Why You Should Watch That Nuremberg Movie

There's something happening in this country that may sound eerily familiar

Karl Marx said somewhere that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, then as farce. Stephen King, in his great time-travel novel 11/22/63 said the past doesn’t really repeat itself, but it harmonizes with newer and similar events.

I thought of this the evening of New Year’s Day, when I watched James Vanderbilt’s new movie Nuremberg, which is aptly billed by Wikipedia as both a historical drama and a psychological thriller. I suspect most of my readers know that Nuremberg was the German city where they put the biggest of the surviving Nazi war criminals on trial after the end of World War II. If, like me, you’ve seen film footage of the trial, read about it and perhaps have seen Judgment at Nuremberg, you might wonder, as I did, whether you needed to know any more about the trial, and the people involved.

You do. One of Adolf Hitler’s favorite titles was “Supreme Law Lord,” and nobody even a decade ago could imagine any American acting as if they had the power to ignore the laws. the courts, or the Constitution. But the day after I watched the movie, our own wannabee Supreme Law Lord announced his troops had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president.

Today, Donald Trump sneered that the country’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who is now acting president, could remain in power “as long as she does what we want,” after having said earlier that we (he) was going to “run” Venezuela.

What is most terrifying to me is the muted way everyone, especially the Democrats in Congress, reacted. We didn’t see much more than grumbling and a little whining.

Have we forgotten who we are? People should be disrupting traffic, declaring strikes; chaining themselves to national monuments, etc. Donald Trump means to destroy the Constitution by acting like it doesn’t exist and certainly doesn’t matter.

And he’s got as many or more sycophantic assistants as Hitler did. (Think Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio.) Resisting this, calling him out is absolutely essential if we are to save this planet. Forcing these people, or at least all of us, to face them down and tell the world what they are. Go rent this film (it’s $20, but you’d spend more if you went to a theater) and think about what blind obedience to an arrogant sociopath can do to the world.

Then resist. By any means necessary. Because you don’t want to be sitting in a courtroom in a destroyed country one day, telling how you sold your soul and destroyed what had been the greatest nation ever conceived and invented by man.

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PS: On another note: Want a reason to smile? Marjorie Taylor Greene leaves Congress today.