Hermann Göring and JB Pritzker

I'm pretty sure I can get into all kinds of trouble for this article, and I might not even publish it. But I absolutely have to write it, because the thought just won't release my mind until I do.

My wife and I watched the 2025 movie Nuremberg last night, with Russell Crowe as Göring. It's a tough movie because of the Holocaust newsreel footage, and it distracts the viewer a bit, from the legal case to the relationship between Göring and the U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly (played by Rami Malek), back and forth, perhaps without convincingly integrating the two stories. But it's well worth watching.

I've long said (and I don't recall from whom I got it, it's not my original quote) that in any debate or argument, the first one to say "Nazi" or "Hitler" loses. I do not compare JB Pritzker to Hermann Göring, nor the Illinois psychiatric plantations to the Holocaust, except in one very specific and very limited aspect which honestly came to me when I watched this movie and thought about it afterwards.

The comparison is hard to ignore once you see it simply: a fat man with political charisma, power and apparent high intelligence presides over a total disaster. 

Infamously, Göring's total disaster was the Holocaust. Pritzker's is the Illinois forensic mental health system, which almost nobody knows is a disaster. To me, both exemplify human evil. Almost everyone would tell me I'm suggesting an extreme and false, delusional  equivalence, verging by itself upon evil ideation. I cannot argue the point, but only wait for history's ultimate judgment which may or may not ever come.

As best I can tell, Pritzker does not follow any leader even vaguely comparable to Hitler. If I were to successfully sue him for civil rights violations in Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS)-operated facilities, I am sure he would not take cyanide, no matter what verdict might be entered in my favor. My own ideological battles and middling drama are nothing like 1945. But if Germany had won WW2, Göring might appear quite similar to Pritzker today. If not for the successful armies of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, all evidence of the concentration camps might have been suppressed, and maybe almost nobody would know of that disaster.

At the time of the Nuremberg trials, the legal efforts to prosecute war crimes were understood to be on very shaky ground. If Göring had won the Not Guilty verdict he sought, the military defeat of Nazi Germany might have been in vain, and the Third Reich might have survived.

L. Ron Hubbard said, "Ideas, not battles, mark the forward progress of mankind." Nuremberg shows that the law draws a line between ideas and battles, between changing someone's mind and killing them. I once wrote about what I called "...the last century's high road to a black gate and a hot mushroom cloud."

The law is an imperfect but better road. Psychiatry must be brought back under the law. I'm pretty sure JB Pritzker has never recognized such a target, which wasn't even explicit, though it may have been implied, at Nuremberg.

Psychiatry would replace law. Psychiatria delenda est!