How Will We Be Judged?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Stanley Kramer’s 1961 courtroom classic JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG. I’ve been thinking about it because there is a nasty undercurrent to our current politics that is making me uneasy in the same way Kramer’s skillfully made film makes me uneasy. I don’t like what it has to say about the trajectory of our future as a healthy functioning Nation.

This undercurrent, let’s call it the “we have to do it to them before they do it to us” strain of modern politics, is turning this election cycle into something like a vindictive race to see which side can install their strongman before the other side can install theirs.

I fear that we may not like the place where such a race might take us. Judgment at Nuremberg gives us a hint of what that destination might be… by revealing that it’s a place humanity has visited many times before, to its eternal sorrow.

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is a story about what can happen when that ugly strain of political escalation goes unchecked for too long and is allowed to infect the broader population. The film is nominally about a fictional “Nuremberg Trial” pitting four German Judges, former Nazi Party members all, against an international tribunal looking to make them pay for their crimes against humanity.

But that’s not really what JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is about about.

As most great movies are, Nuremberg is about a man. It is the story of Chief Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) who, even as he struggles to do what is right with respect to the case in front of him, cannot help but ask himself a much larger and more important series of questions… “How did we get here?”, “How could this have happened”, and “Could it happen again?”

In the end, Haywood delivers a verdict that is not so much an indictment of the men in the dock, but rather an indictment of unchecked human nature, and what it means to stand for justice rather than simple, horrible expediency.

Here is that verdict… and fair warning… it’s a doozy.

I think about this speech a lot. Particularly the bit about how extraordinary men can talk themselves into horrible crimes under the theory that when the enemy is at our throat, it sometimes seems that we must use the means of the enemy. Or how a country is not a rock, nor is it an extension of oneself… it is what it stands for when standing for something is most difficult.

If all of that sounds familiar, it should. It is the central message of many of Western Culture’s most enduring examples of popular entertainment.

Take THE LORD OF THE RINGS, for example, both the movies and the books upon which they are based. THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING begins when a Hobbit comes into possession of the ultimate weapon, a ring of power crafted by the Dark Lord Sauron, with which The Dark Lord plans to dominate Middle Earth. Very quickly, a consensus is reached between the free people of Middle Earth to destroy this ring and in so doing, deny Sauron the weapon he seeks. But not everyone agrees. There are those, including a soldier named Boromir, who believe that the ring should be used as a weapon against Sauron. But Aragorn, the man who will eventually lead the Armies of Middle Earth to victory over Sauron, knows that this is not possible. He understands that any attempt to use the weapon of the enemy will damn them all.

Ultimately, it is Gandalf who best crystalizes the problem after he refuses the temptation to take the ring from Frodo, who is desperate to be rid of it…

“Understand Frodo, I would use this Ring from a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.”

The One Ring, it turns out, isn’t really a ring at all, but a metaphor… a stand-in for basic human decency and the tendency of power to corrupt absolutely.

STAR WARS, too, tells a version of this same story. In the world of STAR WARS the Universe is controlled by a powerful energy field known as “The Force.” The Force has a Dark Side and a Light Side. The Dark Side is dominated by emotions like anger, hate, and cruelty, and while The Dark Side can make a person temporarily powerful, that power comes at a great cost. For those who choose the easier path to power, the dark path, physical and moral damnation are the ultimate price.

In the surprisingly downbeat second episode of the original STAR WARS trilogy, the Jedi Master Yoda trains Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Force and repeatedly warns against the seductive nature of the Dark Side…

“Once you start down the Dark Path, forever will it dominate your destiny”

This has since become one of the most famous lines in modern movie history. Why is that? Because it rings true. And human history on Earth has proved it again and again.

This was also a central thematic element of the original STAR TREK series, as was the show’s ongoing emphasis on logic, tolerance and understanding over naked aggression. Many times Captain Kirk’s life, and the lives of his ship and crew, are saved by Kirk’s refusal to indulge the darkest parts of his own human nature. Most notably during his forced mortal combat with a creature called The Gorn, in an iconic episode titled ARENA.

“No, I won’t kill him, you hear!? You’ll have to get your entertainment someplace else…”

Kirk is shouting at the alien race which has forced him into combat for their own entertainment, under the theory that human beings are warlike and incapable of understanding and forgiveness. But he could just as easily be shouting at some of the nastier voices in our political ecosystem these days, those who seem to want open conflict, violence and destruction for their own nefarious ends.

The Holy Bible itself, the original fireside story we here in the West have been telling each other for two thousand years, speaks of these same themes… you could even argue that it created them in the first place. And though I may not be a biblical scholar, I can say with confidence that the central message of the Bible is not generational revenge and an eye-for-an-eye. I don’t know what your bible says, but mine tells me that when Jesus spoke as he died on the cross, he did not shout “avenge me by visiting these same horrors upon my enemies.”

