Podcast Trial Ep 1

I think Mark Twain was wrong when he said history doesn't repeat itself. You've heard of the "Nuremberg defense." Does everyone remember what it means? In the last couple weeks, there have been discussions about the behavior and culpability of ICE agents, or not...if they're just following orders. More recently, a story broke that Secretary of Defense (yup) Pete Hegseth gave an order to kill any passengers that survived one of his boat bombings off the coast of Venezuela, reminiscent of Hitler's "Commando Order." It's still being investigated.

If you get a chance to see Nuremberg, do it. It's about just one of the many of the "Nuremberg trials," but one of the most impactful (because it was Göring) and interesting, because of the work a psychiatrist got to do analyzing what he thought was just "pure evil." The movie stars Rami Malek as the psychologist Douglas Kelley, and Russell Crowe as Nazi Hermann Göring. I talk about what the movie gets right historically, what it made up to move the narrative, what was a little bit of both, and what the movie left out that I think could have made the movie even more interesting. I also start off with a bit of history on what I consider historically two mutually exclusive circles, international law, and war crimes. I think the Nuremberg Trials exists in the overlap of those two circles, and the results changed the western world forever...or did it?

Two notes from this first episode. First, in talking to a veteran friend about unlawful orders, he shared with me that he had many friends fired from the military for refusing to get the Covid vaccine, a command that he and those fired members deemed an unlawful command. So, it goes both ways. Second, I don't think I explained the Millgram experiment very well. The unknowing participants administering the "shock" were responding to instructions of an authority figure. The "students" were played by actors, and while hooked up to electrodes, they were not really being shocked. They were faking it, acting out the pain, so the participants administering the shock thought the shocks were real. As the "students" got more questions wrong, the severity of the shocks were increased, according to instructions by the authority figure and administered by the volunteers. A significant percentage of participants obeyed the authority figure and administered the maximum level of shocks, despite their apparent discomfort (they would look towards authority figure, also an actor, like, you still want me to do this? The authority figure would say yes). The study was seen as a demonstration that ordinary people are surprisingly likely to obey authority figures, even when those orders conflict with their own moral beliefs.