TIMELESS ADVICE FROM GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: How Will We Be Judged?

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.

Read the whole thing.