Before 2019’s “Knives Out,” writer/director Rian Johnson had a somewhat controversial career. Between the sci-fi action movie “Looper” and the divisive “Star Wars: The Last
At the end of “Wicked: For Good,” the day has been largely saved.
While Elphaba has to appear to have died, she and Fiyero can walk into the sunset of a new world, while Glinda the Good presumably rules over Oz as the Wizard self-exiles and all the animals that had been hunted down or driven out can return to society.
But my prevailing thought as the credits rolled wasn’t about the stellar performances, of which there are many. Nor was it about the lackluster filmmaking, of which there’s a lot.
My primary thought was, “Wait, so Glinda just gets to go free?”
This woman was knowingly complicit in the attempted genocide of animals. Just because she had reservations doesn’t mean she didn’t participate in the propaganda campaigns. Hell, she profited off the vilification of the animals. And what about all the soldiers who attacked animals and forced them into creating the yellow brick road? Surely there must be a consequence for that kind of evil.
A consequence like the Nuremberg trials.
Held between 1945 and 1949, the Nuremberg trials sought to prosecute members of the Nazi Party responsible for the Holocaust. In the decades since, it’s become a paragon of how to deal with evil.
And its relevance has only grown over the past several months.
As the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy has unfolded, the parallels to fascist leaders have grown increasingly clear. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has operated as a secret police, assaulting, arresting and infringing on people’s rights with impunity. The comparison to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo practically writes itself.
The response to the barbaric tactics used by ICE has been loud. Massive protests have swept across the nation, and many have called for ICE agents and everyone involved with implementing or carrying out the forced displacement policy to be “Nuremberg-ed.”
But the idea of Nuremberg is much more appealing than the reality.
The abbreviated story of the Nuremberg trials often goes like this: Nazis are caught. Nazis are convicted. Nazis are executed. Simple, effective justice for some of the most heinous evil the world has ever seen. That’s the more preferable version of the story.
But it’s not the truth.
In reality, the Nuremberg trials were a mess. The original trial, run by the United States, United Kingdom, France and Soviet Union, sought to prosecute 22 of the highest-ranking surviving Nazis. Just 12 of them were sentenced to death, seven were sent to prison, while three were acquitted altogether.
Later, the United States would carry out more trials at both Nuremberg and Dachau, prosecuting 185 and 1,672 more of the Holocaust’s architects and executors, respectively. Of these, there were 438 sentenced to death, 207 to life and 868 imprisoned. Only 252 of them were actually executed.
Almost every other convicted Nazi walked free by 1958.
The biggest reason? The United States didn’t want to have to deal with monitoring the prison stays of hundreds of Nazis, especially in a different hemisphere.
A smaller reason? Many courts simply didn’t see any reason to keep them in prison.
To many, no individual Nazi was going to be able to recreate the infrastructure that enabled the Holocaust, so what was the harm in letting them go free? They posed very little danger to society.
In the original Nuremberg trials, the German defendants were not allowed to use tu quoque defenses. Essentially, the Nazis couldn’t point to the prosecution and say, “What about you?”
Because, yeah. What about us?
The irony of the United States of America, a nation founded on not just one, but multiple genocides, prosecuting the Germans for the same was not lost on the legal scholars of the day. It wasn’t like the colonial nations of France, Russia and the United Kingdom were any better.
All this leads to one central question: What did the Nuremberg trials really accomplish?
If the goal was to punish Nazis for carrying out the Holocaust, it failed. Most of them walked free.
If the goal was to dissuade other nations from carrying out genocide, that certainly hasn’t worked either. Hell, the United States has been complicit in a Palestinian genocide since before the Nuremberg trials even ended. Not to mention the genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Cambodia, Bosnia and dozens of others that have taken place since World War II.
The idea of “Nuremberg-ing” someone responsible for the great evils of the Nazi party or the Trump administration or any other crime against humanity is appealing. The reality is not.
At the end of “Wicked: For Good,” no one is prosecuted. No one is tried. No one is “Nuremberg-ed.”
But it might represent the best-case scenario.
The animals return to society as equals. They’ve gone through a harrowing time, sure, but at least they weren’t killed or permanently forced out.
I’d trade the deaths of every single Nazi if it meant that the millions that died in the Holocaust and the millions more that went through hell during their reign of terror would never have had to.
I’d trade holding Benjamin Netanyahu and the genocidal Israeli government accountable if it meant the millions of Palestinians who have been killed, injured and forced off their land since 1948 could live peacefully in the place they call home.
I’d trade prosecuting the thugs who created and carry out the Trump administration’s genocidal immigration policy if it meant the thousands of people who have been deported without due process could come home, or if Victor Manuel Díaz, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter, Renée Nicole Good, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres and the 34 other people ICE has killed during the current administration could see their families again.
