Saturday, November 22, 2025
1963 US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald
In bed at 10, awake at 4:15 to move to LZB, up at 5. 31°, high of 47°, cloudy again.
Beds, etc. Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.
Nuremberg. I don't know whether Nuremberg fits an academic definition of a "morality play," and I suspect it doesn't; nonetheless, I think of it as a kind of morality play, a story about Good and Evil, writ large, and mostly about Evil.. What the story is about is foreshadowed early in the film when Rami Malek, as psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, tells his Army interpreter, Leo Woodall as Sgt. Howie Triest, that he hopes to learn from extensive interviews and tests on the defendants in the first Nuremberg trials what makes them different. Triest says, "Different?" and Kelley says, "From us," begging the question whether they were different from us. By the end of the film, when the trial has been concluded, Kelly is a despondent and ultimately suicidal author of an unsuccessful book about his experiences at Nuremberg, proclaiming like Cassandra at Troy, or like Chicken Little, that fascists are everywhere, in every country, including the US, eager to take over the government and do evil deeds, like the Nazis. It is as if the entire film is a cinematic depiction of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous statement in The Gulag Archipelago:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.
I believe that this is the moral of the movie and why I think of it as a morality play. Any and all of us could become Nazis, given the right circumstances. Each of us has a very good person inside of us, and a very bad person.
The movie is also about the relationship between Law and Good and Evil. Michael Shannon plays US Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson. At one point, while standing in the giant assembly area where the Nazi mass rallies were held, he argued to Kelley that the Nazi atrocities and crimes began there where the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws were announced in 1935 and that they should end in a legal setting, with a trial and the introduction of evidence of Nazi guild, rather than simply lining the leaders up along a wall and killing them by firing squads. Here in America, some of us have a tendency to sacralize law, forgetting that there are good laws and bad laws, that law can be used as an instrument of punishment and oppression as readily as it can be used as a tool for good. The racial laws of the Third Reich made that clear, as did the many and long-lasting laws establishing and sustaining slavery and Jim Crow in the U.S.
The movie is also about narcissistic political leaders. Quite a point is made of Herman Gӧring as a narcissist who considered himself superior to other humans, including Robert Jackson. I thought this was a bit heavy-handed in its allusion to our current president. Indeed, the entire movie seemed to be an allusion to our current American era, as was vividly clear in the closing scene with a drunken Doug Kelley as much as shouting it, literally. In a postscript to the movie, we are told that he died a suicide on New Year's Day 1958, 11 years after the end of the first Nuremberg trial and Gӧring's suicide. He died as Gӧring did, by swallowing a cyanide capsule.
I am struck by Robert Jackson's naïveté (wrong word?) about the purpose and intended effect of the trial. As World War I was supposed to be 'the war to end all wars,' the Nuremberg trials, the creation of the United Nations, and later the International Court of Justice and the Genocide Convention were to put an end to wars of aggression and genocide. That did not happen of course. Europe remained free of national wars of aggression until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but wars of aggression occurred elsewhere, including America's invasion of Vietnam in 1965. Moreover, many genocides and mass killings followed the destruction of the European Jews. When I and thousands of other Americans were in Vietnam trying to impose Washington's and Wall Street's will on the Vietnamese people, Washington and Wall Street were using the CIA and the Pentagon to assist the Indonesian army in killing at least half a million leftists and communists in that country, and perhaps more than a million. Our government, America, and the United Kingdom directly assisted the Indonesian Army in the mass murders. Doubters would benefit from reading Wikipedia's long entry on "Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66." When, in the movie, Doug Kelley upbraids Göring for his role in German atrocities, Göring reminds him of the Allies' saturation bombing of civilians in German cities and refers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “You vaporize 150,000 Japanese at the touch of a button, and you presume to stand in judgment of me for war crimes?” We think of America and Americans as so high-minded, mainly because we are so ignorant of our own national history.
The movie closes with an afternote: "The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.” This is attributed to the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood and is intended to remind us that fascism, Nazism, world wars, the Holocaust, and worldwide death and destruction could all be repeated. There are 'little holocausts' all over the world, in Sudan, in Gaza, in Burma. Hannah Arendt jolted her readers with the idea of 'the banality of evil," its ordinariness, its commonness, its expectedness and ubiquity. We see it now in our own country in the Trump Restoration: brutal treatment of immigrants, the withdrawal of food and medical assistance to foreign lands, the worst medical system in the developed world, worsened by the government's actions and inactions, and so on. As Billy Pilgrim says, 'So it goes.' There weren't nuclear weapons available to our species until the end of the Big War when only the U.S. had them. We've gone 80 years without any country or non-state actor using any, but I wonder whether their use one of these days is all but inevitable. So it goes, right? Homo hominis lupus.
I didn't like the movie, though I am glad that I saw it. The only character that seemed likable was Sgt. Triest, the psychiatrist's interpreter. The scenes of the extermination camps were crushing, and the scenes of all the physical destruction of Germany were depressing. The whole movie was depressing, as I suppose it was intended to be. It succeeded.
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