have been an integral part of preserving the experiences of this era, are dying out.

How, then, can Holocaust memorials balance their role as apolitical sites of memory with the responsibility to defend the values they represent? And how, in a broader sense, can they adapt their work as the events they chronicle recede further and further into the past?

“We’re not politicians,” Axel Drecoll, the director of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, told me recently in his office. “But the way we talk about history is massively affected by these movements. And I'm deeply convinced that our consensus for a peaceful and rule-based existence is strongly based on the fact that we keep our critical reckoning with the past alive."

For Drecoll and others in his position, the problem isn’t just that right-wing-populist rhetoric and actions at times echo the very rhetoric their institutions warn against. It’s also that reinterpreting history as a way to create a new nationalist narrative is a rhetorical hallmark of parties such as Germany’s AfD and Poland’s ruling right-wing-populist Law and Justice Party (PiS). For those who see protecting the integrity of history as their primary task, far-right rhetoric feels like a direct assault.

Here in Germany, AfD leaders have sought to diminish the importance of the Nazi era to produce an argument for renewed national pride: The party’s co-leader Alexander Gauland referred to it as a “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s otherwise admirable history, while Björn Höcke, who leads the party’s most extreme wing, called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” and has defended Holocaust deniers. (Höcke’s rhetoric led administrators at Buchenwald, a former concentration camp and memorial based in his home state of Thuringia, to ban AfD politicians from its commemorative events.)

“We not only have right-wing populist and right-wing extremist parties ... but they are deliberately taking on memory culture and historical themes,” Drecoll told me. “When it comes to historical revisionism, when it comes to the history that we want and need to explain here, we have a responsibility to speak out.”

In Poland, attempts to shift the national historical narrative have even been enshrined in law. The government last year spearheaded its so-called memory law, which made it a criminal offense—carrying hefty fines or even jail time—to suggest that Poland was culpable for the crimes of the Holocaust. (After international backlash, Poland’s government amended the law to remove the possible imprisonment.)

[Read: The dark consequences of Poland’s new Holocaust law]

Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, told me that institutions such as his have a responsibility to speak out about unacceptable political discourse and rising anti-Semitism—but must strike a balance to avoid being dragged into the partisan fray.

“It depends on the situation,” Cywiński said, before adding, “Sometimes our mission means that we cannot be silent.”

The role of an institution such as Sachsenhausen or Auschwitz-Birkenau “is not to be a political tool—it is to in some way show the history of that site in a way that is a fair description, a fair understanding of what happened there,” says Robert Jan van Pelt, a history professor and Holocaust scholar at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, who has curated a series of recent Holocaust exhibits. Leaders of such organizations, he told me, “are facing constant pressures—and the pressures are not only of different governments that come into power in Poland.”

Visiting the site of a former concentration camp comes with a whole range of emotions, as the students I met, a 12th-grade class from the small western-German town of Brüggen, discovered. Though those who come here have surely learned at least an overview of the history of the site, and others like it, before arriving, being confronted with physical reminders of the scale of extermination—the mountains of human hair at Auschwitz, for example, or the mass graves at Sachsenhausen—puts that knowledge in an entirely new context.

“It’s important that we get confronted with situations like this so it will never happen again,” Ada, 18, one of the students, told me as we left the memorial. “I always imagine [the victims’] feelings and their thoughts … I’m just happy that we aren’t living in a time like this.”

Whether because of increased tourism more generally or particular interest in the memorials specifically, these institutions are receiving unprecedented numbers of visitors. In 2018, 2.2 million people visited Auschwitz; five years ago, that number was 1.5 million. And more than 700,000 people came to Sachsenhausen in 2017, double the number that visited a decade prior.

Germany is serious about reckoning with its dark past in many aspects of society, and education is no exception. High-school students are required to take classes on 20th-century German history, including the Nazi era and the Holocaust, though visiting the site of a concentration camp isn’t compulsory—the students from Brüggen had chosen to take a special course that offered this experience. (Their school is also part of a nationwide program called Schule Ohne Rassismus, or “Schools Without Racism,” whose more than 2,800 participating institutions pledge to offer additional study for students on such issues. This year’s focus for the Brüggen students is right-wing populism.)

[Read: A Twitter tribute to Holocaust victims]

What makes Holocaust education, especially with a rising far-right, more difficult is that memorials must grapple with the dying-out of Holocaust survivors. Where a tour of Auschwitz or a memorial event at Sachsenhausen might have featured a speech by someone who survived that respective concentration camp, precious few survivors remain (or are at an age at which they’re able to continue such work).

The fact that ever more time is passing between the events of the Holocaust and the present day has led some in German politics to call for an entirely new approach to memory culture.

“Our culture of remembrance is crumbling,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wrote in January in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. “Right-wing populist provocateurs diminish the Holocaust, knowing that such a breach of taboo will garner maximum attention.”

While Drecoll acknowledged the new challenges that memory institutions face in keeping history engaging for their visitors, he said places such as Sachsenhausen still have “a whole arsenal” of tools to keep history alive for new generations. “We would be bad historians if we could only share history and truth through eyewitnesses,” he said. Cywiński, the museum director at Auschwitz-Birkenau, told me that memorial sites will have to shift from educating people solely about history to helping them understand connections to contemporary politics and society.

Cywiński’s point was on display with the students from Brüggen, who piped up with questions. Why is it illegal to deny the Holocaust? one asked. What other remnants of Germany’s past are similarly guarded?

“Simply said, [these restrictions] are a result of our past,” Angelike told them, as he and the guide took turns explaining that it is also illegal to display Nazi symbols, for example, and to give the Hitler salute. “Anyone who denies the Holocaust positions himself on the side of the perpetrators, which means it could happen again.”

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