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 evolving unprecedented legal case to the relationship between Göring and the U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly (played by Rami Malek), back and forth between those two stories, perhaps without convincingly integrating them. Several critics noted this problem when the movie first came out. But it's well worth watching.
I've long said (I don't recall where I got this, it's not my original observation) that in any debate or argument, the first one to say "Nazi" or "Hitler" loses. I cannot compare JB Pritzker to Hermann Göring, nor the Illinois psychiatric plantations to the Holocaust, except in one very specific, limited and perhaps coincidental 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 of course, 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, even 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, the movie's Göring could 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 recognize Göring's historical 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 his Not Guilty verdict, the military defeat of Nazi Germany might have been in vain, and the Third Reich might have survived. At least so says the movie.
L. Ron Hubbard said, "Ideas, not battles, mark the forward progress of mankind." Nuremberg shows that one purpose of the law is to draw a clear 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 a tedious, imperfect but better road than world war. Psychiatry must be brought back under the law. I'm pretty sure JB Pritzker has never recognized that need, which was not explicit at the Nuremberg trials although it may have been implied, about five years before I was born.
Psychiatry pretends to replace law. Psychiatria delenda est!
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