As writer Jacob Geller puts it, “The earth does not cry out for vengeance. The earth just cries.”
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At the end of “Wicked: For Good,” the day has been largely saved.
While Elphaba has to appear to have died, she and Fiyero can walk into the sunset of a new world, while Glinda the Good presumably rules over Oz as the Wizard self-exiles and all the animals that had been hunted down or driven out can return to society.
But my prevailing thought as the credits rolled wasn’t about the stellar performances, of which there are many. Nor was it about the lackluster filmmaking, of which there’s a lot.
My primary thought was, “Wait, so Glinda just gets to go free?”
This woman was knowingly complicit in the attempted genocide of animals. Just because she had reservations doesn’t mean she didn’t participate in the propaganda campaigns. Hell, she profited off the vilification of the animals. And what about all the soldiers who attacked animals and forced them into creating the yellow brick road? Surely there must be a consequence for that kind of evil.
A consequence like the Nuremberg trials.
Held between 1945 and 1949, the Nuremberg trials sought to prosecute members of the Nazi Party responsible for the Holocaust. In the decades since, it’s become a paragon of how to deal with evil.
And its relevance has only grown over the past several months.
As the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy has unfolded, the parallels to fascist leaders have grown increasingly clear. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has operated as a secret police, assaulting, arresting and infringing on people’s rights with impunity. The comparison to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo practically writes itself.
The response to the barbaric tactics used by ICE has been loud. Massive protests have swept across the nation, and many have called for ICE agents and everyone involved with implementing or carrying out the forced displacement policy to be “Nuremberg-ed.”
But the idea of Nuremberg is much more appealing than the reality.
The abbreviated story of the Nuremberg trials often goes like this: Nazis are caught. Nazis are convicted. Nazis are executed. Simple, effective justice for some of the most heinous evil the world has ever seen. That’s the more preferable version of the story.
But it’s not the truth.
In reality, the Nuremberg trials were a mess. The original trial, run by the United States, United Kingdom, France and Soviet Union, sought to prosecute 22 of the highest-ranking surviving Nazis. Just 12 of them were sentenced to death, seven were sent to prison, while three were acquitted altogether.
Later, the United States would carry out more trials at both Nuremberg and Dachau, prosecuting 185 and 1,672 more of the Holocaust’s architects and executors, respectively. Of these, there were 438 sentenced to death, 207 to life and 868 imprisoned. Only 252 of them were actually executed.
Almost every other convicted Nazi walked free by 1958.
The biggest reason? The United States didn’t want to have to deal with monitoring the prison stays of hundreds of Nazis, especially in a different hemisphere.
A smaller reason? Many courts simply didn’t see any reason to keep them in prison.
To many, no individual Nazi was going to be able to recreate the infrastructure that enabled the Holocaust, so what was the harm in letting them go free? They posed very little danger to society.
In the original Nuremberg trials, the German defendants were not allowed to use tu quoque defenses. Essentially, the Nazis couldn’t point to the prosecution and say, “What about you?”
Because, yeah. What about us?
The irony of the United States of America, a nation founded on not just one, but multiple genocides, prosecuting the Germans for the same was not lost on the legal scholars of the day. It wasn’t like the colonial nations of France, Russia and the United Kingdom were any better.
All this leads to one central question: What did the Nuremberg trials really accomplish?
If the goal was to punish Nazis for carrying out the Holocaust, it failed. Most of them walked free.
If the goal was to dissuade other nations from carrying out genocide, that certainly hasn’t worked either. Hell, the United States has been complicit in a Palestinian genocide since before the Nuremberg trials even ended. Not to mention the genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Cambodia, Bosnia and dozens of others that have taken place since World War II.
The idea of “Nuremberg-ing” someone responsible for the great evils of the Nazi party or the Trump administration or any other crime against humanity is appealing. The reality is not.
At the end of “Wicked: For Good,” no one is prosecuted. No one is tried. No one is “Nuremberg-ed.”
But it might represent the best-case scenario.
The animals return to society as equals. They’ve gone through a harrowing time, sure, but at least they weren’t killed or permanently forced out.
I’d trade the deaths of every single Nazi if it meant that the millions that died in the Holocaust and the millions more that went through hell during their reign of terror would never have had to.
I’d trade holding Benjamin Netanyahu and the genocidal Israeli government accountable if it meant the millions of Palestinians who have been killed, injured and forced off their land since 1948 could live peacefully in the place they call home.
I’d trade prosecuting the thugs who created and carry out the Trump administration’s genocidal immigration policy if it meant the thousands of people who have been deported without due process could come home, or if Victor Manuel Díaz, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter, Renée Nicole Good, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres and the 34 other people ICE has killed during the current administration could see their families again.
As writer Jacob Geller puts it, “The earth does not cry out for vengeance. The earth just cries.”