I’ve always thought that one of the reasons why we love going to the movies is that sitting together in the dark watching a story unfold connects us to our ancestors who also sat around fires and also told each other stories, not just for entertainment, but to pass down generational knowledge and morality. Once upon a time, Hollywood performed that same function for American audiences.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as Hollywood’s power and influence over American culture has faded, this country has begun to lose its way.

We are no longer telling each other the stories that hold us together and teach us how to be a good and decent and courageous people. More often these days, we tell each other stories about how those people who vote differently from us are evil and want to imprison us or kill us or worse.

Once you convince yourself that the guys on the other side of the ticket are Communists or Nazis who want to imprison you and kill your family, not only can you justify any effort to do the same back to them, you can convince yourself that you are morally obligated to do so. This is the point where, as Judge Haywood says, “under a national crisis, ordinary, and even able and extraordinary men, can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination.”

No one is saying that we shouldn’t fight as hard as we can. Aragorn did indeed fight Sauron. Han, Luke and Leia did fight the Empire. Captain Kirk did fight and defeat The Gorn. And Jesus’ self sacrifice eventually saw the end of the Roman Empire and two thousand years of Christian ascendancy.

But in 2023 we are talking about politics, not Civil War. And in politics, how we fight matters.

How we behave in victory matters even more.

Or at least, it should…

There is a certain strain of thought amongst the current political punditry which argues that horrible things are being done to us in the name of power and political subjugation, and that whenever and wherever we have the power to do so, we must do these same horrible things to the other side… indeed, they tell us that to do so is the only way to make it all stop.

Except that this is false hope. It wouldn’t stop. The other side would escalate. And then we would be obliged to escalate again. And on-and-on forvever.

By the time roving bands of disaffected teens with official red sashes are putting random citizens up against walls and shooting them (Khmer Rouge), or party officials are forcing their ways into homes to confiscate food and burn crops in order to starve entire populations (The Holodmor), or “undesirables” are being shipped off to concentration camps to be exterminated (Nazis), no one will care anymore which side started it. And all we’ll have left is to wonder how it came to this.

Have you seen that classic comedy sketch “Are we the baddies?” It’s only funny to us now because of the lens of historical hindsight. We laugh because, through that lens, the signs of “badness” become so obvious that we wonder how the Germans couldn’t see it.

Here in 2023 we don’t venerate skulls as political symbology but we do have a lot of prominent voices on the Right arguing that Republican Governors must do things like direct their AGs to go out and arrest Democrat politicians. On what charge? one is tempted to ask. And it turns out that it doesn’t matter what the charge is. If a crime does not exist, we are told, then a crime must be invented… in the same way that they have invented the crimes which they use to persecute our politicians.

“An eye for an eye” they demand as, somewhere in hell, Lavrenti Beria smiles.

So a modern day version of the “are we the baddies?” sketch might start something like this…

“Hans… did we charge our political opponents with trumped up charges, arrest them, and then railroad them into prison? “

Uh… Yeah… a bit…

Hans… are we the baddies?

And no, it doesn’t matter that “they did it first.” Using the weapon of the Enemy is inherently corrupting. It breaks us in ways that aren’t easy to recover from. We cannot escape the moral rot that comes along with choosing the expedient path over the moral one.

It is easy to forget that Human history is full of conflicts in which there are no good guys.

“But you don’t understand George, you don’t know what time it is… we can’t vote our way out of this… the only way forward is national divorce and Civil War… the system is broken!”

Right… I hear this on talk radio and on the podcast circuit all the time. I see it on Twitter every single day. And there’s really only one problem with it.

It just ain’t true.

All across the country, Governors have been quietly using that exact same “broken” system to achieve exactly the kind of victories we all say we want. They have fired George Soros backed prosecutors. They have removed CRT and gender ideology from grade schools. They have banned transgender athletes from taking opportunities away from women. They have banned vaccine mandates and protected businesses from forced closures. They have delivered on wildly popular School Choice programs. They have forced “Sanctuary States” to endure the consequences of their virtue signalling on illegal immigration. And they have fought the worst excesses of woke corporations who would use DEI and ESG to punish those who refuse to vote the way they want them to.

The careers of these Governors and other elected officials across the country are a testament, a stark refutation of the Conservative black pill position on the coming elections in 2024.

Indeed, Ron DeSantis in particular has been so successful at using our allegedly “broken” system to re-Conservatize Florida that he’s accidentally created an entire genre of social media engagement… the “I’m a Progressive and here’s why I had to flee Florida” post.

What I’m saying is, maybe we should try a little bit more of what some of our Governors have been doing in their individual States, but on a nationwide scale, before we start gleefully firing on Fort Sumter.

For if we reject the harder more righteous path. If we elect an avenging angel in 2024 to do dirty work on our behalf. If we embrace the darker elements of our human nature. If we give in to anger and hate in the hope of achieving some kind of expedient victory over our political rivals, who also happen to be our fellow countrymen… in the end, how will we be judged?