Hot off the Screen: Nuremburtg (Netflix) and Inside the Manosphere

Last night, I decided to watch Nuremburg even though I was afraid it might be too depressing. It wasn't and yet it was. First off, it doesn't dwell on the horror of the crimes of the Third Reich, and they were so horrible they have burned themselves into the memories of those of us born at the end of World War 2. The post war years were filled with magazine articles (Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post) as well as books and movies and documentaries about the war: Victory at Sea! The cultural look back was a kind of group attempt to understand this worldwide cataclysm of human evil, to understand and, hopefully, to prevent it from happening again. The entire 10 years of my early childhood from birth in 1945 to 1957 when we moved to New Jersey and we more or less left the past behind, was filled with the images and the reflection on the horrors of the war and the bravery that was needed to bring it to a good ending.

This film, Nuremburg, is filled with a cast of excellent actors and I must point to Russel Crow who was almost unrecognizable in his layers of late life fat, (donned for the role or natural)? I don't know. Anyhow his masterful feat was in portraying the "banality of evil" a quote from author Hannah Arendt. He portrays a character of warm bonhomme' and bro charm, an ordinary 'big'man, the kind with which we are all familiar, a man like Donald Trump. I think that is why he was chosen as the focus of the film, to bring that to our attention. He does win over the psychiatrist played by Rami Malik who is a major in the US army assigned to keep a suicide watch over Herman Goering, Hitlers right hand man and the second in command in the Third Reich. The psychiatrist is fascinated by this immensely powerful and evil man and he wants to learn as much as he can about his inner workings in order to understand how a man can behave in such a blantantly evil and criminal way. Goering is, actually, being tried for Crimes Against Humanity, and a central point is that one side seems to see that the actions of the Third Reich were a monumental Crime commited against the rest of the world while the criminals/perpetrators both refuse to acknowledge this or are incapable of seeing it. They are still encased in a sense of their omnipotence and power. We know, of course, that they are all eventually hanged, those that don't commit suicide. The main thrust in the trial is to see if Goering can be made to see his crime for what it is.

Anther interesting point made in the film is that US cannot do it alone. AS our lead lawman is losing, the UK lead lawman steps in and saves the day.

The film is a warning and a blatant mirror to the rise of the MAGA movement which has swept to power in the United States with the same tactics - destruction of the free press and opponents, propoganda focus on a selected victim group - in this case "Immigrants" and a wide scale promotion of aggressive rage as "manliness." This is coupled with a vague group of forces and enemies stealing "manliness" from men, female empowerment, a shadowy power holding them down (the matrix) and keeping them poor and unsuccessful and a description of success as having lots of expensive machines (yachts, apartments) and lots of submissive financially dependent females in constant sexual availability.

That is the culture of the manosphere, cleverly manipulated by Trump and the Maga to push them to power. That is clearly portryed in the documentary by Louis THEROUX: Inside the Manosphere (also on Netflix). Louis Theroux is precisely the kind of man in danger of the thugs of the Manosphere, he is intelligent, sensitive, observant and he is sublty mocking them. He is the kind of man they will harrass and beat-up on the street. The new age of influencers are totally dependent on attention and imprisoned by that so they let Louis Theroux into their world to gain the attention his documentnary will bring to them, and the 'legitacy of what ehey perceive as an intellectual film' that they somehow imagine it will bestow, at the same time that they know the light he shines on them blatantly reveals what they know, deep down, is wrong: racism, cruelty, unfairness, exploitation of the weak.

Like Jeffrey Epstein, they use the money they get from the attention they gain from outrageous behavior to monetize themselves. Subscribers pay one of the mansophere stars $50 a month in the hope that he will teach them how to make enough money to buy women, flashy cars, expensive apartments in luxury resorts which they believe will make them happy. That's their version of success and it is the prevailing version of success for the many men in America today, mostly the under-class, the uneducated who see no other way to the top. These 'influencers' show them how ignorant guys who are intellectually disabled in one way or another, can nake it to the top by doing things they are capable of doing "lifting weights" to get manly muscles, behaving in dominating ways, believing in themselves. These are the young fellows who make up the forces of ICE today and were the brown shirts and the Gestapo of Germany 80 years ago. These are the Trump guys. They worship Trump because he portrays all the same values - gaining wealth and power not by creating or inventing or knowing, but by bluster, bullying, manipulation and exploitation. The same way Jeffrey Epstein became rich. They fail to notice that Epstein like the Nazi leaders in Nuremburg, ended up dangling at the end of a rope in a cell or committing suicide.

They are either oblivious or willfully blind to the moral road and the idea that good comes from good and that the road to happiness isn't on a powerboat with a weak girl in a thong bowing at your knee but through spiritual, personal attainment. Happiness is something you gian INSIDE yourself, you can't buy it. All the great and wise of the world have been teaching us that for millennia: Buddha, Ghandi, Jesus Christ. I mention them and leave out Mother Theresa because Mother Theresa fills their stereotype that women are here to serve. Ghandi, Buddha and Jesus were MEN and fulfulled their roles of attainent by deploring and abandoning the vanities of attainment in the Manosphere.

Lots to ponder, especially approaching the season of Easter and the holy season of the prophet Jesus Christ.

When I was a high school teacher and the Right wing White Supremacy movement was on the rise in the devastated working class river front town where I worked, my male students would often pen the nazi sign on their book covers and their hands because they knew it would get them attention. I would often gently point to the sign and say "You know they lost - twice!" and they would be stunned, at 14 and 15, they were entirely ignorant of those historic details. I was their English teacher, their history teacher was mainly in it to be a 'coach' and not particularly interested in history. Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo,com